Happy 100th Birthday Mel Brooks!
To Celebrate the Upholding of Birthright Citizenship (for Now), Below Is a Clip from Blazing Saddles.
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Content Warning: The clip of Blazing Saddles uses a racial slur against the Black and Asian communities.
The incomparable Mel Brooks turned a century old a few days ago. His birthday marks one of the few good and hopeful moments in our draconian and dystopian upside-down world.
Born Melvin Kaminsky, Mel Brooks is not just an American Treasure. The EGOT winner’s contributions to comedy, television, film and music have influenced and inspired other satirists, such as Trey Parker and Matt Stone from South Park.
Brooks served in World War II where he fought in The Battle of the Bulge. After World War II, Brooks served as a comic for Special Services and worked as a comic in Borscht Belt resorts and radio. His break came after selling jokes to Sid Caesar whom he had met years before at a EBorscht Belt hotel when Caesar was 18 and Brooks was 14.
Along with Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon, Brooks wrote for Caesar’s iconic Your Show of Shows. Brooks’ comedy continued to develop. With Reiner playing the straight man, Brooks created The 2,000-Year-Old Man.
Brooks went on to create Get Smart and worked on it for one season. Just a few years later, he wrote and directed The Producers that introduced Gene Wilder to the world.
In the 2026 United States, The Producers has never been more needed and relevant. For his original screenplay, Brooks won the Academy Award.
Married to his second wife Anne Bancroft for 41 years until her death, Brooks film career continued to grow. His next film after The Producers was The Twelve Chairs. His love of Russian novels inspired the comedy-drama. Though not one of Brooks’ better-known films, The Twelve Chairs remains one of my favorites.
During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Brooks wrote and directed Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movi, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, a remake of To Be or Not to Be, Spaceballs, Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. In the early 1980s, his production company Brooksfilms produced David Lynch’s The Elephant Man. Lynch received an Oscar nomination.
In the early Aughts, Brooks adapted The Producers into a musical. Not many know this fun fact about Brooks, but drumming legend Buddy Rich taught Brooks the drums.
In particular, I keep returning to the wisdom of Blazing Saddles during Dump’s MAGA-Nazi Reich. Brooks understands bigotry and hate all too well as the descendent of Russian and German Jewish immigrants.
Brooks wrote Blazing Saddles with that life experience along with his collaborative screenwriters Richard Pryor, Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger and Andrew Bergman who conceived the story. Brooks wanted to “emulate” the writer’s room of Your Show of Shows.
To close today’s tribute to Mel Brooks in honor of birthright citizenship being upheld for now (Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch voted against it; while Kavanaugh did vote with the majority, he does not believe birthright citizenship has Constitutional protection and is only the “law of the land” because of a federal statute), I have included this clip from Blazing Saddles.
My maternal grandparents received birthright citizenship since their parents immigrated from Southern Italy and Sweden. My great great grandmother was born in Ireland and immigrated with her parents. In the 19th century, the United States did not consider Southern Italians and the Irish white either. Knowing this about the Irish, make this scene’s close more understandable.