Just last week I was writing about how stand up comedians can’t sustain consistent laughter in an audience for the hour, hour and a half, of a major theatre or arena show, and yet here is Mel Brooks, at a youthful 88 years of age, killing it with an hour straight and could have, definitely doubled or tripled that hour with no loss in humor. An auto-biographic sampling of his life, undoubtedly no more than a smatterring of the stories he could have given us, Brooks took us from his childhood in Williamsbugh, through his years in the Catskills (from Bus Boy to Stand Up) through his first viewing of Sid Ceaser not to mention his first viewing of his late wife Mrs. Robinson herself, Anne Bancroft (“You’re following me everywhere” she tells him after he shows up at another party), “The Twelve Chairs”, “The Producers” where he won for Best Screenplay (“I wanna tell you something from the heart” he said, “Boom, Boom, Boom”), screening “High Anxiety” for Hitchcock, singing “Blazing Saddles”, “Hope For The Best, Expect The Worst” and his superb Frank Sinatra parody, the aforementioned “High Society” replete with whiplast effect.
But there was so much he didn’t even come close to telling us about. The hugely successful Broadway production of “The Producers” doesn’t get a word and neither does his funniest film, the sublime “Young Frankenstein”. That’s just off the top of my head, What we did get was Brooks in a tux, with that sort of face that seemed to be cracked in a perpetual smile, timing so impeccable it felt like a master class. and memories of close encounters with the greats, that while all we get is a handful they are all funny.
As a comedian, maybe as a person, and definitely as a director, Brooks took the Borscht Belt humor of his youth and added a back story to it. I’m reminded of “Young Frankenstein”, where he has Igor say to Young Frankenstein, “walk this way, no, this way…” one of the oldest jokes in the book. “Young Frankenstein” was a superb comic telling of the classic story, yes, but it was also skits as old as the Marx Brothers. Brooks buddy in “Your Show Of Shows” Doc Simon is a tragi-comic playwrite with a sense of the epic about him, Brooks was low humor with a sense of structure at his dispossal.
The fastest hour of stand up you will ever see, I think they should make it a weekly show.
Grade: A