Background and career
Melvin James Brooks (né Kaminsky; born June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter and playwright. With a career spanning nine decades, he is known for a variety of successful farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of the few people to win the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) awards. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016 and a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017. Brooks began his career as a writer for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, where he worked with Mel Tolkin, Neil Simon and Carl Reiner. Reiner and Brooks co-created the comedy sketch The 2000 Year Old Man and shared the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000. With Buck Henry, he created the spy spoof Get Smart. Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers (1967). After The Twelve Chairs (1970), he made a string of successful comedies: Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981) and Spaceballs (1987). His musical adaptation of The Producers ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and won 12 Tony Awards. It was adapted as a film in 2005. Through his company, Brooksfilms, he produced David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) and David Jones's 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). With Anne Bancroft, he starred in To Be or Not To Be (1983), a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film. Brooks and Bancroft were married from 1964 until her death in 2005; their son Max Brooks is an actor and author. Brooks wrote a memoir, All About Me! (2021). His career was covered in Judd Apatow's documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! (2026). The American Film Institute included Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and The Producers on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list. In 2026, to celebrate his centenary, it moved Blazing Saddles to first place.
Brooks was born Melvin James Kaminsky on a tenement kitchen table on June 28, 1926, at 515 Powell Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn to Katie "Kitty" (née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky. He grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on 365 South 3rd Street. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His parents married in 1916. He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny and Bernie. His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 when Brooks was two years old. He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face." Brooks was a small, sickly boy, who was often bullied because of his size. Humor was a defense mechanism: "If your enemy is laughing, how can he bludgeon you to death?" At age nine, he saw Cole Porter's Anything Goes starring William Gaxton, Ethel Merman and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle Joe "I'm gonna do that one day!" His uncle said, "OK kid, you can do it." One of his favorite films was Frankenstein (1931), and he found he could amuse a friend by singing "Puttin' On the Ritz" à la Boris Karloff. At 14, Brooks gained employment as a pool-side tummler at the Borscht Belt's Butler Lodge, where his antics amused audiences. He recalled standing at the edge of a diving board wearing a derby and a large alpaca overcoat with two suitcases full of rocks, and announcing: "Business is terrible! I can't go on!" before jumping, fully clothed, into the pool. It was there he met an 18-year-old Sid Caesar. Brooks studied drumming under jazz legend Buddy Rich, a fellow Williamsburg native, and earned money as a musician from age 14. During his time as a drummer, he was given his first opportunity as a comedian at the age of 16, filling in for an ill emcee. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky. He considered using his mother's maiden name, but "Brookman" was too long to fit on his drums, so he shortened it to Brooks. Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in Williamsburg in January 1944 and intended to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology.
In early 1944, in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test. He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to learn electrical engineering, horse riding and saber fighting. In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army. Twelve weeks later, when he turned 18, he officially joined the Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, induction center, and was sent to the Field Artillery Replacement Training Center at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic and radio operator training. Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment. Brooks says he boarded SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard around February 15, 1945. A reporter for the United States Department of Defense writes that Brooks arrived in France in November 1944, and later in Belgium, serving with the 78th Infantry Division as a forward artillery observer. In December 1944, Brooks was transferred to the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion as a combat engineer, participating in the Battle of the Bulge. Of his experience there, Brooks noted:
Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier. Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany. Brooks was tasked with land-mine location; defusing was done by a specialist. Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing Jewish American singer Al Jolson's hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo' Bye!)" into a bullhorn. Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit. His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River, later building bridges over the Rhine River. In April 1945, Brooks's unit conducted its last reconnaissance missions in the Harz Mountains, Germany. Brooks's brothers also served; Lenny spent 19 months in a POW camp after his plane was shot down. With the end of the war in Europe, Brooks joined the Special Services as a comic touring Army bases, and he was made acting corporal, put in charge of entertainment at Wiesbaden, and performed at Fort Dix. In June 1946, Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal.
After the war, Brooks's mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but he "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills", where he worked in Borscht Belt clubs as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic was too sick to perform, Brooks substituted. He also acted in summer stock theater in Red Bank, New Jersey and did radio work. He eventually worked his way up to tummler at Grossinger's. Brooks worked for the Broadway producer Benjamin Kutcher, who later inspired the character of Max Bialystock. In 1949, Caesar hired Brooks to write jokes for the DuMont/NBC series The Admiral Broadway Revue, paying him, off-the-books, $50 a week. In 1950, Caesar created the variety show Your Show of Shows and hired Brooks as a writer along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Danny Simon and head writer Mel Tolkin. The writing staff was widely influential. Reiner, as creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, based Morey Amsterdam's character Buddy Sorell on Brooks. Neil Simon's Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) is inspired by the production of the show, and the character Ira Stone is based on Brooks. In 1952, Brooks wrote for the revue New Faces of 1952. Your Show of Shows ended in 1954 when Imogene Coca left to host her own show. Caesar created Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers, including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart. It ran from 1954 until 1957. Brooks recalled: "When I was a fledgling comedy writer working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, our head writer was Mel Tolkin... I really looked up to him. (By the way, I was 5-foot-7 and he was six feet tall.) He was a bona fide intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the traditions of great Russian literature. One day, he handed me a book. He said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.' The book was Dead Souls by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I'd never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time... It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be." He recalled "I went to the library, and read all the books I could carry—Conrad, Fielding, Dostoevski, Gogol, Tolstoy. I decided that Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through his mind on its way to the page. ... And I said to myself, 'My God, I'm not a writer, I'm a talker.'"
Brooks and Carl Reiner became close friends and improvised comedy routines. Reiner played the straight man interviewer and pitched parts to Brooks. Reiner recalled:
