Funny Man: Mel Brooks

by Patrick McGilligan

Overview

A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.

Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family.

The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh.

Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy.

McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.

Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062560957
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	656
Sales rank:	186,613
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Patrick McGilligan is the author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light; Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; and George Cukor: A Double Life; and books on the lives of directors Nicholas Ray, Robert Altman, and Oscar Micheaux, and actors James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. He also edited the acclaimed five-volume Backstory series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters and (with Paul Buhle), the definitive Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not far from Kenosha, where Orson Welles was born.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 1926: Little World 1

Chapter 2 1944: Big World 34

Chapter 3 1949: Funny Is Money 61

Chapter 4 1952: Dreams and Nightmares 93

Chapter 5 1955: Club Caesar 124

Chapter 6 1957: The Genius Awakes 155

Chapter 7 1962: The Warm and Fuzzy Mel 193

Chapter 8 1965: Springtime for Mel 229

Chapter 9 1967: Auteur, Auteur! 264

Chapter 10 1971: Blazing Mel 301

Chapter 11 1974: Tops in Taps 334

Chapter 12 1975: Club Brooks 359

Chapter 13 1980: Uneasy Lies the Head 394

Chapter 14 1983: Why So Angry? 435

Chapter 15 1986: Frolics and Detours 472

Chapter 16 1995: He Who Laughs Last 504

Chapter 17 2001: Unstoppable 528

Sources and Acknowledgments 555

Chapter Notes 563

Filmography 593

Index 595

Editorial Reviews

Comprehensive….illuminating….teeming with fascinating details about Brooks’s life and career.” — New York Times Book Review

“The author ably chronicles Brooks’ career arc from the Brooklyn kid born Melvin Kaminsky to the loudest member of Sid Caesar’s writing staff on NBC’s Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour in the 1950s to the driving force behind some of the most successful film comedies of his time.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Well researched, engaging, and of interest to all of Brooks fans. McGilligan has found a good critical balance as he extols his subject’s comedic and artistic virtues while being forthright about Brooks’s occasional stubborn attitude toward creative and financial control. McGilligan is one of the few film biographers not to indulge in extensive criticism of the projects themselves, instead offering commentary through the contemporary reviews or financial results of a given work.” — Library Journal

“After a career Funny Man: Mel Brooks tells the story of a man who has never stopped hustling in an almost pathological pursuit of the twin needs to entertain and be famous for it.” — New York

“Highly detailed....A veteran showbiz biographer, McGilligan has produced a book rich with knowledge of the industry and overflowing with the fruits of his research.” — Newsday

“This superb account by film biographer McGilligan of Mel Brooks’s life and career persuasively sketches two sides of the comedian-filmmaker’s personality….. McGilligan’s exhaustive biography will be essential reading for anyone interested in Brooks or, more broadly, how Hollywood functioned during the second half of the 20th century.” — Publishers Weekly

“McGilligan skillfully profiles Brooks’s two sides—the bullying, raging and credit-grabbing “Rude Crude Mel” and the “Nice Mel,” who performed discreet and generous acts of kindness and was a lightning rod for laughter in public. This fascinating and exhaustive biography presents a complicated and immensely talented man whose inner demons fed his hilarious output of films, TV series and albums.” — Shelf Awareness

“While devoted Brooks fans may recognize some of these tidbits, there are enough new trivia nuggets that most readers will come away with something they did not know before. For those who want an in-depth account of Mel Brooks, the ruthless businessman, Funny Man is for you.” — Washington Post

From the Publisher

After a career Funny Man: Mel Brooks tells the story of a man who has never stopped hustling in an almost pathological pursuit of the twin needs to entertain and be famous for it.

New York

While devoted Brooks fans may recognize some of these tidbits, there are enough new trivia nuggets that most readers will come away with something they did not know before. For those who want an in-depth account of Mel Brooks, the ruthless businessman, Funny Man is for you.

Washington Post

Highly detailed....A veteran showbiz biographer, McGilligan has produced a book rich with knowledge of the industry and overflowing with the fruits of his research.

Newsday

McGilligan skillfully profiles Brooks’s two sides—the bullying, raging and credit-grabbing “Rude Crude Mel” and the “Nice Mel,” who performed discreet and generous acts of kindness and was a lightning rod for laughter in public. This fascinating and exhaustive biography presents a complicated and immensely talented man whose inner demons fed his hilarious output of films, TV series and albums.

Shelf Awareness

…teeming with fascinating details about Brooks's life and career…There's plenty of information in Funny Man, and it's often illuminating. Like Brooks's tablet-tumbling Moses in History of the World, Part I the author probably could've dropped a portion of this material to no one's harm. Despite its overstuffed nature, the book nonetheless paints a portrait of Brooks as a wildly talented—emphasis, occasionally, on wild—artist whose intensity both advanced and impeded him.

The New York Times Book Review - Dave Itzkoff

01/14/2019

This superb account by film biographer McGilligan (Young Orson) of Mel Brooks’s life and career persuasively sketches two sides of the comedian-filmmaker’s personality: “Nice Mel,” a zany performer who is always on, cares deeply for others, and craves affection, and “Rude Crude Mel,” a tenacious negotiator and a genius at self-promotion who is riven by insecurity. McGilligan covers the major achievements of Brooks’s career, including the TV show Get Smart (on which he had a long-standing feud with Buck Henry over the creator credit), his film directing debut, The Producers (described by collaborators as a chaotic and fractious production), his breakthrough hit Blazing Saddles, and the follow-up success Young Frankenstein (to which Brooks shrewdly secured the stage rights from co-writer Gene Wilder, allowing him years later to mount a musical version). While the book sometimes bogs down in the minutiae of Brooks’s legal deals, it is best at showing Hollywood as a place full of remarkable talents intricately interconnected through friendship and career, especially, in Brooks’s case, through his lifelong relationships with Carl Reiner, Mel Tolkin, and other fellow writers on a formative early experience, Sid Caesar’s live 1950–1954 TV program Your Show of Shows. McGilligan’s exhaustive biography will be essential reading for anyone interested in Brooks or, more broadly, how Hollywood functioned during the second half of the 20th century. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Comprehensive….illuminating….teeming with fascinating details about Brooks’s life and career.

New York Times Book Review

While devoted Brooks fans may recognize some of these tidbits, there are enough new trivia nuggets that most readers will come away with something they did not know before. For those who want an in-depth account of Mel Brooks, the ruthless businessman, Funny Man is for you.

Washington Post

Film historian McGilligan offers the first full biography of comedy icon Mel Brooks. Narrator Stephen Hoye picks up on McGilligan’s snarky tone, delivering the numerous negatives about the mercurial writer/actor/director/producer with admirable objectivity. Brooks, the comedy genius who created YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BLAZING SADDLES, and THE PRODUCERS, was also a fractious negotiator, a manipulative self-promoter, and a product of his time, when being “PC” wasn’t considered important. Brooks’s humor was often crude and rude, demeaning women and heavy on fart and fag jokes. Hoye’s narration keeps die-hard Brooks fans hoping for some positives about the Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy winner—the “Nice Mel”—but those are few and far between. Perhaps it’s better not to know our heroes too well. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2019 - AudioFile