Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is an American comedian, filmmaker, actor, writer, lyricist and producer whose work helped define modern screen parody. He was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on 28 June 1926, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Brooks grew up in a working-class household, served in the United States Army during the Second World War, and returned to entertainment with the speed and timing of someone shaped by live performance, radio, vaudeville traditions and New York writers' rooms.

Brooks first made his name behind the scenes. In the 1950s he wrote for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, part of a celebrated staff that also included figures such as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. With Reiner, Brooks created the 2000 Year Old Man comedy routine, a long-running act built on absurd historical memory and deadpan interview rhythm. He also co-created the television spy spoof Get Smart with Buck Henry, bringing his taste for genre parody to network television before he became a major film director.

His feature breakthrough came with The Producers, a 1967 comedy about a fraudulent Broadway scheme to stage a guaranteed flop. The film won Brooks the Academy Award for original screenplay and established the tone that would become his signature: rude, literate, theatrical, self-aware and willing to turn show-business panic into farce. In the 1970s he directed two of the most durable American comedies of the era, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The first attacked the myths of the Hollywood Western through race satire and fourth-wall chaos; the second lovingly recreated the style of Universal horror while turning Frankenstein into a precise black-and-white comedy.