The comedian and film-maker seems oblivious to his best material in an uneven life story in need of a punchline or two
Mel Brooks is the last comic in the world you can imagine wanting to be Hamlet – although, of course, that role is just another way of getting all the attention. He did play a Shakespearean actor in a 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s comedy To Be Or Not to Be, but otherwise the Danish you’re most likely to associate with Brooks is the kind you buy in a deli. Now 95, the comedian, screenwriter and director of such beloved spoofs as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie has written his autobiography. As the title might suggest, All About Me! is very much the work of the man who, as a young Jewish comic in the Borscht Belt resorts, got his break as a “pool tummler” (Yiddish for “entertainer”), his job to keep the guests happy and alert, and stop them falling asleep round the swimming pool.
Born Melvin Kaminsky, Brooks grew up in working-class Brooklyn, the youngest of four brothers, whose father died when he was two. There’s a priceless opening shtick about seeing Frankenstein as a boy, and worrying that the monster would get him; his mother reassured him that it would have to shlep all the way from Transylvania, find its way to get to South Third Street, then probably eat the Rothsteins downstairs first. The other childhood stuff is fairly mundane: memories of uncle Lee and religious fanatic Louie from Minsk, “clotheslines full of wet wash” and tributes to his mother, “a true heroine”.
