![]() It was a joyful, frenzied, hugely stressful period that brought on anxiety attacks – not surprisingly, given Caesar’s volatility: he once held Brooks out of a window by his belt.ĭespite the ensuing therapy, Brooks seems to have little self-awareness when it comes to his own behaviour: like the two occasions when he menaced a colleague into handing over everything in his pockets, the second time making him wade waist-deep in Central Park Lake. Once Brooks enters showbiz, the period he devotes most attention to (45 pages, 15 more than his best-loved film, The Producers) is his long spell writing for TV comic Sid Caesar, an experience that comes across as both the dream and the nightmare of his existence, as traumatic as his wartime service clearing landmines. 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”.ĭespite the ensuing therapy, Brooks seems to have little self-awareness when it comes to his own behaviour 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. 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.īorn Melvin Kaminsky, Brooks grew up in working-class Brooklyn, the youngest of four brothers, whose father died when he was two. Now 95, the comedian, screenwriter and director of such beloved spoofs as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie has written his autobiography. 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. M el 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. ![]()
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