Mel Brooks names the “funniest and most talented” actor of all time: “Gifted from God”
Modesty tends to edge closer to the window the older someone gets, and since he’s one of the finest comedic minds in Hollywood history, Mel Brooks is well within his rights to call himself one of the finest comedic minds in Hollywood history.
He’s dedicated his life to making people laugh, and he’s proven himself to be better at it than most. Ask the writer, director, and star of Blazing Saddles to name the funniest movie that’s ever been made, and he’ll tell you that it’s Blazing Saddles. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong; it just shows that he’s fully aware of his contributions to the medium and uninterested in downplaying them.
Even when he won three consecutive Primetime Emmys for guest-starring in the sitcom Mad About You, he didn’t think he deserved them. Instead, he was convinced that the reason he edged one step closer to the EGOT he completed by winning three Tonys in 2001 was that he was Mel Brooks, the living legend and comedy hero to millions.
With that in mind, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that if Brooks were tasked to name the single greatest comedy performer to ever set foot on stage or screen, he’d name himself. He didn’t, though, with the veteran’s veteran more inclined to tout his credentials as a filmmaker as opposed to an actor, one who holds the box office bust, Life Stinks, in high esteem as his on-camera pinnacle.
You might also think that because he named his wife, Anne Bancroft, as the best actor who ever lived, he’d also call her the funniest. He didn’t, but nor did he let his eyes wander too far from his repertory, zeroing in on somebody he worked with on Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and History of the World, Part I.
“What an incredibly gifted gift from God, Madeline Kahn,” he told NPR. “The funniest and most talented comedienne, I think, including people like Carol Burnett, who are great, you know, and Gilda Radner, who was magnificent. But nobody, listen to me, nobody could approach the magnificence and wonder of Madeline Kahn.”
Like most of the best onscreen comedians, Kahn could also hold her own in drama, notching Academy Award nominations for Blazing Saddles and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, two movies that were poles apart. A three-time Golden Globe nominee and a Tony winner, she was as adept at pratfalling and mugging as she was tugging at the heartstrings, and Brooks didn’t think anyone could touch her.
“She was really a great gift to us all,” he said of his late collaborator, who passed in 1999 at the age of 57 after battling cancer. “I saw art in her, not just funny. But I saw a person who was gifted with art. She’s the only one who actually could have worked in opera as an opera singer, as a coloratura. She was that talented. Or I think she could have worked as a longshoreman in New Jersey.”
As far as Brooks could see, “I don’t think there’s anything that Madeline Kahn couldn’t do,” which is why she’ll always have his vote as being the pinnacle for comedy acting.
