Mel Brooks reveals the biggest regret of his career: “Maybe that’s a bit too much for the kids or whatever”
Mel Brooks doesn’t come across as the type of person who would regret much of anything. He’s doubled down on his comedy of excess over the years, inciting laughter by assaulting the viewer with endless jokes rather than focusing on carefully paced comic timing or subtle sight gags. Those things are there too, of course, but they’re just one of many lines of offence. If you don’t laugh at one joke, don’t be disappointed, because there will be at least five more in the time it takes to say, “Frau Blücher.”
Brooks knew he wanted to be in show business when he was a kid growing up in New York. He saw the grand dame of musical theatre, Ethel Merman, star in the Broadway production of Anything Goes. He began performing at hotels at the age of 14, and eventually landed a regular gig writing for Sid Caesar’s television variety show, Your Show of Shows.
In 1965, Brooks co-created the spoof spy series Get Smart, but it wasn’t until 1967 that he was able to stretch his comedic muscles and scandalise audiences fully. The Producers is a comedy musical about Adolf Hitler. More specifically, it’s a comedy musical about a producer and a timid accountant who try to make a fortune out of over-inflating the prospects of a musical about the Holocaust that they believe is bound to fail.
It was such a controversial setup for a film that most studios refused to make it, and Brooks said that he received thousands of letters from rabbis and Jewish organisations condemning the movie. Although he acknowledged that the backlash was justified, Brooks responded to his critics by suggesting that the best way to fight the Nazis and the pall they cast over the world was to laugh at them. “If we’re going to get even with Hitler,” Brooks reasoned to NPR in 2021, “We can’t get on a soapbox because he’s too damn good at that. We’ve got to ridicule them. We’ve got to laugh at him.”
Brooks’ comfort with taboo subjects has made him no stranger to controversy, but it clearly doesn’t bother him. In fact, when asked in the same interview whether he ever regretted any of his jokes, he responded that he only regrets the ones he didn’t tell.
“Not one would I take back!” he insisted. “There were plenty, plenty of jokes I should have just exploded with and I said, ‘Maybe that’s a bit too much for the kids’ or whatever.”
Seven decades into his career, Brooks has more than earned this perspective. He is one of the few creators who boasts an EGOT, having won an Emmy in 1967 for his work with Caesar, a Grammy in 1999 for his spoken word comedy album The 2,000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000, an Oscar in 1969 for the screenplay of The Producers, and three Tonys in 2001 for the stage version of The Producers. All told, he has 11 awards across the four awards ceremonies, and, if we take him at his word, might have earned a handful more if he hadn’t cut his edgiest jokes.
