“I threw it out”: The Mel Brooks scene so unfunny it was deleted from history
Comedians thrive on having their finger on the pulse of what’s guaranteed to make an audience laugh, and few had their finger on it better than Mel Brooks during his big-screen heyday.
In the space of a decade, he’d gone from a first-time filmmaker to the biggest name in Hollywood comedy, which comes with the territory when he’d written and directed The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety in ten years.
The only outlier was The Twelve Chairs, and while it was warmly embraced by critics, it was a disappointment at the box office compared to the rest of his peak-era output, although it retains a special place in Brooks’ heart as the picture he’ll always defend as his most underrated work.
When the EGOT-winning veteran wanted to know if a scene was working, he had a simple experiment; he’d hand white handkerchiefs to the crew, and if he turned around and found out his colleagues had stuffed them into their mouths to stop them from laughing when the cameras were rolling, he knew he was onto a winner.
However, even his tried and trusted methods could fail him, with one particular example taking him so completely by surprise that he instantly discarded it onto the cutting room floor, never to be seen. Silent Movie featured a gag that was, for all intents and purposes, classic Brooks, but not a single soul who wasn’t involved in the production thought it was funny.
The setup was as simple as it was nonsensical; unfolding in a restaurant, two well-dressed lobsters turn up for dinner at a swanky New York City eatery, where the waiter leads them to a tank full of humans in bathing suits. The lobsters pick out which person they want for their dinner, much to the chagrin of the unlucky human being, and the subversion of how many high-end establishments dish out prime seafood to their customers is complete. That was the whole scene, and Brooks was high on it.
“There were laughs during the making of the scene, laughs during the cutting of the picture, and laughs during the editing,” he recalled. “There were big screams of laughter throughout Silent Movie… big screams except during the lobster scene. I was amazed. And I said this was the greatest lesson of my life, and I threw it out immediately.”
It knocked him for a loop, with Brooks having never encountered a scene he was so convinced was hilarious that audiences unanimously rejected. “We loved it; we thought it was hysterical,” he admitted. “Every time we saw it, there was not enough Kleenex to stuff into our mouths.” And yet, his guinea pigs had spoken, and the lobster sequence was declared to be painfully unfunny.
Even though it was bruising for his ego and confidence in his abilities to understand what the people he was making his movies for wanted to see, Brooks was the bigger man. He may have loved it, but the lobster scene fell flat when it was previewed, so it was swept under the rug and deleted from history.
