The 1974 scene Mel Brooks called “the most soaring, thrilling moment” of his entire career
As the brains behind some of the most indelible, iconic, and hilarious scenes in the history of Hollywood comedy, trying to get Mel Brooks to single one of them out as the single most thrilling should be as difficult as asking him to name a favourite child.
After all, for everything that he’s achieved in the industry, which is more than most, he’s often been guilty of getting high on his own supply. Brooks adores Some Like It Hot, but he’ll always have an axe to grind with Billy Wilder’s masterpiece because the American Film Institute called it funnier than Blazing Saddles.
His 1974 classic is the EGOT-winning veteran’s choice for the most rib-tickling motion picture ever made, but since he wrote and directed it, he would say that. On the other hand, he’s Mel Brooks, and if he wants to say that he’s crafted a more gut-busting flick than anybody else, he’s entitled to do just that, since he’s hung around long enough to become the genre’s definitive living legend, no offence to Dick Van Dyke.
He also showed himself to be one of the most loyal collaborators in the business, with Brooks’ heyday as a writer, director, producer, and actor assembling an inner circle who’d become recurring fixtures in his work, with Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, and Dom DeLuise among them, never mind his legendary, decades-spanning friendship with Carl Reiner.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that another member of his repertory was responsible for a scene that will forever be seared into Brooks’ memory as “the most soaring, thrilling moment” that he’s ever been lucky enough to witness on set, which he took some of the credit for, naturally.
“Madeline Kahn as Lili von Shtupp singing ‘I’m Tired’, a song I wrote the music and lyrics for, with her ad-libs and her near-harmonies,” the star marvelled. “She was amazing in that. I think she was the best actress/comedienne/singer who ever lived. She was a born coloratura. She could have sang in the Met. She was the best. I was stunned by her incredible music talent and her comedy.”
Kahn’s Academy Award-nominated performance in Blazing Saddles embodied everything that Brooks loved about her: she got to act, she got to sing, and she got to do comedy, with von Shtupp created as a parody of Marlene Dietrich, who became a memorable character in her own right, all thanks to the combination of razor-sharp writing and Kahn’s unwavering commitment to going all-in.
It may not be the most iconic sequence in his oeuvre, and there’s hardly any shame in that when there are so many to choose from, but for all the laughs and yuks he’s been able to wring out of audiences from the string of bawdy capers that saw the filmmaker usher in a new age for mainstream comedy in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Kahn belting out ‘I’m Tired’ thrilled him the most.
It’s arguably not even the most memorable sequence in the picture, which says more about Blazing Saddles than it does about Kahn’s contributions, but as far as Brooks is concerned, it’s the one that’s stuck with him the most.
