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The New York Times Magazine Mar 30 1975

Funny is money

by Herbert Gold
Originally published in The New York Times Magazine Mar 30 1975

    At the theater in San Francisco where I saw "Young Frankenstein," the audience began screaming with laughter before the film went on -- a sure sign of cult in action, this time the Children of Mel Brooks. The movie itself, a parody-homage to the traditional horror genre, was not easy to see and hear over the immense wigs of a coven of campy cockettes and their crunching, yowling admiration -- a special transvestite Judy Garland audience. But elsewhere in America, where it is earning those bountiful millions of dollars which flow inexorably toward the hit movie, the audience includes kids who know nought of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, the Borscht Belt, or shtick humor, as well as oldsters bred on Boris Karloff, the Lon Chaneys Senior or Junior, and Bela Lugosi. Mel Brooks made connection with "Blazing Saddles," "The Producers," and his recordings of the 2,000 year-old man. With "Young Frankenstein," he was monster-connected. The former gagwriter, searching out his path, is now in the godfather class, with a host of Brooklings seeking to follow in the way of the Lord.

    In the parking lot of 20th Gentury-Fox stands a billboard, advertising "Young Frankenstein" to the already converted: MEL BROOKS'S COMIC MASTERPIECE! MEL BROOKS'S FUNNIEST FILM TO DATE! In other words, "Young Frankenstein" cost only a bit over $2-million to make, will move a hundred million worldwide, will return about S30- million to the studio, and perhaps $5-million to Mel Brooks, who did talk shows for his creamcheese-and-bagel money a few years ago.

    Elsewhere on the Fox lot, Josh Greenfeld, New York novelist and co-author of "Harry and Tonto," showed me the bronze plaque on what is known as the Old Writers' Building:

    "Have you noticed that all the studios are surrounded by mortuaries?" Greenfeld asked. "It must mean something." But Brooks, with his slogan, "Funny is money," is making the dead walk again as he puts silver arrows in the corpses of the musical, the western, the horror flick. "I love your face! It's so pretty! Funny is money!" shouts speedy Mel Brooks, your friendly Greenwich Village philosopher, because he wants to make it absolutely clear; and he also names his son Nicholas, after Nikolai Gogol, and cites Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as his masters, and spatters his conversations with French, even five-minute taped spots for radio, just, as he explained when I asked pourquoi: "Parce que."

    The Western world has recently become familiar with the details of the career of 2,000-year-old, 48-year-old Mel Brooks, formerly Melvin Kaminsky, youngest son of a father who died when Melvin was 2, ghetto small boy who discovered that sticks and stones would break his bones but words could make everybody laugh. They would then cease and desist the bone-breaking that seemed to go on in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, your average terrible poverty-stricken ghetto. He was funny as a child, and he kept on being it. He played the drums at 14 and took the name Brooks (his mother's maiden name was Brookman) because he wanted to take his mother's name but it wouldn't fit on a drum. At 17, he enlisted in the Army to kill Nazis and became a combat engineer. He was shipped to Europe in time for the Battle of the Bulge and was briefly a forward artillery observer in Germany. He didn't like the noise.

    After the war, he drummed in the Catskills, but slipped into talking before the customers when a comic took ill. For a short time he was the social director at Grossinger's, where the unmarried go to try again, and there he met Sid Caesar. For 10 years he was on the committee that wrote for Caesar; those days are now remembered as magic, golden, sublime, and pretty good. He went from $50 a week to thousands, but he personally still wasn't king of everything in comedy. This made him nervous.

    "The 2,000-Year-Old Man" record made him a cult figure, although the cult wasn't large enough for a man who needed everybody's love, everybody's, and right now. He also made a lot of money -- after years of postdivorce poverty -- with "Get Smart," a television series which he developed with Buck Henry in the mid-sixties. He started a novel; he admires novelists, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Joe Heller, that sort of thing. The novel was about sweet young Adolf Hitler, a misunderstood Viennese boy who, at one time, was a good dancer. The novel wasn't published, but it became the soreenplay called "The Producers," which Brooks insisted on directing. The studios wouldn't back him as a director; why should they? He was an unknown quantity. The unknown quantity accumulated comedians Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder and told them to go crazy and they did and "The Producers" was made. People liked it; it didn't make anybody rich. His next film, "The Twelve Chairs," made from a 50-year-old Russian satire, continued making nobody rich. He was on his way to has-beenhood again.

    Then came "Blazing Saddles," and the rest is a story of happy success -- money, love, devotion, pleasure, rejoicing in the streets and banks and studios. The early movies will probably be carried along to profit, too. Grateful and responsible Mel Brooks will keep his stock company intact for the future projects -- star Gene Wilder, with whom he wrote "Young Frankenstein," Madeline Kahn, lovely and dry, Dom DeLuise, unlovely and wet, Kenneth Mars, and Marty Feldman of the wild eyes. I asked him why not Zero Mostel and he indicated that genius, other genius, is hard to work into a stock company. He likes to ask his people to go crazy for him, improvise, rise with an adrenalin rush, but he has his limits. Mostel, as those who know him can testify, is pure intellective id -- no limits. Brooks likes to let his actors play, and to help them to play, but there are always those chalk marks. Mostel is something like an Orson Welles of comedy, not made for group development of a product.

    Mel Brooks has become a familiar presence from talk shows, public appearances, and his cameo roles as the Yiddish-speaking Indian chief and the maddened governor in "Blazing Saddles." He has a weary profile, quiet, hooded little eyes, a wide, sharkish mouth, an affable shark with dry but very active lips -- a face reminiscent of an ardent potato shark, if there were such a thin -- and a stocky, energetic body. The chief high-beam emanation is his voice, a multiflex flow of mimicry, wisecracks, helpfulness, marital and medical advice ("You have a little sinusitis, right?"), offers of record albums and boxes of Raisinets, milk-chocolate covered raisins with which he is carrying on a long-term love affair "(Chocolate isn't good for teeth? Teeth aren't good for chocolate, either''). He is helpful and friendly to all, and almost all seem warily to love him. "I love your face! It's so pretty!" he shrieks for hello, and then the voice grows hoarse and precisely elocutionary: "And I remain, your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks."

    His office in the "Hello, Dolly!" world of the Fox lot -- turn-of-the-century-musical ghostly streets winding all about -- is filled with posters of "The Producers," gracefully lurching Zero Mostel, "Blazing Saddles," with Cleavon Little, the black sheriff with the Gucci bag, and "Young Frankenstein," starring wild-haired Gene Wielder and weird-eyed Marty Feldman. There is also a large photo of Brooks himself, leading a horse; and a piano, stacked copies of Variety, clips of reviews and, at one end of the room, a board with cards pinned to it -- the 3-by-5 trail of his silent film, which is to be called "Mel Brooks's Silent Film," to differentiate it from all other silent films. Riding the great success of "Blazing Saddles" and "Young Frankenstein," Brooks imagines a Mel Brooks stock company doing Mel Brooks movies as he sorts out the funny noises and funny ideas that effervesce constantly in Mel Brooks's head. Would he try the theater again -- in his last Broadway outing, he wrote the book for the short-lived Ray Bolger musical, "All American," in 1962 -- or will the Mel Brooks Stock Company make only movies? "If I wanted to do something unexpected, I'd do it so it wouldn't cost anything. If I write a somber comedy -- not 'don't like this joke, wait 10 seconds' -- I'd do it as an experiment, Off Broadway. So it wouldn't have to have yoks. I'm thinking of this good-natured guy named Death, straw boater, good-lookihg guy: Excuse me. madam. He picks up a girl, takes her to the alley, she comes out a withered 97-year-old crone. That kind of thing."

    Was he suprised by the success of "Young Frankenstein"? "I was more surprised by 'Blazing Saddles' -- a private joke. It prepared me for 'Young Frankenstein,' a case of satire and homage, a valentine to the horror movie."

    He relates better to sex and food, he says, than to politics. "I love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool."

    A question about the connections between style and humor, between his style and humor, quickly became an esthetic improvisation, a small sociological lecture. "I only break wind on the prairie." In "Blazing Saddles," a group of cowboys eat baked beans and create a symphony of flatulence; it had always irritated Brooks that this logical consequence of gastronomy was left out of the bean-eating scenes of western movies. "In 'Young Frankenstein,' however, I only spill soup.I pay attention to the parameters. 'Young Frankenstein' is a fragile, 1939 black-and-white beauty. 'Blazing Saddles' is a salute to the eternal western. I have no interest in contemporary matter." For the 2,000-year-old man, he says he needs Carl Reiner to get him going. But he was willing to get going about the meaning of his films. "The Producers" is about the conflict between the Id -- Zero Mostel, everyone's greedy essence, and the Ego -- poor, trembling Gene Wilder, that 6-foot-high, pink-eyed mouse.

    The references to the great Russian novelists, to the matter of life and death, to his psychoanalysis, to the sacred subjects of his mother and his wife, to the deeper meanings he likes to see in his work brought up his relation to the American-Jewish tradition and the novelists and playwrights, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller and others, who are generally taken as serious artists. 'They're O.K.," he said. "The best of the bunch is Joe Heller. 'Catch-22' is a masterpiece. He doesn't inflate himself. We eat Chinese food together." Friendship, love and Chinese food are linked in Brooks's mind, along with art, money, his wife, his children, all the important facts in homely union. He is not pretentious. He is a little, uh, insistent.

    "Mortality is a classic theme. You're known as an entertainer, not a contriver of masterpieces."

    "Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes, Let's be wet and noisey!'"

    Brooks has no memory of his father. He admits to a nostalgia for the father who died so early in Mel's life, for death the enemy, and it is reflected in a touching personal loyalty and possessiveness which all his friends emphasize. Often he looks like a 4-year-old little boy. He makes basketball motions to make a point about a comedian "who just holds the ball till it's green and moldy." He feeds his visitors. He asks small-boy intimate questions. He talks about his mother. He shows the transparent plastic cube with the pictures of his children. "What do I like?" he repeats -- "Sex and spaghetti, spaghetti and sex." His wife, the actress Anne Bancroft, is beautiful and Italian. He describes a friend as "a leading California gentile." He goes into corner-boy riffs about whatever subject comes up. The incendiary quality of other people, other minds, questions -- they dont' even have to be smart people or good questions -- ignites him. His metabolism is driven by a heart which defies the loss of his father, the loss of childhood, by insisting on childhood everywhere. The extended family of show business helps to keep him wellstocked with relatives.

    When I mentioned a mutual friend, a writer who also worked for Sid Caesar, Brooks's face expressed puzzlement. "He quit. Oh yeah, he left. He wanted to do longer pieces -- books." Brooks does long pieces now, too, whole movies, ,in fact, but the shtick orientation persists through the imagination of a sustained meaning. As we talked, Broooks mixed a persistent fantasy about death, a story about death, a movie about death, with telephone calls, jokes, haranguing abuse of colleagues, laughter, offers of Raisinets (the company supplies them free, since he mentioned them in "Blazing Saddles"), "Hey, I love your face!" and then: "Where was I? I have this character called Bronsky who realizes he's gonna die, so he visits the tombstones of all his friends." A friend entered the offfce. They exercised their routines. Brooks bowed him out in a strangled, elegant voice: "And I remain, your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks, God bless you." He watched his friend down the hall with a long second of silence. A short silence with Brooks is given great value. He stared at me with a puzzled expression. "Listen, even Shakespeare didn't beat death, and he was really bright. Have a whole package of Raisinets. Hey, Donna, get him the letters from the Raisinet people. So Bronsky owns some property in Larchmont, and he knows it takes a few years to build a pyramid, and he starts to build a pyramid in Larchmont, a monument, he wants to stay around, like a pharaoh...."

    He was going again, doing a routine, doing sincere shtick.

    What Brooks really thinks of his profession might be indicated by his hopes for his children. "I'd 1ike my son Eddie to go into film or theater, my daughter Stephanie should write -- she's at Brandeis. Papers about Henry James, that kind. Very smirt, brilliant. My first wife was a dancer. My son Nicholas, he should be a doctor or a film maker."

    Does all this heap of new money change his life? "I used to do talk shows for the money!" -- shaking his head with disbelief. He used to put on funny costumes and do the 2,000 year-old man. "Now it's emotional. I don't buy too much, but I can say no to jobs. I can say no! A great relief. My throat doesn't lock with anxiety when I pick up the check. I drive the only Buick around here. That's a Jewish car, the Italians used to have the Olds. If you suffered amnesia in Beverly Hills and woke up, you'd say you were in Dusseldorf -- Mercedes! BMW's! The signs say: GERMAN CARS! But money means, to me, walking by a sporting-goods shop, I see a-nice pair of sneakers, I buy it."

    A friend reports that he describes his writing as shouting at a secretary. His interviews have some of the same character, except for tbe kindliness of the shouting, the boyish eagerness to know all, understand all, be a friend along with the dissonant humor. "Do you have a gross position in your new film?" Josh Greenfeld asked him. "I'll show you my gross position," he shouted, squatting.

    "I have a few awards -- gold records, two Academy awards, an Emmy, Writers Guild gold plaques -- and they all live together in harmony and happiness on my mother's television set in Miami Beach." As to his colleagues from the Sid Caesar shows, from Broadway and television, from the nightclubs of another time, what has happened to them, stars at 20, some of them -- and now? "Those old comedy writers wandered off like atrophied little Jewish spores, waiting . . . " He paused for a minisecond as compassion struck. "Waiting for a wetness and a sunniness to make them blossom again." With a certain firmness, he noted that he keeps his eye on the sparrow, a vision of success on his own terms. "If you work at a lower level, you burn out, you become flashpaper."

    Does he miss New York? Does he complain, like other transplanted New Yorkers, that he is a slave in exile in Beverly Hills? "I miss haircuts in New York. I miss the one millimeter of rudeness. Of course, after 9:30, it's mugging time. I miss the dog----. No, revise that-- dogdoody. Walking. You get exercise, you've got to avoid big presents the doggies have laid out for you. That's better for family reading. Broken field running, a choice of muggers. I miss the Village. A New York waterbagel really tests your teeth. They call something bagels here, but even people with false teeth can eat them.... But the coal is here in L.A. I'm a coal miner. I'm here. If I have my family and a few good friends and my work, what difference where I am?"

    His friend Bernard Wolfe told me Brooks used to knock on his door on Fire Island at midnight to talk about Dostoevski. But that was at midnight. Earlier in the evening, he and Carl Reiner were developing their 2,000-year-old man interview to the floating, barefoot cult. Reiner the actor, Brooks the writer seemed to reverse roles. Reiner asked the questions and Brooks had a split second to respond with a definition of his ancient Yiddish personality, lightning plots, premise, accent, point of view -- all instantly. New York gave him that -- a little alcohol, a little audience, a warm blanket of jollity. And he's not finished with acting. In "Mel Brooks's Silent Film," he plans to remind people of the departed greats, the Three Stooges, the Ritz Brothers, "with Dom DeLuise on my left, Marty Feldman on my right."

    Another project in preparation is Mel Brooks's Robin Hood for television, entitled, "When Things Were Rotten." Prince Charming will be a queen, crying out, "My drapesl My earrings!"

    We were interrupted by another five-minute taping for radio. "My favorite recent films? Both mine, I go back and watch my films . . . I can't believe I'm on the radio! My mother always hoped I'd be an announcer." He then gave away his Al Jolson takeoff, his Frank Sinatra imitation, singing "America the Beautiful," interrupting it to note that Sinatra's national anthem is "My Way." The metabolism gave the five-minute interview 10 minutes, 15 minutes. "I'm carrying, along with Woody Allen, the cinematic load of film comedy, parce que... I have a wonderful accent. I love the Ritz Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, je ne sais pas. The great days of film comedy, especially the Ritz Brothers. Harry is still alive."

    Does Brooks have any political intentions, despite his disavowals? No. Oh, perhaps to smash a few idols, but nothing serious, just a bit of boyish destruction here and there. Any theories of humor, of comedy and tragedy? "Tragedy is if I'll cut a finger, I go to Mount Sinai, get an X-ray, have to change bandages. Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die." (In almost these words, the observation also appears- in one of his recorded interviews.) "Comedy is not surprise, it's knowing. How does it work how does it laminate? Seeing it on the horizon, expecting, unable to stop it." I thought of Bergson's theory of laughter -- human beings behaving like machines when they are supposed to make infinitely subtle organic calibrations; of Freud's theories about cruelty and the suffering of others; and then of Mel Brooks saying, "Comedy is algebraic. You're given the quadrants and you suspect that X will be a big laugh." If not, try Y. He knows that his slapdash reassures, perhaps even flatters, the audience: Look, he got away with that bad joke! Why can't I?

    Brooks turned somber a moment, contemplating the end of his psychoanalysis, his happy marriage to Anne Bancroft, his sudden total success. "Now I have to worry about losing power, force, inspiration," he said. But his doubts are under control, and in an instant he found an answer: "I have targets, of course, to keep me going."

    As he rambles, perched on the edge of randomness, he suddenly touches his familiar bases in lingo, jargon showbiz, obsession, New York fun. He is the little boy, the youngest son, so beloved by his family and continually tossed in the air that his feet didn't touch tbe ground until he was 6 years old. He has been resting securely on the wind ever since. He knows he can always get home. He also gives an audience this dreamy assurance: They can wander in fantasy and nightmare, but with Kafka or Lenny Bruce, other Jewish masters of controlled psychosis, they were not sure of getting home from the dream. With Mel Brooks they are merely up in the air, dandled, comfortable, blowing homeward to familiar hatreds (Germans, creeps, squares) and comfortable nostalgias (food, neighborhood, kids, old folks, Jews, Italians). The 1,000 - watt kid is finally shedding his light for Southern drive-ins, Western small towns, the suburbs and exurbs and nonurbs filled with chuckling customers who never saw the originals which spawned him. In stagflation time, something that allows laughter is worth any price, especially since the price will probably go up.

    Benevolent rivals for kingship in this domain of comfortable and consoling comedy are Woody Allen and Mel Brooks. They share several qualities -- unthreatening physical presence, a bewildered yet focused eye, a language which slips out of the loose grasp of immigrant speech into desperate precision. Survival is never certain for them, and yet their perturbation is somehow comfortable. The audience is implicated, but not bound. Both Allen and Brooks violate rules, but not law: or perhaps it is law but not rules -- they go far, but not too far. Fred Allen and Jack Benny filled some of these needs in another time. Isolation, anomie, frustration, love-lost and lovelorn fate, the common comic themes are stroked. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks are good at it. They do not threaten total revolution, but they play with nihilism. They are wanters -- of love and comfort -- like tbe audience. They also want distraction, and they give it, and they get good rewards from an audience in need. There is room for both Woody Allen and Mel Brooks at the top.

    Howard Rothberg, Brooks's agent, a young man in an elegant wide-lapelled checked suit and a Mickey Mouse watch, is very proud of his client. "He has total creative control. They don't understand, but they know he does it well. He has final cut -- the best deal in the industry. What other directors have it? Woody Allen. Peter Bogdanovich. Mike Nichols. Francis Coppola. He has total recall. He pays attention to every frame. He'll say: 'In that scene, the effects come three frames too soon.' His creative control goes all through the campaign -- publicity, selling, everything."

    That slightly flat banter of the professional comic, the man who's always on, begging for laughter, is usually lined with a melancholy which blackmails his audience into giving him what he wants. The eyes are pouched; the nose is long and sad; the Jackies and Sheckies of Vegas and the perishing nightclub world have become familiars of talk-show television. Mel Brooks is another beast. The eyes are cool and steely. The wildness is an element he enjoys. Maldng it is not the meaning of his life. What he cares about is perhaps still a secret even from himself, He may not be a great artist, but his character is ready for that opportunity. The yoks and Borscht Belt jokes are merely the smog he grew up in, as he grew up with Sid Caesar and Broadway and radio. He is not a lost soul finding himself by becoming a celebrity. He is a lost soul in search of his mission through bad taste, violation and laughter. He is a comic artist.

    Mel Brooks has learned the philospher's truth: The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced -- or, in his case, to be worked over in yoks. Like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, he is playful with ideas and sounds, and introduces a bound-for-college tentative intellectuality; like the Borscht Belt comics, the Jackies and Sheckies and Jerries, he knows his job is to keep the customers awake and agape and, if you don't like this joke, wait seven seconds for the next one. His special qualities -- boyish hope, a few obsessions (Jews and Italians good, Germans bad), the image of the 2,000 year-old man, a loving attention to the street fantasy of the kids of his generation (the western, the horror film, the verbal pratfall) -- are not really unique, either, but he has finally mobilized the Mel Brooks Cult into a Mel Brooks Championship.The funny has become money partly because of his ferocious metabolism, an energy which cows and enlists everyone around him ("I love your face! Mmmm,mmmm, mmmm! I love your face''). He works. His attention to detail is that of a fanatic artist. He doesn't understand how another director could shoot a film and walk away from it. He keeps forever busy, doing interviews, writing advertising campaigns, preparing publicity, promoting, pushing, playing, living and reliving the movie, selling the tickets, jabbing his elbow into the ribs, offering Raisinet munchies, keeping the sugar up.

    The audience achieved by Brooks's careful attention to his own insanity now seems to include everybody -- critics, the young, the old, the nostalgic and the backers of movies. People want an excuse to laugh, any excuse, and Brooks is willing to give them good value for their money. They sense his yearning beyond the wisecrack, his appeal to love, his small-boy dirty-face cuteness, no matter how outrageous he might seem -- flatulence, a dirty word here and there, a touch of bemused sadism. Where Lenny Bruce shocked, Mel Brooks consoles. He is funny because he wants to be funny. He is attractive about his funniness, corrosive- in a healing manner, because he likes his actors, he likes his audience, he likes himself. As an amateur doctor, he wants to make people well -- also himself. He is one unusual comic. The fact that he and his wife are devoted to each other and to their children is perhaps merely a moral virtue. But his life-style has connections with the style of his art. He is no revolutionary. He is a consoler in a time of too many instant revolutions.

    Diagnosing the circles under my eyes as sinusitis, he gave me two packages of Raisinets to take with me because he had no chicken soup in stock to heal me. Chocolate isn't good for teeth. O.K.; but teeth aren't good for ohocolate, either. Perhaps I had already heard that one. But another joke was already on the way from sincerely yours; your obedient Jew, Mel Brooks, and God bless you.

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