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The Mel Brooks Webring

Playboy February 1975 (Part 2)

by Brad Darrach
Originally published in Playboy February 1975

Part 1|2|3|4

PLAYBOY: Would you give us a sample?

BROOKS: The corner was tough. You had to score on the corner - no bullshit routines, no slick laminated crap. It had to be, "Lemme tell ya what happened today… " And you really had to be good on your feet. "Fat Hymie was hanging from the fire escape. His mother came by. "Hymie!" she screamed. He fell two stores and broke his head." Real stories of tragedy we screamed at. The story had to be real and it had to be funny. Somebody getting hurt was wonderful. "You hear what happened with Miltie and the Buick?" "What? What?" "He was doing and eagle turn on his skates … " "Yeah? Yeah?" "Oogah! Oogah! Miltie thought it was applause, didn't bother to look. Bam! Buick got him right in the ass. Did a somersault. Crunncchh! Out like a light, took him away, Saint Catherine's Hospital. The nuns are with him now." The nuns are with this little Jewish kid, right? And then you visit Miltie, propped up on pillows, very cool. "Who are these penguins?" he says. "And why do you want me to pee all the time?"

PLAYBOY: We've heard that medicine is kind of a hobby with you. How did you get interested in it?

BROOKS: I always thought it was great to be able to make people feel better. It was a little like being God. So I started to take charge when anybody got hurt playing ball. "Get the Mercurochrome. Put a Band-Aid on. Quick! Flappy fainted. Bring and egg cream!"

PLAYBOY: An egg cream has healing properties?

BROOKS: An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It's the Jewish malmsey.

PLAYBOY: How do you make one?

BROOKS: First, you got to get a can of Foxs U-Bet Chocolate Syrup. If you use any other chocolate, the egg cream will be too bitter or too mild. Take a big glass and fill one fifth of it with U-Bet syrup. Then add about half a shot glass of milk. And you gotta have a seltzer spout with two speeds. One son-of-a-bitch bastard that comes out like bullets and scares you; one normal, regular-person speed that comes out nice and soft and foamy. So hit the tough bastard, the bullets of seltzer, first. Smash through the milk into the chocolate and chase the chocolate furiously all around the glass. Then, when the mixture is halfway up the glass, you turn on the gentle stream and you fill the glass with seltzer, all the time mixing with a spoon. Then taste it. But sit down first, because you might swoon with ecstasy.

PLAYBOY: But there's no egg in an egg cream.

BROOKS: That's the best part. That's the wonder and the mystery of it. Talmudic sages for generations have pondered this profound question. Why is there no egg in an egg cream? Well, 1000 years ago there may have been egg in egg creams. Joe Heller is very bright and he thought so. But Georgie Mandel and Speed Vogel are bright, too, and they applauded Julie Green's reasoning. He said, "Egg creams are called egg creams because the top of a well-made egg cream looks like egg white." I can't offer you an egg cream right now, but how about a Raisinet? If you scrape the chocolate off 5000 of them, you could have an egg cream.

PLAYBOY: How much does an egg cream cost?

BROOKS: Three cents or six cents, depending on how big it is - or they did when I was a boy. Increments of three. Of course, if you were Izzie Sugarman, you would save all week for a 12-center. I mean, the glass was the size of a bucket, and every kid on the block would be there to watch it go down. Then we'd wait for the first belch. Go-O-O-O-O-orch! Up it would come like Old Faithful, and then two or three more little ones. If you stood too close, you'd get sprayed.

PLAYBOY: What does an egg cream do for you?

BROOKS: Physically, it contributes mildly to your high blood sugar. Psychologically, it is the opposite of circumcision. It pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness. But what is this about egg creams? Isn't this a Playboy Interview? When are you going to ask me about sex?

PLAYBOY: Mr. Brooks, what is your attitude about sex?

BROOKS: How dare you ask me such a filthy question? What do you take me for - an animal? Kindly change the subject! I prefer to speak about Cossacks. I live in terror of Cossacks. Also of cars and narrow places. And I don't like to make turns when I walk. At night I keep the lights on in the closet. Mice eat closets.

PLAYBOY: You don't have a cat?

BROOKS: I am a cat. As a boy, I could make the greatest cat sounds in the world, and I'm still very good. There may be better cat-sound makers, but they have not come to my attention. In Young Frankenstein, there is a scene in which Gene Wilder throws a dart and misses the target. A second later you hear the greatest cat-in-pain scream ever heard on film. It was performed by your obedient servant.

PLAYBOY: Were Jewish cats different from gentile cats in your neighborhood?

BROOKS: You mean, did they wear

BROOKS: You mean, did they wear yarmulkes? No, but Jews were different. When I was a little kid at home, I thought the whole world was Jewish. Even when I was allowed out to play, I still thought that Italians and the like were very rare. We used to try to capture them to study them. It was a shock when we saw their penises and they all had those funny tips. Looked like anteaters. Did I tell you that for years I though Roosevelt was Jewish? No kidding. I mean, the Nazis called him a Jew bastard, right? I loved him. I thought of him as my father. I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

Anyway, after a while, I realized it wasn't only our penises that were different. Jews looked different. My image of a Jew had always been that of a short, funny-looking guy with kinky red hair and milk-white skin with lots of freckles and he's usually hiding under a bed, praying for his life in Yiddish while the Cossacks go thundering by. When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish, too. I thought that little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.

But even in English, Jews talked different. Gentiles have Rs. Jews were not given Rs by God. Gentiles said, "PaRk the caR." Jews said, "Pahk the cah." Jews in Brooklyn learned their English mostly from the Irish. Anybody who says, "I wantida go ta da terlit on T'oid Avunya" is mixing a Jewish-immigrant accent with an Irish brogue.

PLAYBOY: Were there any Jewish princesses in Brooklyn in those days?

BROOKS: Sheila Rabinowitz. Jewish princesses are a second-generation thing. First-generation girls were scrubbing floors and helping out. Second-generation parents could afford royalty. But Sheila's father was a coriander importer; he made it big in coriander; so Sheila was a first-generation Jewish princess. She lived two blocks away from school and she took a cab. She had four chain bracelets with different names on them, two on her wrists and two on her ankles. And all the names were gentile, jut to put you in your place; Bob, Dick, Peter and Steve. They happened to be Jewish guys. But the names were gentile. She came to class in Pucci, and Pucci wasn't even in business yet. Sixteen years old and she wore a turban with a rhinestone in the middle of it. And the accent! "Why, hellooo, theahhh. How aahh you?" What the hell is coriander, anyway?

PLAYBOY: What became of Sheila?

BROOKS: Don't know. She was dreaming of the great world beyond the ghetto. I was happy were I was. When I was a kid, Iwas very confused by what the Jew was in the outer world. I knew what he was in Williamsburg. He was a runner and a rat and scared as hell. But Jews in the outside world I heard different, conflicting things about. First of all, I heard they were the Communists, overthrowing all the governments in the world. When I was in high school, I thought a Jews job in life was to throw over every government. The other thing I heard was the Jews were capitalists and had all the gold and the banks and that the Jews' job was to kill all the socialists and the radicals. So I never really figured out what the Jewish mission was. Should I kill the capitalists and take all their money? No, I’d be killing Jews. Should I stamp out the radicals so that we could keep our money? No, I'd be killing Jews. Very confusing. BUT (leaps to his feet) ENOUGH OF JEWS! I WILL SPEAK NO MORE OF JEWS! IN FACT, I WILL SPEAK NO MORE OF ANYTHING! (Ripping off several pieces of Scotch tape, he seals his lips tight and then, in a frenzy, rolling his eyes and squealing wordlessly, slaps sticky ribbons of tape over his ears, over his nostrils, over his hair and finally, eyelids stuck shut, goes staggering around the room, dragging one leg, gurgling and mumbling) Look! Look wha' th' G'rm'ns did t' me! (He tears off the tape) They stole into my foxhole at night and covered my face with Scotch tape.

PLAYBOY: In your movies, you make fun of Germans. Don't you like them?

BROOKS: Me? Not like Germans? Why should I not like Germans? Just because they're arrogant and have fat necks and do anything they're told so long as it's cruel, and killed millions of Jews in concentration camps and made soap out of their skins? Is that any reason to hate their fucking guts?

PLAYBOY: Certainly not. Have you ever been to Germany?

BROOKS: Only to kill Germans. I was in the Army, World War Two. Seventeen, I enlisted. Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Basic training, right? Make a soldier out of the Jew boy. Left, right. I tried to explain to the sergeant, walking is not good for Jews. He felt otherwise. Then one day they put us all in trucks, drove us to the railroad station, put us in a locked train with the windows blacked out. We get off the train, we get on a boat. We get off the boat, we get into trucks. We get out of the trucks, we start walking. Suddenly, all around us, Waauhwaauhwaauh! Sirens! Tiger Tanks! We're surrounded by Germans. It's the Battle of The Bulge! Hands up! "Wait!" I say, "We just left Oklahoma!" We're Americans! We're supposed to win!" Very scary, but we escaped.

I spent a lot of time in the artillery. Too noisy. Could not take the noise. All through the war, two cigarette butts stuck in my ears. Couldn't read, couldn't think, couldn't even make a phone call. Baghamoooooommmmm! Brrllaggghhaarrooooooooooommmmm! And then they started shooting. "Incoming mail!" Bullshit. Only Burt Lancaster says that. We said, "Oh, God! Oh, Christ!" Who knows, he might help. He was Jewish, too. "MOTHER!"

I was a forward observer. Couldn't learn the artillery argot. You're supposed to give them map coordinates: "Alpha 38 point 27. Correction. Beta 2 point 3." But I'd say, "No, no! You're missing it! You're going over, dummy! You're not even near! Aim for the big tree by the church! Say, listen, did the chow come up yet?" Very unmilitary. I didn't last long as a forward observer.

PLAYBOY: What did you do when you got out of the Army?

BROOKS: Wait, your going to fast! At the end of the war, I did Army shows. First for the Germans, then at Fort Dix I did some camp shows. We all rolled up our pants and were the Andrews Sisters. One of us is still doing LaVerne in the last village. Anyway, after I got out, I had three choices. I could go to college and hang out a shingle and make $10,000 a year. Another thing for a Jew to do would be to become a salesman. Hipsy, pipsy, lotsa pep, you know? White-on-white shirt, black-mohair suit, Swank cuff links and, if you made it, a cat's eye-ring, on the pinkie, our bar mitzvah ring. That was the big Brooklyn jewelry artillery. Shine in everybody's eyes at a party.

PLAYBOY: And the third thing?

BROOKS: Show business. But you got to understand something: Jews don't do comedy in winter. In summer, all right. You’re a kid, you work in the mountains. That's how I got started years before - as a pool tumeler. A pool tumeler is a busboy with tinsel in his blood. For eight bucks a week and all you can eat, you do dishes, rent out rowboats, clean up the tennis courts and, if you beg hard enough, they let you try to be funny around the pool. I'm 14 years old and I walk out on the diving board wearing a black derby and a big black-alpaca overcoat. I'm carrying two suitcases filled with rocks. "Business is terrible!" I yell. "I can't go on!" And I jump in the pool. Big laughs - the Jews love it. But I don't laugh - because the suitcases weigh a ton and like a shot I go to the bottom. The overcoat soaks up 20 gallons of water instantly. I run out of air, but I can't lift the suitcases - and I can't leave them in the water. They're made of cardboard, in two minutes they'll dissolve, and I need them for tomorrow's act. God bless Oliver, that big goy! He was the lifeguard - Jews don't swim, remember? - and every day he'd do a little swan dive and haul me up.

PLAYBOY: What happened after pool tumeling?

BROOKS: I joined a Broscht Belt stock company. They let me play the district attorney in Uncle Harry, a straight melodrama. I'm 14 and a half, but I'm playing a 75-year-old man. My only line was, I pour some water from a carafe into a class and say, "Here, Harry, have some water and calm down." But on opening night, I'm a little nervous, right? So I dropped the carafe on the table and it smashed and this flood rushed in all directions and made a waterfall off the table and all over the state - such a mess! The audience gasped. I don't waste a minute; I walk right down to the footlights and take off my gray toupee and say, "I'm 14, what do you want?" Well, I got a 51- minute laugh, but the director of the play came running dwon the aisle and chased me through five Jewish resorts.

PLAYBOY: So how did you become a comedian?

BROOKS: I became a drummer, that's how. When we moved to Brighton Beach, I was 13 and a half and only a few houses away lived the one and only Buddy Rich. Buddy was just beginning with Arite Shaw then, and once in a while he would give me and my friend Billy half a lesson. When I went back to the mountains after the war, I played drums and sang. (Eyes suddenly dreamy, begins to patter rhythmically on his desk with finger tips as he sings) "It's not pale moooon that excites me, that thrills and delights me. Oh, nooooo … " Oh, I was so shitty. You've no idea.

Anyway, one time in the mountains I was playing drums behind a standard mountain comedian. Wonderful delivery, but all the usual jokes. "I just flew in from Chicago and, boy, are my arms tired." Was that girl skinny - when I took her to a restaurant, the waiter said, 'Check your umbrella?' " Anyway, one night the comic got sick and they asked me to go on for him. Wow! But I didn't want to do those ancient jokes, so I decided to go out there and make up stuff. I figured, I'll just talk about things we all know and see if they turn out funny. Now, that day a chambermaid named Molly got shut in a closet and the whole hotel had heard her screaming, "Los mir arois!" Let me out! So when I went on stage, I stood there with my knees knocking and said, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen … LOS MIR AROIS!" They tore the house down.

PLAYBOY: You continued to improvise your act, night after night?

BROOKS: Crazy, huh? But I did. Look, I had to take chances or it wasn't fun being funny. And you know, there was a lot of great material lying around in the Catskills, waiting to be noticed. Like Pincus Cantor. He was the manager where I was working, an old-fashioned Jew from the Polish shtetl. He couldn't handle the loud-speaker system at the hotel. Technology was beyond him. He was never sure if he had the speaker off or on and he usually had it on at the wrong time. It's a peaceful sunny day in the mountains, right? People are snoozing in deck chairs, people are rowing slowly across the lake. Suddenly, a tremendous shout booms out. For ten miles in the mountains, you could hear it" "SON OF BITCH BASTARD! FILT'Y ROTTEN! HOW DEY CAN LEAVE A SHEET SO FILT'Y! THAT SON OF BITCH! LAT HIM SLEEP IN IT! I VUDN'T …. IT'S VAAAAT? IT'S ON? OYYYYY!" Click.

So I did Pincus Cantor onstage - big hit. But I wasn't a big hit, not at first. The Jews in the rear room, the Jewish ladies with blue hair, would call me over and say, "Melvin, we enjoyed certain parts of your show, but a trade would be better for you. Anything with you hands would be good. Aviation mechanics are very well paid." I'd walk by a bald guym Sol Yasowitz. "Well what did you think, Mr. Yasowitz?" I'd ask him. "Stunk." With a little smile. You could never get a kind word out of Jews. And you know, maybe I was terrible. I had this theme song, wrote it myself. (Does a Donald O'Connor walk-on as he sings). "Dadadadat dat daaa! Here I am. /I'm Melvin Brooks!/ I've come to stop the show./Just a ham who's minus looks/But in your hearts I'll grow!/ I'll tell you gags, I'll sing you songs./Just happy little snappy songs that roll along./Out of my mind./Won't you be kind?/And please … love … Melvin Broooooooks!" Terrible, right? Wrong. But think it over. Believe me, there are very few things that work as well when covered with chocolate. Anyway, I wanted to entertain so badly that I kept at it until I was good. I just browbeat my way into show business.

PLAYBOY: We read somewhere that you did seven two-hour shows a week while you were working in the Catskills.

BROOKS: That's true. But we thought nothing of it. We thought that's the way it is in show business. After that, the big time was a cream puff. One show a week on television, one picture a year in the movies. Are you kidding? I've spent the last 20 years catching up on my sleep.

PLAYBOY: Didn't you meet Sid Caesar when you were working in the mountains?

BROOKS: Yeah, but before I went into the Army. He was a saxophone player and a really terrific one. He could have been world-famous on the sax, but he started fooling around in the band and he was so funny they turned him into a comedian. After the war, we met again in New York and he got me into television. Sid was a genius, a great comic actor - still is - the greatest mimic who ever lived. Only he didn't impersonate celebrities; he did types. He would do a harried married man or an old horse on its last legs or a bop musician named Cool Cees or a whole Italian movie. He was imitating life and he had these tremendous insights over a huge range. And there was always a needle. Sid had this terrific angle in him; he was angry with the world - and so was I. Maybe I was angry because I was a Jew, because I was short, because my mother didn't buy me a bicycle, because it was tough to get ahead, because I wasn't God - who knows why? Anyway, if Sid and I hadn't felt so much alike, I would have been a comic ten years earlier. But he was such a great vehicle for my passion.

PLAYBOY: Is it true that everybody hated you on Your Show of Shows?

BROOKS: Everybody hated everybody. We robbed from the rich and kept everything. There was tremendous hostility in the air. A highly charged situation, but very good. We were all spoiled brats competing with each other for the king's favor, and we all wanted to come up with the funniest joke. I would be damned if anybody would write anything funnier than I would and everybody else felt the same way. There were seven comedy writers in that room, seven brilliant comedic brains. There was Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen. Then I came in. And spoiled everything. Then Joe Stein, who later wrote Fiddler on the Roof, and Larry Gelbart, who writes and produces M*A*S*H. Mike Stewart typed for us. Imagine! Our typist later wrote Bye Bye Birdie and Hello, Dolly! Later on, Mike was replaced at the typewriter by somebody named Woody Allen. Neil and Danny Simon were there, too, but Doc was so quite that we didn't know how good he was. Seven rats in a cage. The pitch sessions were lethal. In that room, you had to fight to stay alive.

PLAYBOY: From what we've heard, your competitive relationship with the other writers was nothing compared with your troubles with Max Liebman, the producer of the show.

BROOKS: Max hated me. I was a pretty snotty kid. But I hated him right back. When Sid first asked Max to hire me, Max wouldn't do it. So Sid gave me $50 a week himself and I'd wait in the hallway outside where Sid and Max and Mel and Lucille were writing the show. After a while, Sid would stick his head out and say, "We need three jokes." So I'd give him three jokes, but Max wouldn't let me in.

PLAYBOY: What didn't he like about you?

BROOKS: He didn't like my fast mouth. When I'd sass him back, he'd throw a lighted cigar at me - right at my face! I'd duck. One day, we were standing on the stage. I yelled, "Pepper Martin sliding into second! Watch your ass!" And I ran straight at him at full speed and then threw myself into a headfirst slide. Slid right between his legs, sent him flying in the air, scared the shit out of him. We laugh about it now, but it was rough then. He's a great showman, though; unconsciously, I think I still copy him.

PLAYBOY: Didn't you once scare the shit out of General Sarnoff?

BROOKS: True! One day they had a big conference in the RCA building. All the big shots. General Sarnoff, the chairman of the board of RCA; Pat Weaver, the president of NBC; Max Liebman and Sid. When I tried to walk into the room with them, the door was slammed in my face. But I wanted to know what they were planning. Would there be a new show? Should I buy a new car? So I put on a white duster and a straw hat and I crashed through the door into the meeting and jumped up on the conference table. "Hurray!" I yelled. "Hurray! Lindy has landed at Le Bourget!" This was 1950. And I whipped off my straw hat and skimmed it across the room and it sailed right out the window and has never been seen since. Then I burst into the Marseillaise while General Sarnoff clutched his heart and Liebman picked his eyes up off the floor. Weaver was white as a sheet. Sid was the only one who laughed; staggered around, holding his gut. Liebman said, "And now, if you will kindly leave us Mr. Brooks!" But I said, "Don't you understand? Lindy made it!"

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