![]() ![]() As I dial his number, I am braced, unsure what to expect. Brooks has never needed much encouragement to get in front of a camera, but I was told that he wanted to talk by phone, not video chat, because he doesn’t want to be on a screen. I became even more concerned in the run-up to this, our second interview. He’d call and say, ‘Come over! I got a big stuffed cabbage for us!’ Even at the end, he was always Carl Living to 95, as Brooks now is, is not for the faint-hearted. Almost everyone he writes about is now dead: Reiner, Brooks’s wife Anne Bancroft, Richard Pryor, Gene Wilder, TV star Sid Caesar, comedian Dom DeLuise, film-maker Buck Henry – all gone. It is as sparkling and delightful as you’d expect from Brooks, full of great advice, such as how to get a studio head to give you more money for your film (catch them off-guard in the bathroom), and memories from the making of his gold-plated classic movies. What was he doing with his evenings without even Jeopardy! for company? When his memoir, All About Me!, arrived in the post last month, my concerns were not assuaged. ![]() Then in June Reiner died, followed a few months later by Jeopardy!’s long-term host, Alex Trebek. Only a month later, the US went into a lockdown. It was impossible not to be moved by their friendship, and hard not to feel anxiety about the prospect of one of them someday having to dine on his own. The deep love between them was palpable, with Brooks, then 93, gently prompting 97-year-old Reiner on some of his anecdotes. ![]() I loved listening to Brooks and Reiner – whose films included The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains – reminisce about their eight decades of friendship in which, together and separately, they created some of the greatest American comedy of the 20th century. ![]() But his 1987 Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs, was the first Brooks movie I saw, and nothing was funnier to this then nine-year-old than that nonstop gag-a-thon (forget Yoda and the Force in Spaceballs, Mel Brooks is Yoghurt and he wields the greatest power of all, the Schwartz). Compared with his stellar 60s and 70s, when he was one of the most successful movie directors in the world, with The Producers and Blazing Saddles, and later his glittering 2000s, when his musical adaptation of The Producers dominated Broadway and the West End, his 80s and 90s are considered relatively fallow years. Brooks, more than anyone, shaped my idea of Jewish-American humour, emphasising its joyfulness, cleverness and in-jokiness. It was one of the most emotional nights of my life. I n February 2020, I joined Mel Brooks at the Beverly Hills home of his best friend, the director and writer Carl Reiner, for their nightly tradition of eating dinner together and watching the gameshow Jeopardy!. ![]()
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