Ray Richmond: Happy Birthday, Melvin James Kaminsky! Mel Brooks turns 97

When I was a little kid in the 1960s and a teen in the 1970s, there was simply no one cooler than Mel Brooks. He was the guy (along with Buck Henry) who created and wrote the comedy masterpiece “Get Smart,” and even as a child I could recognize the genius behind it. While I was a little too young to appreciate the greatness of his 1967 directorial debut, “The Producers” (for which he won his lone Oscar until this week, for original screenplay), once the ’70s rolled around I was in comedy heaven thanks to “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.” Those two classics of big screen comedy came out the same year: 1974.

As a result, I spent much of that year as a high school sophomore and junior laughing my proverbial butt off in movie theaters (those things we used to frequent prior to the advent of streaming technology). The campfire farting scene in “BS” was my generation’s comedic colossus.

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I lost count of how many times I saw “Blazing Saddles” at 15, at least a dozen of those on the big screen, which I flocked to every weekend that spring (it was released in February ’74). That was followed in December by multiple viewings of “Young Frankenstein,” which me and my friends took to calling “Frankie,” as in, “Are we going to see ‘Frankie’ again on Saturday?” Generally, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”, as we found it impossible to stay away from the theater. It didn’t hurt that it cost only $2 to see a movie back then. But it wouldn’t be stretching the truth to say that Mel Brooks was our straight-up idol in the mid-1970s. And you know that? He still kind of is.

SEEAngela Bassett, Mel Brooks, editor Carol Littleton to receive honorary Oscars

This has been a big week for the man born Melvin James Kaminsky on June 28, 1926 in New York City. Not only does he turn 97 today; he received an early birthday present on Monday when he was voted to receive an honorary Oscar from the film academy’s board of governors at the Governors Awards in November. Brooks is already one of just 18 entertainers to achieve EGOT (Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony) status. He will now be one of only two to be feted as a HEGOT recipient, adding an Honorary Academy Award to the mix. The other was Audrey Hepburn, in her case the “H” standing for the Hersholt honor – and bestowed posthumously.

While there were several others for whom a convincing case could be made to honor at the Academy Awards this year, Brooks is certainly deserving. We tend to put the man in a little comedy box. But when you think about everything he’s accomplished in his nearly a century on the planet, it’s a little bit astonishing. He got his start as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar’s legendary variety series “Your Show of Shows” in the early 1950s, on a staff that also featured future “M*A*S*H” creator Larry Gelbart and a playwright named Neil Simon as well as a performer he would later become inseparable from, Carl Reiner. He and Reiner would collaborate on the “2,000-Year-Old Man” in 1960 and later several other comedy albums.

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His TV career would peak with “Get Smart” from 1965 to ’70. And while Brooks’s movie career as a writer-director wasn’t vast, it was memorable. Besides “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein, there were “The Twelve Chairs” (1970), “Silent Movie” (1976), “High Anxiety” (1977). “History of the World, Part I” (1981), “Spaceballs” (1987) and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993). Besides all of those, he also produced several films, notably “The Elephant Man,” “My Favorite Year” and David Cronenberg’s remake of “The Fly.” His most recent project, still working in his mid-90’s, is writing and producing this year’s Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.”

He won his first Emmy for co-writing the “Your Show of Shows” reunion special in 1967. In 1999, he and Reiner won the spoken word comedy album Grammy for “The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000.” And he celebrated the first year of the new millennium with a legit version of “The Producers” that won a record-breaking 12 Tonys, including awards to Brooks for book and score.

Equally fascinating to his creative life was Brooks’s marriage to actress Anne Bancroft, which stretched from 1964 until her death in 2005. It was, by all accounts, one of the most successful unions in Hollywood annals. A lot of people outside the show business mainstream were left wondering how an Italian girl from the Bronx like Bancroft (born Anna Maria Louisa Italiano) could find happiness with a wacky Brooklyn Jew. But they reportedly clicked on all cylinders. And it’s a measure of the depth of their love that even nearly two decades after his wife’s passing, Brooks still can’t talk about it.

SEEMel Brooks on his 70-year friendship with Carl Reiner: ‘He tested me every day in every way’

There are few more beloved long-lived entertainment figures than Mel Brooks. One of the keys that contributes to that is the man’s sheer chutzpah. Imagine the nerve it required for him to craft a satirical song entitled “Springtime for Hitler,” and the stinging parody of Warner Bros. at the heart of “Blazing Saddles,” a movie put out by…Warner Bros. That studio’s execs originally thought the film un-releasable. Instead, it revolutionized the comedy genre while becoming a blockbuster hit – due in large part to my contribution from seeing it so often. But in every way, Brooks has been fearless, and it’s gone a long way toward burnishing his rep as a living legend.

And here are a few Brooks factoids you probably didn’t know:

• As a teenager, he accepted a gig to perform in the Catskills for a then-insane $200 a night – because the hotel was expecting the famed trumpeter Max Kaminsky, not Mel Kaminsky. That’s the moment he decided to change his name to Mel Brooks.

• He served during WWII in an Army combat unit. One of his jobs was defusing landmines. He was present at the invasion of Normandy and saw action at the Battle of the Bulge.

• Brooks was the inspiration for Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” After his first marriage broke up, he lived with a pal, becoming fodder for the stage.

• He was also Carl Reiner’s basis for Morey Amsterdam’s comedy writer character Buddy Sorrell on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”

• He and Reiner originally created “The 2,000-Year-Old Man” as a party gag. The biggest laughs came from his line that having lived for two millennia, he had fathered 42,000 children “and not one comes to visit me.” It was George Burns who talked Brooks and Reiner into recording the skit on an album.

• Brooks was a guest on “The Tonight Show” the first night that Johnny Carson hosted: October 1, 1962.

• Before NBC picked up “Get Smart,” ABC rejected it as “distasteful and un-American.” The CIA reportedly found it hilarious.

• Brooks once defined tragedy as “if I cut my finger” and comedy as “if you walk into an open sewer and die.”

I’ll close here with a crazy Brooks sighting that, due to the sheer bizarre-ness of it, was perhaps the zaniest celebrity encounter of my life. It was the summer of 1976, and I was shopping in the Ralph’s supermarket on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I was just entering the place when turning off from aisle four was a hilarious sight: Brooks, walking along in polka-dot boxer underwear, a white tank undershirt and flip-flops. His hair was utterly askew. He looked as if he’d just crawled out of bed without bothering to get dressed, which I have no doubt was in fact the case. He was carrying a half-gallon of milk. No cart. But the strangest part was the expression on Brooks’s face. It was blank save for the fact he was twitching like crazy while muttering under his breath, “Yeah, uh huh, yup” while also making little grunting noises. Traveling to the beat of his own inner who-knows-what.

I stood there transfixed along with a fellow shopper. As Brooks turned and made his way down the next aisle, the shopper and I looked at one another, eyes wide, jaws agape, incredulous at what we and seemingly we alone had just seen. Somehow, as the man who had little more than a year earlier made two of the funniest films of all time, it made perfect sense.

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