“In my experience if you’re not working, you’re not really alive,” Mel Brooks writes in his 2021 autobiography, All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business.

For once, he’s not kidding. The tireless Brooks, a writing, directing, acting and producing dynamo, is behind gut-busting comedy classics like Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. He has spent decades making subversive, edgy, anarchic comedies that have tackled serious subjects like antisemitism and racism, pushing the boundaries of “good taste.”

His love of comedy is evident throughout All About Me!, a must-read guidebook for any aspiring comic auteur. Full bits and gags from his glory days (most of which are still hilarious) are recorded, and the reader sees what a kick Brooks gets out of them to this day. He also lovingly describes the eccentric characters in his journey to the top who inspired some of his greatest films.

On a personal level, Brooks comes across as both “wonderful and terrible,” a phrase he frequently uses to describe life. He is charming, scrappy, ambitious, a tad obnoxious, and ultimately withholding. “Personal means personal,” he told a reporter when the book was published, “and I don’t want to spill the beans.”

But Brooks is effusively generous in his praise for anyone who made him laugh: people like Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Gene Wilder, and Richard Pryor. Brooks himself once made Cary Grant laugh so hard the debonaire movie star repeatedly asked him to lunch (where Grant ate only one hardboiled egg); eventually, Brooks writes, he began avoiding Grant’s invites because he had nothing left to say.

Brooks has plenty to say in All About Me!, but most of it is about his beloved career. And hey, it has been one hell of a career. “I’ve had a great second act and I’m enjoying a pretty good third act too,” he writes. “If I were a Shakespearean play, I’d be rooting for five acts!”

The Swaggering Shrimp

“The story goes that when the doctor delivered me and said to my mother, ‘You have a big, beautiful bouncing baby boy!’ my mother replied, ‘Do you want him?’ But I’m sure she was kidding. (At least I hope so.)”

Katie Kaminsky already had three boys, and had been hoping for a girl. But instead, she got little Melvin, born June 28, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. When Mel was only two, his father, Max, died, marking his youngest son with a “brushstroke of depression that really never left.”

From the start, Mel was his mother’s darling. He was also spoiled by his three older brothers and an extended network of aunts, uncles, and neighbors in his poor but tightly knit Jewish neighborhood. “I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again,” Brooks writes. “Until I was five, I don’t remember my feet touching the ground.” (The reader wonders if all this affection may have contributed to Brook’s legendary ego, amply evident in All About Me!)

He paints a loving picture of his bustling, crowded childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, swarmed with kids playing stickball, going to the movies, and cutting up on the corner.

The irrepressible Brooks became the “undisputed champ at corner shtick.” As the shortest kid in class, it was a powerful weapon against bigger, tougher boys. “Comedy made me friends, big friends to protect me from bullies,” he writes. “I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh.”

Brooks also had overwhelming ambition, which found its purpose when his uncle took him to his first Broadway show: Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. While hiding on the floor of his uncle’s cab on the way home (since he was an illegal fare), Brooks announced:

“Uncle Joe, I am not going to go to work in the Garment Center like everyone else in our neighborhood.” I knew I had bigger fish to fry. I said, “I am going into show business and nothing will stop me!” And, strangely enough, nothing did.

Borscht Belt Busboy

“I wasn’t getting kissed for just being Melvin anymore,” Brooks writes of his teenage years. “Now I had to go out and earn it. I needed to be kissed for being somebody. So, I sought the spotlight.”

A persistent pest, Brooks came under the mentorship of local comedian Don Apple. When he was 14, Apple got him a summer gig as a busboy at a Catskills resort in the legendary Borscht Belt, where countless comedians honed their chops.

Brooks is at his best exuberantly describing vanished worlds, and his delightful stories of his summers working at the Borscht Belt are a joy. He eventually worked his way up to “pool tummler,” which entailed keeping guests entertained as they lazed near the water. Brooks would go to desperate lengths to make his clients laugh, developing a routine that repeatedly almost killed him:

I wore a derby and an alpaca coat and I would carry two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and go to the edge of the diving board and start yelling: “Business is no good! I don’t wanna live!” I’d then jump off into the pool.

Even though Brooks had to be repeatedly fished out by the lifeguard, for him it was worth it. This dedication to dark humor would serve him well during his time serving honorably in the 1104^th Combat Division in the waning days of World War II. Shipped to France, Brooks recalls one day hearing a group of enemy German soldiers singing (badly) across the river.

“I picked up a big bullhorn, went to the bank of the river, and started singing à la Al Jolson,” he writes. “When I finished the song, I thought I heard coming from the other side of the river (where the Germans were) a round of applause… Maybe it was my imagination, but anyway it makes for a good story.”

His talents recognized, Brooks ended his military career as a corporal organizing troop entertainments in Germany. “If you don’t get killed in the Army you can learn a lot,” he writes. “You learn how to stand on your own two feet.”

Crazy Mel

“Every once in a while, I would suffer an attack of outright no-holds-barred madness,” Brooks writes of his near decade as a TV writer for comedian Sid Caesar.

That seems like an understatement. During the 1950s, Brooks helped catalyze a comedy revolution as a writer for Caesar’s pioneering programs like Your Show of Shows. Brooks thrillingly conveys the combustible energy of the writers’ rooms of this time, populated by geniuses like his lifelong best friend Carl Reiner and a shy youngster named Neil Simon.

Cocky and brash, Brooks seemingly specialized in driving coworkers crazy. According to Brooks, a crazed Caesar once dangled him out of a skyscraper window, and Columbia chief Harry Cohn screamed “I want him killed” after a prank gone wrong. Once when Caesar had a meeting with studio bosses, Brooks decided he deserved a seat at the table:

I put on the hat, coat, and a pair of goggles, and I burst into the meeting! I jumped up on the long conference table and yelled: “Lindy landed! He’s in Paris, he made it!” And I hurled my hat out the open window. They quickly threw me out.

But according to Patrick McGilligan, author of Funny Man: Mel Brooks, these outbursts were not all good clean fun. Other writers claim to have been bullied by Brooks, who they say was so obsessed with comedy and success that he would broodingly roam the New York streets all night coming up with bits. Although Brooks does admit that during his first marriage to Florence Baum he was probably “hell to live with.”

But Brooks’s mad genius would not be denied. At the 1957 Emmys, Brooks was appalled when his team lost the award for “best writing. After jumping up on a table to scream “there is no God,” he raced backstage and proceeded to cut his tuxedo off his body.

“I was just in my shorts,” Brooks writes. “I was almost naked in front of everybody when I said, “I’m never wearing a tuxedo again!” Somebody put a sheet around me, and put some ice on my head and took me home. I might have been a little drunk.”

One and Only

By 1961, newly divorced and at a low point in his career, Brooks found his salvation in the fiery Anne Bancroft when he tagged along to watch her rehearse for an appearance on the Perry Como Show. He was instantly smitten.

“She was just incredibly beautiful,” Brooks writes. “When the song was over, I leapt to my feet, applauded madly, and shouted, ‘Anne Bancroft! I love you!’ She laughed and shouted back, ‘Who the hell are you?’”

The two struck up a conversation that never stopped. In his typically aggressive (and quite out of date) fashion, Brooks enlisted spies who alerted him to everywhere she would be.

“By the end of the week I said to her, ‘It’s amazing! We’re always showing up at the same places! It’s kismet!’” he writes. “She laughed and shouted back, ‘It’s not kismet. You’re stalking me! If you wanna see me why don’t you be brave and ask me for a date?’ So I did.”

They fell madly in love, forming a mutual admiration society, each believing in the other’s talent and innate brilliance. The heartwarming tenderness and enjoyment they took in each other jumps off the pages of All About Me! At their 1964 wedding ceremony, Brooks realized he had forgotten to bring Bancroft’s wedding ring. So Bancroft simply used her hoop earring as a substitute. In classic screwball fashion, the justice marrying them had a very odd voice, and the couple struggled to keep a straight face.

“For the rest of the ceremony Anne and I never looked at each other, because if we did, we knew we’d crash to the floor laughing,” Brooks writes. “Somehow, we got through the ceremony.… We took a cab back home to the Village kissing each other and both kissing the earring that had become our wedding ring.”

The King of Comedy

By the 1970s, Mel Brooks was the undisputed titan of edgy, provocative, thought-provoking comedy blockbusters that pushed the boundaries of good taste. In one passage, Brooks recalls an appalled studio head writing down everything that had to be taken out of 1974’s Blazing Saddles. “Farting scene, out…No punching a horse.”

Needless to say, Brooks ripped up these direct orders.

Loyal to his reliable stable of cast and crew, reveling in collaboration, Brooks delights in recalling how he bought handkerchiefs for everyone to shove in their mouth on the set of Young Frankenstein, to stop them from ruining takes by laughing. He admits to being demanding and intense on set (he once threw his director’s chair in the river). But in Funny Man, McGilligan says “rude crude Mel” was actually an abusive tyrant prone to emotional outbursts, sending actors running to their psychiatrists.

Like many ultra-successful memoirists, as Brooks climbs to greater career heights, All About Me! becomes more inside baseball, a workaholic’s litany of accomplishments and production decisions. But no matter how savvy, litigious, and powerful Brooks got, it is clear he never stopped delighting in meeting his heroes. He became friendly with the elegant, proper Alfred Hitchcock while filming his Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety. But one day, Hitchcock was dawdling, blocking Brooks from the lunch table:

I had a crazy comedy urge and I acted on it. I banged my knee into his tush and said, ”Come on, Al. Get moving. We’re hungry!” I immediately realized, What have I done? And then he just broke out into a big laugh. He said, “You naughty boy.”

When he asked Orson Welles to narrate History of the World: Part One, Welles agreed as long as he was paid $25,000 in cash. When Brooks delivered the bag of bills to Welles, he asked his fellow auteur what Welles was going to do with it. “I am going to spend it all on fine Cuban cigars and the best Beluga caviar,” the erudite Welles replied.

Wonderful and Terrible

“I started in 1938 as a street-corner comic in Brooklyn,” Brooks writes. “And I’m still doing it…just on more well-known street corners.”

As Brooks became a mega-producer in the 1980s, with hits like Spaceballs and The Elephant Man to his name, Bancroft was his rock and partner, reportedly as complicated and egotistical as he was. But together, they were golden. “When I hear his key in the lock at night my heart starts to beat faster,” she once said, per Brooks. “I’m just so happy he’s coming home. We have so much fun.”

Bancroft died of uterine cancer in 2005, a loss still so raw Brooks only mentions it in passing. Brooks, though, is lucky; even in his twilight years, he writes, he is rarely alone because of his gift for friendship and love of weekly lunches and informal clubs. (He and Carl Reiner watched Jeopardy together every night until Reiner’s death in 2020.) Brooks also shares close relationships with his children. And above all, he keeps working, meticulously searching for that perfectly crafted punch line.

“I still think that the best thing in the world is saying something funny, and then having an audience explode with laughter,” Brooks writes. “I will never grow tired of that. It’s magical.”