JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business By Mel Brooks Ballantine Books, 480 pages, $25 Mel Brooks’ memoir begins with a promise. In a preface, the 95-year-old actor-writer-director vows to make an intimate confession to his reader — one not to be shared with anyone. Then, he thinks a bit more about the…
In a lengthy essay published in the New York Post, we learn that filmmaker David Zucker was recently asked an inane question at an anniversary screening of his 1980 film “Airplane!” “Could you make ‘Airplane!’ today?” an audience member asked. Zucker’s response was, “Of course, we could. Just without the jokes.” Really? Is there a…
From one Brooks, how many rivers flow? There’s a bit of trivia about the filmmaker, who turns 95 on Monday, that I often turn over in my head. On an episode of Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” Carl Reiner said that the two funniest people he knew were Brooks and a 16-year-old kid named Albert Einstein….
“Every time I hear a horse whinny I will forever think of Cloris’ unforgettable Frau Blücher,” Mel Brooks wrote Wednesday on Twitter, as the media reported Cloris Leachman’s death at the age of 94. Indeed, few characters or performances have been so linked to Foley sound as Leachman’s turn as the eldritch housekeeper from Brooks’…
While Mel Brooks has dabbled in the local politics of a frontier town, enjoined theatergoers to join a Nazi kickline and famously proclaimed “It’s good to be king,” he’s never made a video endorsing a political candidate. Even at 94, there’s a first time for everything. On October 21, Brooks’ son Max posted his father’s…
“My secretaries stay a long time,” Carl Reiner said as he greeted me at the start of the job interview, “so I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask.” Okay, I was plotzing to get the job. Though at 26 I’d worked in show business long enough to know that celebrities were often nothing like…
“World War Z” author Max Brooks makes a living selling stories of the zombie apocalypse. But today, he’s enlisting his followers to help stave off the apocalypse at hand. On Twitter, the writer teamed up with his father, the veteran comedian and director Mel Brooks, to demonstrate proper social distancing techniques in the confusing era…
At 93, Mel Brooks is a lot of things: A Kennedy Center award recipient, a titan of both stage and screen even a vampire grandfather in t “Hotel Transylvania 3,” but for all these distinctions he reduces himself to one thing. “I’m just a Jew comic,” he told David Denby in a profile published in…
Hybrid event in London and online.
Aug 14, 2022
1:30 pm ET ·
Join audiences and participants from across the globe for this live celebration of Yiddish songs, poems, jokes, stories, games, serious and funny - all performed in Yiddish with English translation.
