Funny Man

Reviewed by: Funny Man: Mel Brooks by Patrick McGilligan Sean Sidky (bio) Funny Man: Mel Brooks. By Patrick McGilligan. New York: HarperCollins, 2019. 640pp., ISBN 978-0062560995 (hc), US $40.00. Though it has been fifteen years since his last film, it is hard to underestimate the influence of Mel Brooks on the landscape of comedic film in the United States. Brooks’s reputation precedes him, and it is clear from the opening line of Funny Man: Mel Brooks that Patrick McGilligan’s biography is not going to be about Mel Brooks the man, but rather about Mel Brooks the character, the performer, the institution: “What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny?” (1). Duality forms the structural basis for McGilligan’s portrayal of Brooks, helping the reader decipher Brooks’s wild and unpredictable temperament (the “Rude Crude Mel”) in light of Brooks’s preoccupation with keeping his public persona likable and jovial (the “Nice Mel”) (132). The book has a generally celebratory quality, but McGilligan does not shy away from either side of Brooks’s character. Considerable time and space are given to Brooks’s angry outbursts, and even to his disturbing treatment of his close colleagues and family. McGilligan does, however, underplay the consequences of Brooks’s outbursts, preferring to highlight the creative ways Brooks navigated or ignored the effects of his often-unreasonable demands and invective on others: the “Nice Mel” always seems to win out. [End Page 227] Funny Man’s structure is shared by many biographies of public figures: it takes the career and work of the figure as its central focus and looks backward to find and emphasize those experiences and events that would shape them into the public figure that inspired the biography. Structured chronologically, Funny Man is divided into chapters by significant years, highlighting the decisive moments in a celebration of Brooks’ rise and persistence over six decades. This chapter division reinforces the fact that we are most interested here in Brooks’s career, not in his childhood or his personal life. Though there are no significant gaps, the pacing does vary as a result: the first chapter, for example, covers eighteen years, while the rest vary between two and five years. Jewishness is not a major focus of the biography except in the first chapter— his birth and early childhood (“1929”)—where it plays a crucial role in establishing the landscape of young Melvin’s earliest years. Even then, McGilligan highlights membership in a community, rather than religious practice or even conscious identification, as critical to our understanding of Brooks. His childhood neighborhoods, the Catskills resorts where he first tried his hand at performance, and the Jewish cultural organizations that supported him and his family are really the only spaces in which Brooks’s Jewishness is directly considered. There are practical benefits to a structure that reads Brooks’s life in light of his career: it provides focus and direction, as well as tangible limits to an already lengthy project. However, such an approach does leave us wondering if there is anything to Melvin Kaminsky that was left behind with the transformation into Mel Brooks, anything about the man that did not become part of the persona. McGilligan often ascribes this to a gap in the records—facets and experiences neither Brooks nor other critics or biographers talk about. This is most notable in the description of Brooks’s wartime experiences, of which there appears to be little information available, even as this period is critical to McGilligan’s understanding of Brooks’s career, if for no other reason than as the catalyst for the filmmaker’s obsession with ridiculing Hitler and the Nazis (40–41). Not until the second chapter (“1944”), which traces his life from military service in WWII to his first meeting with Sid Caesar, do we get a sense of how McGilligan sees Brooks’s Jewishness manifest in adulthood: his understanding of comedy, and his intense hatred of Hitler and the Nazis. Jewishness is thus a background force in the chapters surrounding Brooks’s early work on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. It is almost taken for granted, and never addressed

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