Mel brooks religion in russia

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    Mel Brooks has claimed that his true interest is “reality.” By reality I take him to mean the truth that lies behind social customs, false norms, everyday etiquette. Reality in this reading means what we really think and feel, not what we are supposed to think and feel. The first stage of reality, in Brooks’s interpretation, turns out to be the rejection of good taste. Jeremy Dauber, in his recent study of Mel Brooks, a volume in the Yale University Press series of Jewish lives, refers to Brooks as the “poète maudit of bad taste.”

    As for that bad taste, a brief sample is on display when, in 2001, at the outset of an interview with Mike Wallace on Sixty Minutes, Brooks asks Wallace, “Is that a hundred-dollar watch?” When Wallace tells him it’s a forty-dollar watch, Brooks replies, “What a cheap son of a bitch you are.” After a brief pause, he next asks Wallace, “What did you pay for your jacket?” and they are off. The bad taste of these questions is redoubled by the fact of Brook

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    The real Jewish history in Mel Brooks’ and Hulu’s ‘History of the World, Part II’

    Spoilers for “History of the World: Part II” follow.

    (JTA) – Finally fulfilling the promise Mel Brooks made in 1981, the long-belated “History Of The World, Part II” brings us … “Hitler on Ice.”

    For a sketch first teased during the end credits of Brooks’ film “History Of The World, Part I,” the leader of Nazi Germany can be seen attempting to landsome difficult moves (perhaps a triple Axis?)at an Olympics-like skating competition. 

    Needless to stay, Hitler wasn’t known as a figure skater. But some aspects of the sketch — such as why collaborationist Vichy France would give the Nazi leader’s routine a perfect score — might benefit from a more detailed understanding of the real history that’s being pilloried. 

    The same goes for the sendups of Christianity, the Russian Revolution and Henry Kissinger — all historical events and figures depicted in the series, the first episodes of

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    Mel Brooks (Melvin Kaminsky) never camouflages the causal rela­tionship between his Jewish perspective and his comic work. In­deed, he persistently demonstrates and explicitly acknowledges how the latter springs from the former. In both his interviews and his films, Brooks incorporates Jewish motifs and concerns, a repeti­tive pattern as easily recognizable in his earliest works as in his most recent picture.

    Often referring to himself as “your obedient Jew”–a phrase squeaking with mock obsequiousness while affirming his outsider status–Brooks plainly situates himself, his work, and his humor within a recognizable Jewish tradition that integrates his personal history with his people’s suffering:

    Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved, lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every 10 Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one…. You want to know where my comedy comes from? It comes from not being

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