Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn’t! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!
All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I’m going to die and I don’t have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred.
I don’t think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?
In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.
Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.
Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It’s all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it’s diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They’re supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.
I wanted to entertain so badly that I kept at it until I was good. I just browbeat my way into show business.
You want me to admit I’m a four-foot, six-inch freckle-faced person of Jewish extraction? I admit it. All but the extraction. But being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.
My mother is very short – four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.
I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn’t afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.
My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of “Yah! Yah! Yah!” And death says, “All right. He’s too noisy and busy. I’ll wait for someone who’s sitting quietly, half asleep.”
Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. He’s poetic, but he’s also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without – I suspect – without letting himself be vulnerable to it.
I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I’m one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.
Comedy is serious – deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn’t absurd, no amount of joke will help.
I also try to surround myself with people I love – make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There’s a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company.
I like people with big talents and small neuroses – not always an easy combination to find. I’ve discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get.
I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.
Be interested in everything. You don’t have to adore it. I don’t adore hip-hop, I don’t think it’s great music, but I’m interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I’m interested – you gotta stay interested!
No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn’t. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.