Реферат: Mel Brooks As Jewish Comedian Essay Research

Mel Brooks As Jewish Comedian Essay, Research Paper

Mel Brooks’s membership in the elite club of Jewish comedians is essentially

impossible to dispute. The question is whether or not his comedy is atypical.

Satirizing Jewish history and klutzy old Jewish men is normal for Jewish comedy.

However, "Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party,"

is something that you would not expect to hear in typical Jewish comedy (The

Producers). Defined broadly, there are two forms which Mel Brooks’s Jewish humor

takes. The first form is to discuss specifically Jewish topics in a funny way.

This is evident in The Producers and in the Inquisition scene from History of

the World, Part I. The other form is to use certain aspects of Judaism for

comedic value. This form, is typically used by Brooks’ as a means for a quick

laugh as opposed to a major source of plot definition, and is most apparent in

such scenes as that with the Yiddish-speaking Indian in Blazing Saddles. While

exploring Brooks’s types of Jewish humor, this paper will limit its scope. Only

four of Brooks’s films will be discussed in this paper-The Producers, Blazing

Saddles, History of the World, Part I, and To Be or Not To Be. These films were

chosen because the quantity of Jewish content in all of them is considerably

more than in his other films such as Young Frankenstein or Silent Movie. The

four films chosen do an excellent job of portraying the complete range of the

types of Jewish-related humor, which Brooks uses. To understand Mel Brooks

identity as a specifically Jewish comedian it is important to understand how

Jewish he actually was. Melvin Kaminsky was born as the youngest of four

brothers in a crowded New York City apartment to Kitty and Max Kaminsky. He grew

up in a very Jewish area were on "Saturdays, the shops were closed, the

pushcarts parked, and Yiddish replaced with Hebrew in over seventy orthodox

synagogues." However, Brooks himself spent his Saturdays enjoying matinees

at the Marcy Theater. He married a non-Jewish woman and allowed his son, Max, to

be baptized only as long as he was allowed to have a bar-mitzvah. When asked by

the media if he wanted his wife to convert he replied "She don’t have to

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