Реферат: Mel Brooks As Jewish Comedian Essay Research

crucial to identify a recurring theme in Brooks’s work-Germans and, more

specifically, Nazis. He had a brief military career in World War II with very

little combat experience, and he actually ended up being the entertainment

coordinator for the army. Yacowar analyzes Brooks’ later feelings towards

Germans as "subconscious frustration" because of his inability to

actually fight the Nazis (Yacowar 17). In an interview he was asked about his

obsession with Germans, and he replied: Me not like Germans? Why should I not

like Germans? Just because they’re arrogant and have fat necks and do anything

they’re told as long as it is cruel, and killed millions of Jews in

concentration camps and made soap out of their bodies and lamp shades out of

their skins? Is that any reason to hate their f-king guts? (Yacowar 32) Brooks

has mocked Germans in various works such as in Your Show of Shows and on the

Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes film festival audio recording.

Regardless, of the origin of his interest with Nazis, if one looks at enough of

his work, one cannot help but notice that this theme is an obsession for Brooks

(Yacowar 34-35, 48). Mel Brooks made his first feature film, The Producers, in

1967. It is about a Jewish Broadway producer (Max Bialystock) who convinces his

Jewish accountant (Leo Bloom) to finance a guaranteed to fail play with the idea

that they would take the profits and run to South America. The guaranteed to

fail play, "Springtime for Hitler" turned out to be a huge success.

The two main characters both represent completely different Jewish stereotypes

and the third area of Jewish interest in the film is the role of Germans both in

the play and the ex-Nazi author, Frank Liebkind (Altman 39). Max Bialystock

(played by Zero Mostel) is obviously not a first generation American because of

his name and his accent. Although he never does anything specifically Jewish, he

is still Jewish so it is relevant to look at his relationship to Jewish

stereotypes. In his book, Telushkin discusses the tradition of having big and

lavish bar mitzvahs, he say’s "that the Jewish tradition has few curbs to

halt such excesses"(74). It is interesting to see how Bialystock chooses to