the blank mel brooks comedy about broadway

So, you see Brooks going from the Jewish enclave of the Catskills to television and Broadway and to box office success as a director and leading man who is not hiding his Jewishness. It’s also about the desire to be at the heart of the cultural story. It’s about subscribing enthusiastically to American values, but also saying “we’re still enough outside the American dream to show the holes and parody it.” We see that duality when Brooks lampoons Westerns and monster movies, the very genres that enchanted him as a child. It’s about Jews wanting to be welcomed into America as full citizens, but also remaining a kind of loyal opposition. It’s about the Jewish embrace of America and America’s embrace of the Jews in the postwar period. With all the documentaries and books we’ve seen, that story is still under told. The short answer is “because they asked.” But really because Brooks did so much to shape not just Jewish comedy and American comedy, but also how American Jews thought about themselves in the second part of the twentieth century. Why include the man who gave us Blazing Saddles ?

Your book is part of the Jewish Lives biography series, which spotlights a pantheon of greats - Einstein, Anne Frank, Wittgenstein. In Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia, describes the filmmaker and comedian's provocative, inexhaustible, and enduring impact on American culture. Brooks in 'Life Stinks.' (Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

The blank mel brooks comedy about broadway