The complex genius of Mel Brooks

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work.

Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, has written a piece of criticism as elegant and sympathetic as Brooks is vulgar and savage. (At least in his personal work: the films he produced –The Fly and The Elephant Man – are grave and heart-breaking pieces on alienation. No jokes.) Its title, Disobedient Jew, is based on an interaction Brooks had with the critic Kenneth Tynan, who interviewed Brooks for the New Yorker in 1978. Tynan wrote:

I take my leave. Brooks clicks heels and bows, saying ‘Your obedient Jew’. He misses no opportunity to brandish his Jewishness, which he uses less as a weapon than a shield. Remember (he seems to be pleading) that I must be liked, because it is nowadays forbidden to dislike a Jew.

Dauber, noting Tynan’s ‘old-school anti-Semitism’, divines Brooks’s words less as a plea, and more of ‘a snarling challenge, irony saturated’.

I like Brooks’s joke to Tynan, because Tynan does not get it, and because it is a paradigm of his work: Brooks is both the wildest and the most functional of American-Jewish comedians.