Mel Brooks, the comedian and filmmaker who was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn and turned his childhood there into a half-century of movies, just turned 100. According to PageSix, Brooks was born on June 28, 1926, and the man who voiced the “2000 Year Old Man” is still cracking jokes about turning 100.
Brooks grew up in Williamsburg, and he has said flatly that those years, not the Oscar and not his marriage to Anne Bancroft, were the best of his life. “I wanted to keep the party going. I wanted to keep the happiness and joy and explosions of laughter going into a dour part of our lives, not our childhood anymore,” Brooks told The Associated Press in 2021, in comments PageSix republished. Asked once to name the happiest part of his life, he said it was ages 4 or 5 to 9. Asked what happened at 9, he said: “Homework.”
Between Williamsburg and Hollywood, Brooks served in the Army and worked the Borscht Belt. Brooks served during World War II, including the Battle of the Bulge, then worked the Catskills resort circuit as a tummler amusing Jewish vacationers before Sid Caesar hired him as a writer, per PageSix. On Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” Brooks met Carl Reiner, a lifelong friend and his partner on the “2000 Year Old Man” sketches, where Reiner would ask the ancient man what Jesus was like. “Thin lad,” Brooks would answer. “Wore sandals. Always walked around with 12 other guys.”
He made movies people still quote: “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “High Anxiety.”
Writing in the Forward, Benjamin Ivry traced how much of that comedy grew out of Brooks confronting antisemitism head-on. Ivry notes that in 1939, when Brooks was a boy, the German American Bund, a Nazi organization, filled Madison Square Garden to smear President Franklin Roosevelt, whom Brooks worshipped, as a secret Jew. Brooks enlisted at 17, Ivry writes, and came out of the war with what the piece calls “an explosive penchant for humor as violence,” the same impulse behind “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers.” Ivry quotes Brooks’ friend and fellow Caesar writer Mel Tolkin, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992 that pogrom-era violence “created the condition where humor becomes anger made acceptable with a joke.”
The Forward also digs into the less-famous corners of Brooks’ work, including the literary films he made through his Brooksfilms company, like the 1987 adaptation of Helene Hanff’s “84, Charing Cross Road,” which gave Bancroft a leading role, and his 1970 film “The Twelve Chairs.”
His 100th birthday comes during many tributes to Brooks. Judd Apatow directed a two-part HBO documentary, “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,” which premiered at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles on January 20, 2026, according to both outlets. “I was born to make people laugh,” Brooks says in the film, per PageSix. “So, I do that.”
In April, Brooks recorded a video message honoring Eddie Murphy for his AFI Life Achievement Award, PageSix reported. In May, he announced he was donating thousands of his documents and photographs to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York. “So, knowing that my work will have a home at comedy’s national archive and continue making people laugh leaves me with a deep sense of pride,” Brooks said in a statement quoted by PageSix.
Brooks has joked about mortality as long as he has joked about everything else. PageSix notes that in a 1980s sketch he built himself a coin-operated gravestone that played a videotaped message opening with, “I was Mel Brooks, one of the funniest little Jews to walk the Earth.” Asked by the AP in 2021 whether he thought much about death, he said he gave it up after 60. “When and if it happens, it’s going to be a sad day for everybody but me,” Brooks said, laughing. “I enjoy living. I’d like to do it as long as I can.”
Featured image: Images for HBO
