On Mel Brooks and humor - Michael Schulman interview Brooks in The New Yorker:

‘Possibly more than anyone else, Brooks epitomized American Jewish humor in the twentieth century, much of which rested on the idea that it’s funny when a kvetchy Jewish guy shows up where he doesn’t belong, which is most places. Case in point: when Kenneth Tynan profiled Brooks for this magazine, in 1978, the piece was titled “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man.”’

(…)

‘Do you feel like, in your career, you returned to that sense of freedom? Yeah. Gene [Wilder] and I wrote “Young Frankenstein.” Mike Gruskoff was going to be our producer, and Gene was going to star in it as the crazy Dr. Frankenstein. It was all set. We had a big, wonderful meeting at Columbia, and just as we left the meeting, before I closed the door, I said, “This is great! Goodbye! Oh, by the way, if we didn’t tell you before, it’s going to be in black-and-white.” I had an avalanche of Jews in the hall chasing us: “No black-and-white! Everything is in color! Peru just got color!” They said, “That’s going to be a dealbreaker.” Mike and Gene and I shouted back, “Then break the deal! We’re going to make it in black-and-white.” If it was going to be a testament to James Whale and that great 1931 Boris Karloff “Frankenstein,” it had to be in black-and-white.’

(…)
‘That’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, the campfire scene.
I know. He said, “You can’t punch a horse.” I said, “You’ll never see it again.” I kept saying, “You’re absolutely right. It’s out!” Then, when he left, I crumpled up all his notes, and I tossed it in the wastepaper basket. And John Calley, who was running [production at] Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Good filing.” That was the end of it. You say yes, and you never do it.
That’s great advice for life.
It is. Don’t fight them. Don’t waste your time struggling with them and trying to make sense to them. They’ll never understand.’

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‘You write in the book, “My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as being purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor.” What’s the difference? Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.’

(…)

‘You write in the book, “My wit is often characterized as being Jewish comedy. Occasionally, that’s true. But for the most part to characterize my humor as being purely Jewish humor is not accurate. It’s really New York humor.” What’s the difference? Yiddish comedy, or Jewish comedy, has to do with Jewish folklore. Sholem Aleichem, that kind of stuff. The mistakenly called “Jewish comedy” of the great comics—it was really New York. It was the streets of New York: the wiseguy, the sharpness that New York gives you that you can’t get anywhere else, but you can get it on the streets of Brooklyn. Jewish comedy was softer and sweeter. New York comedy was tougher and more explosive. There’s some cruelty that you find in New York humor that you wouldn’t find in Yiddish humor. In New York, you make fun of somebody who walks funny. You never find that in Sholem Aleichem. You’d feel pity. There’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.

You were a drummer when you were a kid. Did drumming teach you anything about comedy? It did. It has to do with punch lines. It has to do with timing. It has to do with buildup and explosions. For a joke to work, I always needed that rim shot, when one of the drumsticks hits the rim of the snare as well as the center of the drum and gives you that crack, that explosion. It’s the same thing with a joke. A man walks into a grocery store. He says, “I want a half a pound of lox. I want some cream cheese.” And he stops and says, “All your shelves are filled with boxes of salt! Do you sell a lot of salt?” And the grocery man says, “Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it’s a miracle. I don’t sell a lot of salt. But the guy that sells me salt—boy, can he sell salt!” That’s the rim shot.’

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‘You write about your experience in the Army, and one thing that stood out to me was that you were m.c.’ing variety shows for the Special Services division right after the war, with German civilians performing with American G.I.s. That sounds fraught.
It was talent that was available. You needed to do an hour on the stage so that the soldiers would have some entertainment. But it was hard to do an hour if you couldn’t find enough G.I.s that were great singers, dancers, musicians, what have you. But there was a nice, little German reservoir of talent that was in show business before Hitler, so I just broke the rules and took a chance. They were often in tears: “I’m doing what I was meant to do, and thanks to you you’re letting me do that for an audience.” I never thought that every German was a criminal. Of course, many, many civilians were swayed by Hitler and became bad people. But I wasn’t in politics then. I was in show business. There was a great German tap dancer, and after a talk with him I tried to find out whether they were S.S. troopers hiding as tap dancers.
That sounds like “Springtime for Hitler”! The seeds were probably born in me then and there.
Obviously Charlie Chaplin had done “The Great Dictator” decades earlier, but when you came up with “The Producers” I don’t imagine that people thought that Hitler comedy was acceptable in any way. Did you have your own trepidation, as a Jewish person, as someone who was in the Second World War? That was a fight within me, a big struggle. Of course, I didn’t want to pay any homage in any way to the Third Reich. However, I was true to my story. You can encapsulate “The Producers” in one sentence: you can make more money with a flop than you can with a hit. But you need the ammunition to make that flop. I knew I was on thin ice, but I said, “This will surely send the Jews flying out of the theatre in a rage, and they’d have their flop.” And that’s what this story was all about, a great big flop making them rich. In the end, it turns out that I really was more interested in their relationship than anything else: two strangers become very good friends. That’s the unconscious engine that drives the movie.

When you write about “The Producers,” you say that you got outraged letters, and you wrote back, “The way you bring down Hitler and his ideology is not by getting on a soap box with him, but if you can reduce him to something laughable, you win.” Do you think that still works with the evils of the world? If you can reduce the enemy to an object of ridicule and laughter, you’ve won. And that’s why, when “The Producers” played throughout Europe, it was very successful.’

(…)

‘Richard Pryor.
Richard Pryor I knew from the Village. He would play the Village Vanguard, and we became buddies. We’d have late-night coffee and talk. One weekend, he said to me, “I gotta do a show on Friday night at the Bitter End, and I can’t make it. I want you to do my act.” I said, “O.K.” So I did. I started, “My grandma was a big, fat Black woman in St. Louis who ran a cathouse,” and I did all the stuff he actually said. He came back and he started choking me. He said, “You did my act?” I said, “You told me to do your act!” Anyway, when I said to him, “I’m doing this thing about the Black sheriff, and I want you to be the Black sheriff and write the script with me,” Warner Bros. would not buy him, because he’d been arrested a few times and couldn’t get insurance. Finally, I said, “Richard, I’m not going to do the movie.” He said, “You are going to do it, and together we’ll find a Black sheriff that we both love.” And we did. We found Cleavon Little, and we both fell in love with him. Thank God for Richard Pryor and his graciousness. He was something.’

Read the complete interview here.

‘The Producers’ remains one of my favorite movies, it should be reiterated regularly.

Also, former members of the SS hiding as tap dancers is still an idea worthy of further consideration for a short story. But of course, we had already Littell, although ‘The Kindly Ones’ is many things, yet not a comedy.
In 2009 David Gates didn’t get ‘The Kindly Ones’ in NYT; alas, reviewers make mistake. I’m drifting away.

WW II and the Holocaust as a source of bitter comedy will not function anymore the same way it functioned in 1967. But there will be other genocides and wars, the future won’t let the comedians down.

And we will always have New York humor, a minor consolation, ‘there’s no pity in New York. There’s reality and a brushstroke of brutality in it.’