# Thank God for Mel Brooks  ## Metadata - Author: [[Adrienne LaFrance]] - Full Title: Thank God for Mel Brooks - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Mel Brooks is a legendary comedian known for his bold, absurd humor and love of life. He used comedy to fight fear and hate, making people laugh while sharing serious truths. Brooks’s work changed American comedy and inspired many with his fearless creativity and passion. - URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/long-live-mel-brooks/687730/?utm_source=feed ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > As Brooks remembers it, in a story [he’s told](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/07/mel-brooks-judd-apatow-interview/674167/?utm_source=feed) repeatedly, Tolkin urged him toward *Dead Souls*, saying, “Even though you’re an animal from Brooklyn, I think you have the beginnings of a mind.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kwersx5pahyt2s66m7bzgrs0)) > Brooks was born on a hot summer day in 1926, in Brooklyn, the youngest of four boys—Irving, Lenny, Bernie, and Mel—raised during the Great Depression by a single mother. (His father died suddenly when he was still a toddler.) Brooks, who was born Melvin Kaminsky, remembers his childhood as phenomenally happy, endless days of egg creams at the neighborhood soda fountain and stickball games in the street, an apartment filled with home-cooked meals and the sound of his mother singing along to Irving Berlin, special trips to Coney Island for root beer and hot dogs, and—once his mother returned enough milk bottles to afford it—10-cent double features at the movie house on Friday nights, where he ate salami sandwiches packed from home. “I loved my childhood in Brooklyn,” Brooks recalled in his memoir, [*All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business*](https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780593159132). He often thinks of it as the happiest period of his life. Brooks also relished his role as a class clown, terrorizing his teachers and leaving his friends gasping with laughter. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kweryfr0at0zyb9x83tdgcnh)) > Sidenote: Here’s a fun fact about how Melvin Kaminsky became Mel Brooks: He’d intended to change Kaminsky to his mother’s maiden name, Brookman, but all the letters in *Brookman* couldn’t fit on the drums. So *Brooks* it was. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kwes06cpjj9gw0dkhrcj7v47)) > Brooks often comes across as ebullient—but don’t mistake ebullience for being carefree. His closest friends have always described him as intensely competitive. And as he became famous, he developed a reputation for being fiercely private, understandably so. Even his enthusiasm for Gogol came from a place of insecurity. Brooks sometimes tells the story of how, when he very first saw his name as a writer on the credits of *Your Show of Shows*, he felt like a fraud. “I got scared,” he told Tynan, “and I figured I’d better find out what these bastards do.” Brooks tromped to the library and checked out armfuls of classics—Gogol, but also Conrad, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. (On Tolstoy, Brooks once said, “It’s like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn’t even go through his mind on its way to the page.”) And his conclusion was, “My God, I’m not a writer, I’m a talker.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kwes72kcxpztb7bypn6h7ccr))