Mel Brooks
Celebrating Mel Brooks’ birthday with pieces by Jo Miles, Richard Moore, and Maryhelen Snyder.
TRANSCRIPT
In 1961, a couple youngish comedians named Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks performed a sketch on Ed Sullivan’s show. Reiner was the interviewer; Brooks was the 2,000 year old man that he was interviewing. They weren’t brand new to comedy even then; they’d both been writers for Sid Caesar’s 1950s TV series. And Mel Brooks wasn’t 2,000 years old then. BUT… he’s 100 years old this week. He was born June 28, 1926. And over the course of his career, he’s written some of the funniest and most outrageous movies in American film history: The Producers, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, Robin Hood; Men in Tights, Blazing Saddles, Space Balls, History of the World: Part 1.
The most famous line from George Lucas’s film Star Wars was “May the Force be with you.” In his Star Wars parody Spaceballs, Mel Brooks as the wise mystic Yogurt says, “May the Schwartz be with you.” From Passager Issue 75, here’s Jo Miles’s poem “May the Fork Be With You.”
Life lifts its fork
I chose to eat my fill
Gobble down the sweetest bits
Twirl my tongue around the most spirited elixirs
Chew up all the flesh left on my plate
the fatty parts, the gristle –
bloody meat, raw as a skinned knee
I devoured the picante of life, the sour cherries,
the bitter herbs, the sugar cubes
that dissolved slowly under my tongue.
I have had cool watermelon dreams and the hot daring
dreams of travelers –
beans and rice and steamy peppers – unleavened bread
I devoured the sun in a pudding, the cheese off the moon.
The fish from the sea swim willingly into my waiting arms.
Ah fork – If I am ever impaled on your tines
all is forgiven for I am satisfied, I am free
I am full.
“May the Fork Be With You,” Jo Miles.
In, I think, 1991, Kevin Costner played Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Two years later, Mel Brooks parodied that film in Robin Hood: Men in Tights and gave this line to Cary Elwes: “Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent.”
In Passager’s 2023 special trauma issue, we published a story by Richard Moore, also known as Trevor Huddlestone, who lives in Nottingham, England where Robin Hood hung out and who—I suspect—does speak with an English accent. Here’s an excerpt from that story, “The Facts of Great Uncle Wilfred.”
Great-uncle Wilfred refused to buy any new clothes or anything new at all for that matter. This was probably because he believed he was going to die at any moment as he’d gone way past his allotted lifespan of ‘threescore years and ten’ and therefore there was no point in buying anything new. Instead, he took to wearing old clothes passed down from other family members and which he kept in an old trunk in the attic.
Once he was sitting at the table in the red jacket with gold buttons and white belt of an old Sherwood Foresters uniform. On his head was the black helmet with its large golden Maltese Cross badge and spike on top. The brightness of that uniform glaring in the middle of that dingy, dusty room startled and frightened me like the arrival of imperial warships appearing off the coast of a pristine and native island.
Even more terrifying was when he sat there in a white Victorian wedding dress that had belonged to some great-aunt of his who’d been jilted at the altar. He was a tall man, and the dress barely came to below his knees. A pair of black bobby socks stretched from beneath the dress to his leather slippers whose soles were coming away so that when he walked, they slapped against the carpet or even louder against the kitchen tiles. It was while wearing this grotesque outfit that he told me a couple of his facts that petrified my impressionable seven-year-old brain.
An excerpt from Richard Moore’s story “The Facts of Great Uncle Wilfred.”
In his 1981 film History of the World: Part One, Mel Brooks as Moses holding three stone tablets, says, “The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen…” and then he drops one and continues “Oy! Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!”
The 2016 Passager Poet Maryhelen Snyder wrote this next poem. It’s not quite about the Ten Commandments, but it’s about the next best thing, “The Deadly Seven.”
And what if they were deadly virtues,
these so called sins of Sloth, Greed, Lust,
et cetera? We would watch with Envy,
the infant mouth, breathless with hunger,
gasp, grasp the dripping nipple,
the warm font, and drink with all its muscle.
We would know there is no foreplay needed
to excite desire.
And the swollen breast
craves the hungry mouth with equal longing.
What if the rights to life, liberty and boundless Joy
were birthrights as we said, demanding that
we disobey any authority but our own souls?
We would invite our Sloth, eating the apple
as we lie in an open field. With nothing
to be done until its doing draws us as earth
draws light, we’d loll and wait. But not for long.
Burning, trembling in neuronal fire, watch how
the child, facing six brightly colored rings
in graduated sizes, is eager beyond all stilling
to place them in order on their towering peg.
Nor is her Pride in self, but in self’s triumphs.
And if some fool dare dismantle this, bless
Anger too, her rage against the thwarting
of the Light.
Nor can we out-age Lust. Were
Christ to come again in David’s body, we would
bow down gladly to flesh and sinew. What is not
deadly that is this alive?
From Passager Issue 61, “The Deadly Seven” by Maryhelen Snyder.
On this episode of Burning Bright, we’ve been celebrating Mel Brooks’s 100th birthday.
To subscribe to, donate to, or learn more about Passager and its commitment to older writers, visit passagerbooks.com.
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
