I'm still looking forward to talking to people, to meeting people, to have dinner with people. But otherwise things are pretty good for being 95 and I'm getting around fairly well and my basic emotional attitude is still more positive than negative. I'm so happy that I still have somewhat of an appetite. I'm so grateful to be able to eat scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast and sometimes a roast beef sandwich for dinner. Instead, he says, it's the jokes he opted not to tell that haunt him: 'There were plenty, plenty of jokes I should have just exploded with and I said, maybe that's a bit too much for the kids or whatever.' Over the course of his career, Brooks has told countless edgy jokes, but he doesn't regret any of them. He's also the author of the new memoir, All About Me! His film credits include High Anxiety, Young Frankenstein, History of the World: Part 1, Blazing Saddles and The Producers, which was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Now 95, the filmmaker/actor/comedian is a member of the exclusive EGOT club, for those who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award.

After the war, Brooks' big break in comedy came when he landed a job writing for TV legend Sid Caesar's live variety show, Your Show of Shows. Brooks was drafted into the Army during World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. 'And I remember going back in Uncle Joe's cab and I remember saying as he was driving me back home to Williamsburg, 'Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe! I'm going to do that!. 'My hands stung from applauding so much after it was over,' he says. That's what most of the kids in his working-class Jewish neighborhood did.īut everything changed when he saw his first Broadway musical - Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman. As a child in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mel Brooks assumed he would grow up to work in Manhattan's garment district.

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