All About Me! by Mel Brooks “The only Requirement for a Mel Brooks film is that you come in ready to laugh,” Brooks says in the opening pages of his new memoir, “All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business.” The same requirement applies to this book as well.
While the physical book does plenty of justice to the life and career of Brooks, the audiobook adds a hilarious dimension to it. It clocks in at just over 15 hours, which may seem daunting, but it’s worth it. Comedians tend to have a bit of fun reading their own book in the recording studio. It’s that muscle memory kicking in when they’re handed a microphone.
Brooks’ audiobook feels like your Jewish grandparent retelling a polished story that they’ve told many times before because the captive audience always enjoys hearing it. Even if your grandparents didn’t grow up in New York, like so many Jews in the early 20th century, Brooks’ Brooklyn accent will remind you of the grandparent of someone you know sharing a story from years past.
Brooks has been in show business for 83 of his 95 years, and is a winner of four Emmys, three Grammys, three Tonys and one Oscar—one of only 16 people to have won at least one of each. The audiobook goes through those past 83 years, starting from those street corners where he honed his early comedy talents as a way to fend off bullies.
“I started in 1938 as a street corner comic in Brooklyn, and I’m still doing it, just on well-known street corners.” — Mel Brooks
“I started in 1938 as a street corner comic in Brooklyn, and I’m still doing it, just on well-known street corners,” he says.
He takes the listener to the Borscht Belt, details searching for landmines in World War II, talks about collaborating with Sid Caesar and discusses working on “The 2000-Year-Old Man” with longtime friend Carl Reiner.
“If you don’t have anyone in your life like Carl Reiner, stop listening to this right now and go find someone!” Brooks scolds the listener with his raspy voice. Reiner passed away in 2020 while Brooks was writing the book.
His courtship of Anne Bancroft was as Mel Brooks as it gets. They met at a show in 1961; immediately after telling her he loved her, he introduced himself: “I’m Mel Brooks—nobody you’ve ever heard of.”
“Wrong,” Bancroft said. “I got your ‘2000-Year-Old Man’ record with Carl Reiner. It’s great.” They married in 1964 and remained together until her passing in 2005.
Many anecdotes in the audiobook have been shared over time, but “All About Me!” is a comprehensive collection of them. The audiobook is like listening to the greatest hits of the DVD commentary of his films, but with more detail and all in one place. All the hits are in there: “The Producers” film, “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Silent Movie,” “History of the World, Part I” and many others.
He shares that he was inspired to make “Spaceballs” after celebrating his son Max’s tenth birthday with a “Star Wars” themed party.
“Science fiction, now there’s a genre I haven’t wrecked yet,” he said to himself after the party. “I destroyed the western in ‘Blazing Saddles,’ I savaged classic horror films in ‘Young Frankenstein,’ I sent up silent films in ‘Silent Movie’ and I had fun with Hitchcock in ‘High Anxiety.’”
Brooks rehashes film dialogue and the history behind each production. He imitates the voices of the characters and sings the parts meant to be sung throughout the audiobook.
As with any life story told by a grandparent, there is a bit of advice and philosophy. Brooks talks about how much pressure he put on himself to make the music just right in his work.
“Music infuses a film with the correct emotion that you need in a scene. You shade your film with the right colors while directing, but music is especially important,” he says.
In the final chapter, Brooks talks about the coast-to-coast one-man show he did in 2016 and how the thrill of entertaining is never lost on him.
“I still think the best thing in the world is saying something funny and then having an audience explode with laughter,” he says. “I will never grow tired of that. It’s magical.”
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