---
title: "Happy 100th, Mel Brooks: A Century of the Last Great Comic Anarchist"
description: "Mel Brooks — the Brooklyn kid who became one of the few artists to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, and who made movies that mocked history while taking it seriously — turns 100 today."
category: "Entertainment"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/entertainment
author: "Hana Nakamura"
published: 2026-06-28T23:38:29.000Z
updated: 2026-06-28T23:38:29.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/happy-100th-mel-brooks-a-century-of-the-last-great-comic-anarchist
tags: ["Mel Brooks", "comedy", "Hollywood", "Blazing Saddles", "The Producers", "EGOT"]
---
# Happy 100th, Mel Brooks: A Century of the Last Great Comic Anarchist

Mel Brooks — the Brooklyn kid who became one of the few artists to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony, and who made movies that mocked history while taking it seriously — turns 100 today.

On June 28, 1926, a boy named Melvin Kaminsky was born in Brooklyn. A century later, as Mel Brooks, he stands as one of the most decorated and most fearless comic minds American entertainment has ever produced.

## From the Catskills to Sid Caesar's writers' room

Before the awards, Brooks was a young comic working the Borscht Belt resorts in the Catskills and, after Army service in World War II, a writer on Sid Caesar's *Your Show of Shows* — a fabled television writers' room that also held the likes of Neil Simon and Carl Reiner, [ABC7 noted](https://abc7.com/post/Mel-Brooks-turns-100-Happy-birthday-comedian-filmmaker-2000-Year-Old-Man/19403840/). His partnership with Reiner produced *The 2000 Year Old Man*, the improvised routine in which Brooks played a wisecracking man who had seen all of human history — a bit that grew into hit comedy albums and, eventually, a Grammy.

## The rare EGOT

That Grammy is one corner of a distinction few performers hold: Brooks has won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. His Academy Award came in 1968 for the original screenplay of *The Producers*, his gleefully outrageous comedy about two men scheming to stage a guaranteed Broadway flop. Decades later, the stage-musical version of *The Producers* became a sensation, sweeping the 2001 Tony Awards with a record-setting haul.

## The films that broke the mold

If the trophies show his range, the films show his nerve. In 1974 alone, Brooks released *Blazing Saddles* — a Western whose slapstick smuggled in some of the sharpest satire of American racism ever to clear a studio — and *Young Frankenstein*, a black-and-white parody of classic horror so lovingly crafted it stands among the great comedies of its era. He co-created the spy spoof *Get Smart* for television, and in 1987 took aim at *Star Wars* with *Spaceballs*, which has since become a generational favorite.

## A centennial worth celebrating

Hollywood has marked the milestone in kind. In a nod to his 100th, the American Film Institute named *Blazing Saddles* the funniest American film of all time, [Deadline reported](https://deadline.com/2026/06/blazing-saddles-afi-funniest-film-mel-brooks-100/) — a designation that doubles as a verdict on the film's staying power. Tributes have poured in from the filmmakers who grew up in his shadow and built careers on the permission his work gave them.

Brooks outlasted trends, studios and the conventional wisdom about what audiences would accept. He made comedies that respected their audience enough to challenge them, trusting that a joke aimed at the truth would always land harder. A hundred years on, he is still proof that nothing punctures pretension quite like a perfectly timed laugh.

## Sources

- [Mel Brooks turns 100: Happy birthday to the comedian and filmmaker behind the '2000 Year Old Man'](https://abc7.com/post/Mel-Brooks-turns-100-Happy-birthday-comedian-filmmaker-2000-Year-Old-Man/19403840/)
- ['Blazing Saddles' named funniest film of all time by AFI in honor of Mel Brooks' 100th birthday](https://deadline.com/2026/06/blazing-saddles-afi-funniest-film-mel-brooks-100/)