Mel Brooks Quotes

Good taste is the enemy of comedy.

Humor is just another defense against the
universe.

Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.

If you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy and colorful and lively.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

Why should I waste my good time making a straight dramatic film? The people who can't make you laugh can do that.

I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn't afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.

I was a soldier in WWII. The last couple of months of the war I was actually in combat.

I've been taught ever since I was a kid that sex is filthy and forbidden, and that's the way I think it should be. The filthier and more forbidden it is, the more exciting it is.

We rest our case on the production numbers.

Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before.

There's not enough bad taste! I LOVE bad taste! I live for bad taste! I am the spokesman for bad taste!

My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible.

I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all.

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.

I was in the army, and to me it was like a newsreel.

Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.

The only weapon I've got is comedy

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

If presidents can't do it to their wives, they do it to their country.

Usually when a lot of men get together, it's called a war.

Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance.

Being brave is being scared and worried and still doing it [what you do]. Because if you're just a wacko, a mashugana, a crazy guy, then you're not brave, your nuts!

I'm always stunned when I find out people like Roosevelt and Tolstoy weren't Jewish. How could I love them so much?

Some critics are emotionally desiccated, personally about as attractive as a year-old peach in a single girl's refrigerator.

The only thing we don't have a god for is premature ejaculation ... but I hear that it's coming quickly.

I don't have a mission. I don't have a torch to burn.

We mock the things we are to be.

Directing is a terrible, anxious process. It's all collaboration, and if you have a dream, it's diluted very quickly by the slightest ineptness in any of your collaborators. They're supposed to help you, but too often they help you into your grave.

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

Bialystock: Leo - he who hesitates is poor!

Judd Apatow is pretty good, both as a producer and as a director.

If Shaw and Einstein couldn't beat death, what chance have I got? Practically none.

I realised that all one really had to do was just observe. Observe and slightly exaggerate, and you had comedy. Instead of creating a mythical premise for a stupid joke, I found playing off truth got the best result.

There's no such thing as too far. If it works it's funny, if it doesn't work it's too far, it's stupid. Really there's no such thing as "too far." You're joining the politically correct when you use words like "too far." You don't want to join the army of politically correct.

Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.

I had low blood sugar, a chemical imbalance, plus the normal nervous breakdown everyone goes through from adolescence to adulthood.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

It's good to be the king.

I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.

In real life people fart, in the movies, people don't. Why not? Farts are a repressed minority. The mouth gets to say all kinds of things, but the other place is supposed to keep quiet. But maybe our lower colons have something interesting to say. Maybe we should listen to them. Farts are human, more human than a lot of people I know. I think we should bring them out of the water closet and into the parlor.

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."

The audience got jaded, they want a hit, they want a big success, and so you don't want to experiment because you say, well, I'll disappoint the audience, they may not like it, I better do something that I think is more commercial.

What ignited the rocket that sent you up into the vast regions of comedy, and why? I would say, for me, that philosophical treatise about having black beginnings and wanting love to compensate for that, wanting audiences and wanting attention - I say, "Au contraire." Completely opposite. I want the continuation of my mother's incredible love and attention to me.

Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. 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.

Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.

If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.

When you get big special effects pictures, sci-fi and things, there's little or no comedy. Or it's a domestic comedy and there's not one special effect. But very rarely do these things fuse and come out right.

All short women have a delayed fuse. Marry a taller woman: My wife was an inch or two taller than me; it's a sign of security.

Dom DeLuise was a big man in every way. He was big in size and created big laughter and joy.

It's talent. Either you got it or you ain't.

Comedy is lively, comedy is joy, and that's what keeps us [people] going, we've got to look forward to little, little happiness's. Little, little joys, and comedy is very, very important, it's a vital. We underestimate its value, but we should see more comedies. Comedy is life giving, it's invigorating. I really believe it.

But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.

I knew it ... I'm surrounded by assholes!

I don't believe in this business of being behind, better to be in front.

Basically, I'm a writer. I'm the proprietor of the vision. I alone know what I eventually want to happen on the screen. So if you have a valuable idea, the only way to protect it is to direct it.

My brothers went to work at 12 and put themselves through school and brought the family out of ruin into food and clothing.

My movies were not reaping the kind of emotional rewards that I wanted. I wanted them to be appreciated and they weren't. I didn't want the reviews to say, "Mel Brooks has made another movie," and you get the title somewhere in the second paragraph.

No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.

Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.

I love spaghetti and sex, sometimes together. My dream of heaven is walking naked through fields of pasta fazool.

Any man's greatness is a tribute to the nobility of all mankind, so when we celebrate the genius of [Leo] Tolstoy, we say, "Look! One of our boys made it! Look what we're capable of!"

I like Chris Rock. He's dangerous.

Ill just say whats in my heart: Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get.

Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. He's poetic, but he's also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without - I suspect - without letting himself be vulnerable to it.

An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It's the Jewish malmsey.

Immortality is a by-product of good work.

My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of "Yah! Yah! Yah!" And death says, "All right. He's too noisy and busy. I'll wait for someone who's sitting quietly, half asleep."

Well, you know, 'Spaceballs' is a weird combination, because it's a simple, sweet little fairytale, and it's crazy and out-there and making fun of and taking apart sci-fi, 'Star Wars', and 'Star Trek'.

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.

I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn't touch the ground. "Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I'll eat him!" Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.

The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.

I love gentiles. In fact, on of my favorite activities is Protestant spotting.

The audience. They see the name Mel Brooks, they want something really funny. They don't want to be moved; they don't want to be taught any lessons. But I get more letters for Twelve Chairs and Life Stinks than I get from any other movies, because people actually agree with the philosophy, or were moved, or they love the movie.

I started with [Leo] Tolstoy and I was overwhelmed. Tolstoy writes like an ocean, in huge, rolling waves, and it doesn't look like it was processed through his thinking. It feels very natural. You don't question whether Tolstoy's right or wrong. His philosophy is housed in interrelating characters, so it's not up for grabs.

The Twelve Chairs is about the same thing. It's all about money or love. We know we need money, we know we have to get money, we know we have to hurt others to get money. But we don't know until maybe it's a little too late in life that love is the most important thing. Love, friendship, affection, bonhomie, whatever. Those are the only things that really count: to love and be loved.

I don't know what to say so I'll just say what's in my heart ... badoom, badoom, badoom.

No, no, the songs write themselves, almost.

Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.

There's a lot of things that I've done to stick into the box set. You never have it this good. I think people should bargain. They shouldn't just buy the set, it's a little expensive [anyway]. But they should say - I'll give them dialogue, I'm a good writer.

Creative people should always be striving, they should always be hungry, they should be looking for the next place to go.

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I'm one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.

Be interested in everything. You don't have to adore it. I don't adore hip-hop, I don't think it's great music, but I'm interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I'm interested - you gotta stay interested!

I also try to surround myself with people I love - make a family out of the company. So I tend to use the same people over and over. There's a sort of Mel Brooks Repertory Company.

Look, I had to take chances or it wasn't fun being funny.

You want to be as smart as you can about being stupid.

My mother is very short - four-eleven. She could walk under tables and never hit her head.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.

I only direct in self-defense.

When you come to Germany as a Jew you have an uneasy feeling, but I've always felt okay in Berlin.

There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.

Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.

Liebkind: Hitler. There was a painter. He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon. Two coats!