Of My Old Boss & the Mel Brooks Box Set

Posted by Maximum Fun on 5th April 2006

For a while I interned with a public radio show here in the Bay Area. My boss, the producer, had left a career in publishing to join the show. She had done pretty much everything in the book business — among her titles was novelist, editor and most recently, literary escort. This is not a high-class prostitute, but rather the person responsible for getting authors where they need to be while on book tour.

She met lots and lots of famous authors, and had lots of insight into their personalities, at least while they were on book tour. There were some positive surprises — the shock-jock Mancow, for example, was really, really nice, and took her and her son out to dinner.

But I was never more jealous of her than when she mentioned in passing that she had once escorted Mel Brooks & Carl Reiner. Can you imagine anything more fun than that? And she said it totally lived up to it’s billing.

I love Mel Brooks because he allows a passion for anything-goes humor and a brilliant intelligence to exist in concert. His jokes are usually smart even when they’re dumb.

20th Century FOX released an amazing box set of Brooks’ films today, and side-by-side, you can see how formidable his body of work is. It isn’t a complete collection (we all miss The Producers, no one is lamenting the loss of Life Stinks), but it’s a great one, with eight films, several of which weren’t on DVD at all before. It includes Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, To Be or Not to Be, History of the World Part 1, The Twelve Chairs, and High Anxiety. I’ve never seen Twelve Chairs (should I?), but the rest range from really funny to All Time Classic.

Anyway, it’s pretty cheap at Amazon, considering all the laughs you’re getting…

and by the way, call your local library and find out if they have the mid-90s PBS special Caesar’s Writers, about the writing staff of Your Show of Shows and the Sid Caesar Hour, two 1950s TV sketch series. The film features a lot of brilliant footage from the shows, and interviews with the writing staff, which included Neil Simon, Brooks & Reiner, and (relatively briefly) Woody Allen among others.