Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew by Jeremy Dauber (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew by Jeremy Dauber
• Brynn W. Shiovitz

MEL BROOKS: DISOBEDIENT JEW. By Jeremy Dauber. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023; pp. 201.

It seems fitting that a biography of Mel Brooks would be published the same week that the comedian auteur released History of the World, Part II on Hulu, a sequel audiences have been anticipating for the last forty-two years. Jeremy Dauber’s survey of Mel Brooks’s career as “Disobedient Jew” is not a typical piece of academic scholarship, but instead a breezy, pun-laden yet deeply articulate bio-analysis of Brooks’s métier writ large. Utilizing a combination of primary source material, Brooksian humor, Yiddish knowledge, and in-depth analysis, Dauber demonstrates his insider status as a descendant of the old country as well as his command of popular culture, an unironically self-reflexive identity necessary to critique the unapologetically Jewish Brooks who has always relied heavily on these traits to tell his stories. Mel Brooks made having fun a requirement of his success, and Dauber has clearly done the same with this book. Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew will prove helpful to anyone teaching a film genre course on parody/comedy or a class on Jewish film/performance. It is also a great resource for anyone taking up questions of representational politics, as Dauber addresses Brooks’s often controversial choices.

It is easy to get swept up in someone’s notoriety and think it was just good fortune that brought them there. Dauber shows, however, that Mel Brooks worked tirelessly to arrive at his fame and acclaim. Brooks lost his father as a toddler, making it understandable why he would forever crave attention—a comic’s cliché—and why the streets of Brooklyn would become so formative for him. It is on these streets that a young Brooks would learn the “art of the fast-paced, free-flow, wild man shpritz” (7). A 1930s Brooklyn vernacular was quick-witted, sassy, and predominantly Jewish, a tongue which no doubt surfaces in everything Brooks touches. Understanding this Brooklyn vernacular helps to highlight the similarities between Brooks’s comedic style and the style of his Jewish predecessors, comedians like Eddie Cantor who Brooks grew up observing and no doubt emulating.

An Amerikaner-geboyren who lived amongst other first-generation US Jews, Brooks was simultaneously shaped by the language and familiarity of his Eastern European neighbors and the more assimilated entertainers he grew up watching on the screen and stage. As Dauber writes, “the outer-borough kid dreamed of the Great White Way, which was everything Manhattan was supposed to be; sophisticated, cosmopolitan, rich, and of course, more than ever so slightly Gentile—the kind of club that probably wouldn’t have wanted him for a member” (9). Brooks was both in love with the promises of Gentile life and deftly aware of his obstacles. After a trip into Manhattan to see Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, Brooks was forever infected with the theatre bug: “On the way home…[Brooks] made up [his] mind… ‘I am going into show business, and nothing will stop me!’” (10).

These quotes set the tone for Dauber’s book: he writes passionately about the zealous Brooks, while offering keen insight into the ways that the comedian’s Jewishness impacted his career. While both the author and the auteur are aware of omnipresent antisemitism, neither presents it as an overbearing impediment to Brooks’s career. Instead, Dauber frames such resistance as grist for Brooks’s creative mill, offering the Jewish bit as an important aside but not the whole story. One gets a real sense of Brooks’s insatiable grit and willingness to speak his mind, no matter the cost, to prove something to the US.

One of Brooks’s first jobs was at Butler Lodge in the Catskills. During his off hours, he became somewhat of a performance artist, or a tummeler (someone who takes chances and risks being tummeled by his audience), as Dauber describes it. The story goes that in the summer of 1940, a young man (Brooks) dressed in an alpaca coat and a derby would walk out onto the diving board with two...