Mel Brooks Names His Three Comedy Heroes
When Mel Brooks discussed the influences that shaped his comic filmmaking with the Directors Guild of America, he didn’t name individual comedians like Charlie Chaplin or W.C. Fields. Not only did Brooks’ comedy heroes come in groups, he said, but most of them were related.
“There were three different (sets of) brothers who formed my sense of comedy timing,” he told the DGA, as reported by Far Out. “There were the Marx Brothers, and the Ritz Brothers, and then there were the Three Stooges. Those groups of men formed my sense of how many seconds it took from setup to explosion, from straight line to punch line. They were all perfect at what they did.”
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The Ritz Brothers haven’t stood the test of time like the other two acts, but they were a Brooks favorite. “Harry, Jimmy and Al came from my neighborhood,” Brooks wrote in his memoir, All About Me!: My Remarkable Life in Show Business. “They were like gods to me. They were big in the 1930s and 1940s. Harry had a physical insanity and freedom that no other performer ever had. He was the master of wild, bizarre walks, facial contortions and wacky sounds.”
There’s a scene in Brooks’ Silent Movie in which a bedridden Sid Caesar tries unsuccessfully to swallow a pill. “That’s all Harry Ritz,” Brooks explained.
The Three Stooges weren’t all brothers — Larry Fine wasn’t related to the Howards (Moe, Curly and Shemp), who made up different iterations of the comedy group. But in any combination, the Stooges “were a brilliant combination of timing and earnestness,” Brooks wrote. “They are very serious. Their physical timing was impeccable. They never laugh, or break up, or seem to enjoy the violence they inflict upon one another. They left that for the audience. They showed me that comedy is a juxtaposition of textures.”
The slap-happy scene above from Life Stinks is a direct descendant of a Three Stooges bit of comedy business.
The Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera is one of Brooks’ all-time favorites. “It’s brilliantly constructed,” he said. “All hell breaks loose because they are doing what the Marx Brothers do — jamming a hundred people into a ship’s tiny stateroom. They are crazy and anarchic, but they still have charm and warmth. They married intellectuality and a brushstroke of wit with their great physical comedy.”
Brooks described his approach to movie comedy as a mash-up of the Marx Brothers (intellectual, story- and character-driven) and the Ritz Brothers (comic craziness). “You might say,” Brooks concluded, “that I’m an intellectual meshugenah.”
