As the youngest of four boys, Melvin James Kaminsky was his family's center of attention. "I was the baby and I always expected to be the king of France because I was treated like the king of France," he explained. "I'm still waiting for my crown." His mother Kitty, schooled by Irish teachers, spoke with a touch of a brogue. She and his brothers, Irving, Leonard and Bernard, all worked in the garment trade during the Depression. Most in their tenement building aspired to become cutters or salesman.

Brooks attended Eastern District High School in Brooklyn. Beneath his yearbook photograph, he listed his extracurricular activities: "Class Day Committee, Senior Council, Dean's Assistant, Fencing Team." He stated his career goal "To be President of the United States." Upon graduation, the 17-year-old enlisted man was sent to the Virginia Military Institute. "I figured if the army was going to make me an electrical engineer, I wouldn't be blown up," Brooks said. After the war, he briefly studied psychology at Brooklyn College.

Brooks gained stage experience during the summer months of his teenage years. At first, he was a busboy and drummer filling in for entertainers in the Catskill Mountains; then a stagehand-turned-director with the low-budget Red Bank Players on the New Jersey shore; and at the end of his army career, a Special Services officer stealing jokes from Bob Hope's USO shows and doing Al Jolson impressions for the troops. "All those shells and bombs going off all around you," Brooks said. "Never mind death, a man could lose his hearing."

The first blackout skit Brooks ever wrote and performed for a Borscht Belt audience was entitled "S. and M." He and a female staff member met in the center of the stage. "I am a masochist," he said. "I am a sadist," she replied. "Hit me," he said – and she hit him, hard. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold it. I think I'm a sadist," he said. Blackout.

When Brooks showed up at the stage door of THE ADMIRAL BROADWAY REVUE (1949), he had not been approved by the show's producer Max Liebman and was tossed out by security guards. The star of the program, Sid Caesar, came to the rescue and let Brooks in, eventually paying him $50 a week off the books for comic monologues and gags. "Its jokes and patter are brittle, rowdy, funny and full of satirical references," wrote Time Magazine.

LEONARD SILLMAN'S NEW FACES OF 1952 launched the musical careers of Broadway stars Eartha Kitt, Carol Lawrence and Paul Lynde. Brooks supplied the hit show with "Of Fathers and Sons," a spoof of both method acting and Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," with Lynde playing the Willy Loman character as a criminal nearing retirement who is disappointed in his son, a straight-A student. Twentieth Century-Fox produced a film version in 1954 giving its young writer impressive credits in television, film and the legitimate theater.

In 1950, 11 years before his first hit album with Brooks, Carl Reiner came to work at YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS, eager to satirize a new TV show called WE THE PEOPLE SPEAK, in which ordinary folks bore witness to history. "Here with us today, ladies and gentleman," Reiner improvised, "is a man who was actually at the scene of the Crucifixion, two thousand years ago. Isn't that true, sir?" And with Brooks' reply, the 2000 Year Old Man was born.

The inspiration for Brooks' first Academy Award^®-winning movie, a three-minute short called THE CRITIC, was an old man he had observed at an art house theater. The man appeared to have stumbled in off the street and was greeted by an esoteric short subject based on animation by Norman McLaren, which preceded the featured foreign film. Working with producer-director Ernest Pintoff and designer-animator Bob Heath, Brooks recreated the situation, improvising his own responses to abstract art: "This is cute... this is nice...vot de hell is it?"

Daniel Melnick of Talent Associates introduced Brooks to Buck Henry at his company's mid-town Manhattan office, which was furnished with a pool table. Henry proved to be an excellent shot, and he and Brooks hit it off. The spy parody they co-created was perfectly timed. James Bond was burning up the big screen and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. attracting viewers on TV. With Americans beginning to question their country's involvement in Vietnam it was a good time to present a bumbling government agent, and GET SMART (1965-70) fit the bill.

Throughout the early1960s Brooks worked on a novel called "Springtime for Hitler," whose title was derived from Benn W. Levy's twice-revived 1931 Broadway chestnut "Springtime for Henry." When Brooks turned his idea into a screenplay none of the studio executives he approached were interested. Finally, at New York's Hello Coffee Shop, Brooks pitched the idea to Sidney Glazier, who loved it. With additional funding from Joseph E. Levine's Avco Embassy – and a new title, THE PRODUCERS (1968) – the picture was a go.

Between THE TWELVE CHAIRS and BLAZING SADDLES, Brooks began voicing the character of the Blond-Haired Cartoon Man on PBS' THE ELECTRIC COMPANY. He continued doing so from 1971 to 1977 – a total of 780 episodes! Brooks taught young viewers to say "I am very cute" instead of "I am cute very." And when his character read the words, "I am not talking," he immediately questioned: "If I am not talking, then whom am I listening to? There's nobody else in the room, so I must be talking. I'm talking!"

There was so much laughter on the set during the shooting of THE TWELVE CHAIRS that Brooks bought 100 white handkerchiefs and distributed them to his cast and crew. "I couldn't shoot," he explained. "So I said, 'If you're not in the scene, take this handkerchief, and when you feel you're going to laugh, shove this in your mouth.' And every once in a while, I'd be shooting a scene and I would turn, and I could see a sea of white handkerchiefs. So I said, 'Okay, this is going to be funny. This is good.'"

BLAZING SADDLES (1974) sprang from an Andrew Bergman screenplay entitled "Tex X," which concerned a militant black sheriff in the Old West, whose name was a nod to Malcolm X. Brooks hired Bergman to join him and a team of writers, including Norman Steinberg, Alan Uger and Richard Pryor in creating a go-for-broke send-up of racism, hypocrisy, greed and the cowboy genre. "We're trying to use every Western cliché in the book – in the hope that we'll kill them off in the process," said Brooks.