Mel Brooks at 100: a century of jokes, and the America he keeps making fun of

Mel Brooks turned 100 on June 28, 2026, and the milestone arrived without the kind of orchestrated celebrity tribute the town usually reserves for itself. The man who taught three generations of moviegoers that the only proper response to fascism is a musical number is still, improbably, a working comic with a verdict on the present tense. That is the news. The longevity is the lens.

Brooks has spent the better part of a century turning the American id inside out for profit. He has been a writer, a director, a producer, a lyricist, an actor, an EGOT-holder, and a kind of institutional memory for a country that keeps mistaking nostalgia for argument. His 1993 cameo in front of the Lincoln Memorial, singing "Springtime for Hitler" alongside a re-enacting Richard Dreyfuss at the steps where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once stood, remains the cleanest visual joke ever made about the difference between American aspiration and American practice. It is also, on rereading, the joke the country still cannot quite hear.

A century of material

The basic arithmetic is the gift. Born June 28, 1926, in Brooklyn to a Jewish family that lost relatives in the camps, Brooks has been funny professionally for just over seventy years. He broke into television in the late 1940s and co-created the sketch show that helped invent modern American comedy, then moved into film with "The Producers" in 1967. The pattern since has been familiar: a string of farces, a couple of duds, a run of stage work, a second life as a Twitter-era folk hero punching at the same targets he always has. The catalog is long enough that the most useful way to read it is as a single, long-running argument about who is allowed to mock whom in a democracy.

The argument goes like this. Power is funny when it is mocked by the powerless. Power is funnier still when it mocks itself. Power is most dangerous when it tells a comedian to sit down. Brooks, the son of a dead world that the surviving world preferred not to look at, took the second option as a job description and never quite gave it up. The Western frontier, the 2,000-year-old man, the French Resistance, the Broadway producer with the worst show in town, the spaceship captain afraid of his own mutineers: every setup is a sketch about who gets to be ridiculous in a country that takes itself too seriously.

The lens, not the man

What makes the centenary coverage worth reading is that the major US dailies have largely treated the date as a celebrity milestone. The framing of choice in the celebrity press has been Brooks the showbiz survivor, the sweetheart, the EGOT-holder at the piano. The Guardian, by contrast, has framed the moment around the argument rather than the artist: the longevity is the news, and the joke is the lens on American power. That is a more useful frame, and it is the one worth carrying forward.

The distinction matters because Brooks is doing a particular kind of political comedy. It is not the Hollywood conservative mode of the last two decades, the kind of comic whose right-wing turn is treated as a personality trait and whose targets are coastal elites. Brooks's targets are fascism, the entitled, the credulous, and the powerful. His jokes land on the people who run things. They have done so for so long that the targets themselves have started to change shape, which is the part the celebratory coverage tends to skip.

What the joke is about now

Read against the present, the old material sounds less like period comedy and more like current events. The 1968 "Producers" gag about a Broadway flop so bad its financiers expected to make a killing on the loss is doing a different kind of work in 2026, when the line between con and product has gone soft. The "Blazing Saddles" demolition of the frontier myth now reads as a corrective to a country that keeps issuing westerns to itself. The "History of the World, Part I" potted epics about the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Empire, and the French Revolution, originally pitched as five-minute sketches strung together, now land closer to commentary than parody.

The targets have also migrated in ways Brooks has acknowledged. In interviews around the centenary, he has talked about comedy's narrowing room in the present, and about the difficulty of finding production partners willing to back a joke that might cost them a quarter. The complaint is not new; Lenny Bruce made a version of it; so did the people Bruce was standing on. What is new is that the squeeze is coming from inside the building the comic used to own. Hollywood is a different kind of funny business than the one Brooks broke into, and the kind of politically inflected Jewish farce he built his career on is no longer an obvious commercial bet.

The America that keeps showing up

The deepest joke in the Brooks catalog is the one about the country. The 2001: A Space Years "Spaceballs" gag about the price of air is now a recurring news headline. The "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" sketch about the wrong kind of redistributive politics still tracks. The "To Be or Not to Be" remake, in which a Polish acting troupe uses a Nazi-uniform costume to outfox a real Gestapo agent, is now taught in classrooms that did not exist when the film came out. The America the jokes describe is recognisable from any decade, which is the point. The country Brooks keeps making fun of is the country that keeps making the same news, and the same news is what his material is for.

There is a temptation, around any centenary, to declare the honoree timeless and move on. Brooks is not timeless. He is dated, deliberately, in a way that makes the datedness the point. A Mel Brooks joke is a thermometer reading of the moment it was written, and a good Mel Brooks joke is one whose reading is still legible to the next generation. The longevity is the news, the joke is the lens, and the country the lens keeps finding is the country that has been there the whole time.

A useful exercise, on the centenary, is to watch "The Producers" and then the news on the same evening. The musical number will do most of the work.

Sources: The Guardian (June 28, 2026): "Mel Brooks at 100: a century of jokes, and the America he keeps making fun of."