Brooks is a pure, unapologetic product of vaudeville and the Catskills. If Brooks was not a young man when The Producers and Blazing Saddles became instant classics of sublime vulgarity, his sensibility was even older than his age. After all, by the time 1968’s The Producers made Brooks an instant force in our culture with his debut film as a writer-director (and bit player) he was already deep into middle age, and had already triumphed in at least two other fields through his legendary work on Your Show Of Shows and Get Smart and his ground-breaking comedy albums with Carl Reiner. In some ways, Mel Brooks was an unlikely pioneer in the field of boundary-pushing bad taste.
