Mel Brooks’ the Critic: ‘It must be some symbolism… I think it’s symbolic of junk’

Here’s some trivia for you, beloved blogosphere: Mel Brooks is one of only a dozen entertainers to win an Emmy, Tony, Grammy and Academy Award. For which work did Mel Brooks win his first ever award?

If you answered with the 1968 Academy Award winner for best original screenplay,  the Producers, you’re a few years too late.

If your guess was the legendary 1961 Comedy Routine with Carl Reiner, the 2000-Year Old Man, wrong again! The routine didn’t garner a Grammy until 1999, when the schtick was revived as ‘The 2000 Year Old Man, in the Year 2000.’

Mel Brooks’ first win came in 1963, from a now obscure animated short film called ‘The Critic,’ produced by Ernest Pintoff. He and producer Ernest Pintoff won the award for Best Short Subject; the film has since become a cult classic:



The film is a relic of quintessential borscht belt humor techniques. It is also a valuable sociologic portrait of the predominant cultural attitudes of Brooklyn’s first generation of Russian-Jewish immigrants. The influence of Brooks’ development as a comic as a tummler for the crowds in the Catskills surfaces right away in the first line, “Vat’s the hell is dis?”

Brooks’ accent and enunciations are spot on: cock-a-roach for cockroach, coy-tain for curtain, boy-th for birth, and ‘doit and filfth,’ hammer home an image of the crusty old Kvetch, who discarded the filter between his brain and mouth long ago.’ His hostility towards the film’s price, “Two dollars, out the window Marie,” could have come right from the floor of the Second Avenue Deli.

The response to shushing by the perturbed audience always gets a grin, ‘I’m 71 years old, got a right to be loud, I’m going to die soon,’ and must have come directly from a heckler’s mouth in the lounge at the Nevele or Kutschers.

The blunt, realist ideals of the old Kvetch provide insight on prevailing Jewish values of the time, “The fella that made this must be over thirty if they let him do this kind of thing….What does he waste his time with this? Fella like that could probably drive a truck, do something constructive, make a shoe.” This is also a reference to Mel Brook’s mother, who was employed as a garment worker.

The critic’s insistence that the picture, composed entirely of abstract lines and polygons, ‘I don’t know much about psycho-analysis, but I’d say doity picture,” is a delightfully misguided Freudian interpretation.  The hypocrisy of the critic pretending to offended by sexuality, “sure you have to pull the coy-tain, you’ll get arrested,” is contrasted with the scene’s reality; the critic is actually the one generating the sexual thoughts.

The critic’s honest closed mindedness is somehow endearing.  His constant kvetching is a poignant rejection of post-modernity by a generation faced with the stark realities of the Ellis Island experience and two World Wars, “It must be some symbolism… I think it’s symbolic of junk.”

Mel Brooks’ the Critic is timeless. It’s as sharp today as it was in ‘63. The film also sheds valuable sociological insight towards the values of Brooklyn’s Jewry, which at the time had a larger population than Jerusalem. It is a brilliant foray into the joy of the Kvetch, which formed the backbone for classic borscht-belt humor, and in turn became the basis for modern stand up comedy as we know it.

Brook’s skewered cartoon is also a tasty piece of eye candy. There’s a darned fine reason this film won Mel Brooks his first Academy Award. The Critic film should be considered one of the finest in the Brooks catalogue, I laughed more during it’s three minutes than I did during the whole of Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It’s about time that ‘The Critic’ is rediscovered.

Also, for those of you still on a synthesizer kick and the worship of Mel Brooks Obscuro, The 2000 Year Old Man was animated in the 1970s, with an all Moog soundtrack based on the styles of Walter/Wendy Carlos.

That's all for today, boys, girls, ladies and gentlemen. Don't do anything Melvin wouldn't do.

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