The complex genius of Mel Brooks

Students of Mel Brooks – who has a more important place in American comedy than we, and I suspect even he, have acknowledged – have had thin gruel so far. The emphasis has always rested on Woody Allen, the other New York-born Jewish comic and film-maker who wrote for Sid Caesar – at least since he tried to be Ingmar Bergman. Perhaps that is a joke, or at least a rebuke. American Jewish comedians are so, well, Jewish. It’s pleasing to praise them for their more self-hating work.

Now Jeremy Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, has written a piece of criticism as elegant and sympathetic as Brooks is vulgar and savage. (At least in his personal work: the films he produced –The Fly and The Elephant Man – are grave and heart-breaking pieces on alienation.