Mel Brooks turns 100, celebrating a legendary comedy career

Mel Brooks turned 100 on June 28, 2026, marking a century for the Brooklyn-born writer, director, producer and actor who turned irreverence into a mainstream business. Before the birthday, a new documentary had already cast him as a living institution, and Brooks answered in the simplest way possible: he said he was born to make people laugh.

Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks came up through the postwar comedy world that fed television’s Golden Age. He wrote for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, which aired on NBC from February 25, 1950, to June 5, 1954, and he also worked the Borscht Belt circuit before moving deeper into television. That path shaped a style built on speed, absurdity and the pleasure of puncturing authority, a formula that still echoes through sketch comedy and studio parody.

The turning point came with Get Smart, which Brooks co-created with Buck Henry. The series premiered on September 18, 1965, ran for five seasons and became one of the defining television comedies of its era, collecting 14 Emmy nominations and winning seven. Its mix of spy spoof, deadpan delivery and comic escalation helped normalize a kind of broad, high-concept satire that later became part of the mainstream. Brooks was not just mocking genres; he was showing Hollywood how far a joke could be pushed without losing the audience.

That approach reached a sharper edge with The Producers, which won Brooks the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1969. The film’s satire of a Broadway scheme built around a Nazi-themed musical was the kind of risk many studios would still hesitate to touch, yet Brooks turned it into one of his signature pieces of commercial mischief. Decades later, the adaptation of The Producers became a Broadway juggernaut, winning 12 Tony Awards in 2001 and setting a record at the time.

Brooks’s standing only hardened with age. The Academy gave him an Honorary Oscar in 2023 for his “comedic brilliance, producing acumen and expansive body of work,” and a new HBO documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, brought together Brooks, Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Nicholas Brooks, Conan O’Brien, Jerry Seinfeld, Nick Kroll, Dana Gould, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. The cast list alone makes the point: Brooks’s influence still runs through the people who shape comedy now, even as the kind of boundary-pushing satire he made famous would face a far tighter studio climate today.