By Karen Sternheimer

When I was a child, I really wanted to see Mel Brooks’ The History of the World, Part I. The ads on TV looked funny, and other kids I knew allegedly had seen the movie and talked about how good it was, re-enacting some of the funnier bits.

Alas, it was rated R, and I would have to wait until I was an adult to watch it and every other Mel Brooks movie. His movies blended silliness that appealed to children and sexual humor that appealed to adults, but they were off-limits for kids like me. The political satire that gets slipped into this comedic mix is a great example of the sociological importance of his work.

A recent plane ride gave me the time—nearly 4 hours— to watch Judd Apatow’s documentary Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man, complete with interviews and a multitude of clips from his comedy career that dates back to 1950. It’s clear from the body of his work that he sees himself not just as comedic writer, director, actor, and producer, but a social critic. He talked about the role of the court jester to make fun of those in power in an old interview. His movies tackle diverse themes like oppression, economic inequality, racism, and even homelessness (Life Stinks, one of his later movies from 1991).

The Producers, his first feature film that would later be a hit Broadway musical, debuted in 1967, a year that produced many great works of social criticism. Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate (starring Brooks’ wife, Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were also released that year. The first two films feature young people who are lost and drift into trouble—robbing banks, having an affair with his parents’ friend—while the last one deals with interracial relationships.

The Producers, by contrast, is a musical—a genre less associated with serious social criticism. The film takes aim at Hitler and the Nazis, with a play within the film titled “Springtime for Hitler.” The film also serves as a critique of the entertainment industry itself, as the play was created as a sure flop in order to cash in and bilk investors. Just 22 years after the end of World War II, laughing at Hitler caught a lot of people off guard, especially the movie critics who initially panned the film, although it went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Brooks also played Hitler in this 1978 episode of the TV show Peeping Times; as a Jewish man and US Army veteran who fought in Europe during World War II, Brooks has the last laugh. As a caricature we are made to laugh at, Brooks highlights the absurdity of Hitler’s rise to power.

His 1974 film Blazing Saddles was a parody of the western movie genre with a twist: a Black sheriff is appointed with the expectation that chaos would ensue, and the land could be taken by a wealthy villain. The town is shocked to see their new sheriff, locals describe him using racial epithets, draw their guns and threaten to shoot him. But this scene between Gene Wilder and Cleavon Little clearly reflects the Civil Rights Era in which it was created, as Wilder’s character calls them racists morons:

Blazing Saddles also takes aim at white supremacists and the stereotypes that trigger them:

The film ends with the camera pulling back to reveal that they are on a film set, not in a small western town in the previous century, but in the present, in Burbank, California.

The movie I never got to watch as a child, The History of the World, Part I, comedically and crudely highlights the extreme power imbalances within the Roman Empire and other episodes of European history. Mel Brooks plays a comedian who insults the emperor, and is ordered to be killed. This scene emphasizes the greed of the Roman senate and their disregard for the high cost of housing for the poor.

In one of the film’s most famous scenes, a show-stopping musical number where Brooks finds humor in the Spanish Inquisition, a period that involved the expulsion, torture, and murder of Jews and Muslims:

Some decried this scene as making light of a very dark period in history. Brooks has a long history of finding humor in tragedy, and highlighting its absurdity in musical numbers. It’s also an iconoclastic critique of classic Hollywood filmmaking and the banality of both evil and the mundane subject matter of musical interludes.

In rewatching these classics today, some of the bawdy humor hasn’t aged well. Some scenes are clearly sexist and homophobic. There are many busty scantily clad women, (albeit sometimes smart women who deliver jokes, and are not just objectified). Gay men are often used as punchlines. At the end of Blazing Saddles, a dance number openly exploits gay stereotypes and includes anti-gay violence.  And it’s hard to re-watch the movie without cringing by the repeated use (or interrupted use) of the n-word, even if it is to highlight the absurdity of racsim. The notion that a musical “Springtime for Hitler” would obviously fail drives the plot in The Producers, but it’s not clear that such a musical would fail today as much as it would have 60 years ago.

Mel Brooks turned 100 this year. Love or loathe his work or somewhere in between, he has attempted to address many concepts we study within sociology: inequality, racism, abuse of power—the tagline “It’s good to be the king!” echoes throughout the French Revolution scenes in The History of the World, Part I.

What are your favorite scenes from Mel Brooks movies? How do they reflect sociological concepts?