Happy birthday!

… Celebrating Mel Brooks, the Funniest Jew on Earth - Tablet Magazine.

Though he wrote for Sid Caesar throughout the 1950s and beyond, Mel’s big break came with the release of the “2000 Year Old Man” in 1960, recorded with his friend Carl Reiner. In it, Reiner plays the straight man to Brooks’ ancient storyteller, the twist being that the ancient man speaks like a Lower East Side loxmonger circa 1925. Part of what makes the conceit hilarious is that the 2000 Year Old Man’s responses to Reiner’s questions don’t often reflect the answer an ancient Israelite might give, but rather the answer that your great-uncle Sauly would. On Ed Sullivan in 1961, he waxes rhapsodic about the greatness of wax paper, “mankind’s greatest development.” When asked about the discovery of space he says, “That was good. That was nice. Finding space was cute.”