Funny Man: Mel Brooks Audiobook (Free)

A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy large Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Little Orson: The Many years of Good luck and Genius on the Path to Resident Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.

Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award-winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camcorder too) of some of the most influential comedy strikes of our period, about Funny Man: Mel Brooks including The 2,000 Season Old Guy, Get Wise, The Companies, Blazing Saddles, and Little Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, movie director, comedian, and composer entertained the globe, his first market was his family.

The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was created on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Developing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was brief and homely, a mischievous child whose birth part was to make the family laugh.

Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily in the Kaminsky family members proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand of popular humor is at the center of expert biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. Within this exhaustively investigated and wonderfully novelistic take a look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and disadvantages that designed Brooks’ mindset, his willpower, his persona, and his humor.

McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic trip that is the famous funnyman’s life tale, from Brooks’s years as a child in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television-working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner-to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a deep breathing around the Jewish immigrant culture that affected Brooks, snapshots from the golden age of comedy, behind the moments revelations about the celebrated displays and movies, and a informing look at the four-decade passionate partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers an excellent man’s unforgettable lifestyle tale and an anatomy of the American dream of success.