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I love [Nikolai] Gogol's great eye for idiot behavior. Gogol said that life is so tragic, so stupendously sad that we'd better laugh a lot and enjoy ourselves. You either get a sense of humor going or you go under.

Mel Brooks

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Mel Brooks
Age: 98
Born: 1926
Born: June 28
Actor
Composer
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Librettist
Lyricist
Screenwriter
Soldier
Songwriter
Stage Actor
Brooklyn
New York
Melvin Brooks
Melvin Kaminsky
Love
Humor
Life
Either
Eye
Gogol
Enjoy
Tragic
Sense
Idiot
Better
Laugh
Great
Behavior
Going
Laughing

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Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.
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I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.
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I'll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there's some great comedy minds and performances.
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Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.
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But I have bad taste with a deep fount of intellectuality.
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If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win.
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Immortality is a by-product of good work. Masterpieces are not for artists, they're for critics. Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together. My message to the world is 'Let's swing, sing, shout, make noise! Let's not mimic death before our time comes! Let's be wet and noisy!'
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That's it baby, if you've got it, flaunt it.
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Tolstoy was the most gifted writer who ever lived. It's like he stuck a pen in his heart and it didn't even go through his mind on its way to the page.
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Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.
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I make people laugh for a living. I believe I can say objectively that what I do I do as well as anybody. Just say I'm one of the best broken field runners that ever lived. For 35 years I was a cult hero, an underground funny.
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I wanted to entertain so badly that I kept at it until I was good. I just browbeat my way into show business.
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Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn't! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!
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In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.
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Being short never bothered me for three seconds. The rest of the time I wanted to commit suicide.
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I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.
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You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself.
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I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.
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He who hesitates is poor.
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