He’s a clown who’s smiling on the outside, and smiling on the inside A magician whose tricks never had any mystery. And a sweet man who could do with spreading a little sourness once in a while. A Life In Brief Born Melvin Kaminsky, Brooklyn, New York, 28 June 1926.Family First wife: Florence Baum, married 1951-1961, three children – Stefanie, Nicky and Eddie. No one had spoken of his films for many years; his brand of scatological, scattershot parody had been overtaken repeatedly, first by the Zucker brothers in the 1980s, then by the Farrelly brothers and the Wayan brothers in the 1990s. So it is as much of a freakish accident that the world should warm to The Producers as it is that the audience-within-the-play should go cock-a-hoop for “Springtime for Hitler”.It’s unlikely that Brooks will use his new-found clout and confidence to push back any boundaries; instead, a new film of The Producers, based this time on the stage show and starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Nicole Kidman, starts shooting in January, while a sequel to the unloved Spaceballs has also been announced; a Broadway adaptation of Young Frankenstein is reputed to be in the offing.Regardless of the popularity of these enterprises, Brooks himself will remain a kind of anti-enigma.

Second wife: Anne Bancroft, married 1964-present, one son – Max.Career Gag-writer on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (1954); recorded comedy album The 2,000 Year Old Man with Carl Reiner (1960); made the Oscar-winning cartoon The Critic (1963); wrote and directed The Producers (1968), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World: Part I (1981). And his response to critics who accused him of coarseness? “Bullshit!”In some ways, the subsequent stage triumph of The Producers has been a greater redemption than Brooks could have hoped for. Sure enough, it came thick and fast with one dud after another: Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead And Loving It (1995). If they were overjoyed by vulgarity, then he would give them as much as they could stomach. I think there are jokes and asides in Young Frankenstein that represent Brooks at his best. But viewed next to Blazing Saddles, a picture emerges of a man in conflict with himself – someone who has to play to his basest comic instincts in order to secure the adoration he needs to survive.There were delightful passages too in his next films – the 1976 Silent Movie, High Anxiety, and the 1981 History of the World: Part I, which includes an Inquisition dance routine that is even more outrageous than “Springtime for Hitler”. But you could see the comic craftsman giving way to the demands of his audience.

The bucks rolled in.In the same year, he released another genre parody – Young Frankenstein – characterised by unusual wit and affection. This was as much an homage to the classic Universal horror movies as it was a send-up of them, and to this end Brooks even managed to shoot on some of the sets from James Whale’s original Frankenstein. The wonder is that the same man could have made both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein – and so closely together at that. He crammed the screen with breast jokes, and gave pride of place to a long scene depicting flatulence around a campfire. How crushing that must have been for a man whose craving for love and approval was so authentic, and so public. Brooks’s next move, to broaden his appeal, was as effective as it was calculated.

Blazing Saddles was a spoof western about the appointment of a black sheriff in a town of rednecks. This 1974 picture had moments of comic poise and knowingness – the opening scene, for example, in which members of a black chain gang toiling on the railroad croon Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” – but Brooks must have twigged that it was not these fleeting examples of subtlety that would give the movie the kind of audience he coveted. The show-stopper for which the film is best known – the “Springtime for Hitler” dance number – is, conversely, endearingly glossy. It is one of Brooks’s cleverest tricks in the film that he should make its most bad-taste episode so pleasing to the eye.The Producers won Brooks an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but neither that film, nor his little-seen 1970 follow-up, The Twelve Chairs, was widely liked at the time. But all that jumping in the swimming pool, that flailing around on the backs of tyrants, that laughing at Nazis (in The Producers) or racism (in Blazing Saddles) somehow removes from those autobiographical experiences any trace of the rancour and wrath that is present in the most complex comedians.He has never given free rein in his work, for instance, to the kind of emotions that made comedy writing in the 1950s such a vicious, edgy trade. When Caesar erupted into one of his customary rages, Brooks would scramble on to a filing cabinet, leap on the comedian’s back and yell “Down, boy!” until the fury dissolved into laughter.That’s the Brooks way – he defuses tension with slapstick, just as he triumphs over his demons, and other people’s, simply by mocking them It’s an admirable approach. That first sequence in which the pop-eyed and perspiring Bialystock (the legendary Zero Mostel) plays lewd games with elderly investors still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth; discretion may be observed in front of the camera, but it’s quite clear how this ghoulish crumb-bum gets his kicks.

You have only to sample some of the bone-dry wisdom of the 2,000 Year Old Man, the character he created with Carl Reiner, another Sid Caesar stalwart, to appreciate that Brooks helped to shape the comic vernacular as subtly as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, or, much later, Jerry Seinfeld.When Brooks made his writing and directing debut with The Producers in 1968, a few years after co-creating the hit TV series Get Smart!, he gave the picture a sticky, grimy tone. Which is not to say that he didn’t tend lovingly to the fertile landscape of Jewish-American comedy. Where is that very human, deliciously petty-minded panic, in Brooks’s own writing? It isn’t there. Allen has called those Sid Caesar shows “a mass of hostilities and jealousies”, and it is known that Brooks referred to this bespectacled upstart as “a little red-haired rat”. And when you have lost your father to tuberculosis at the age of two, as Brooks did, and scraped through a below-the-breadline childhood in Brooklyn as the youngest of four brothers, perhaps comedy is the most reliable defence available. And though it is rumoured that Brooks and Caesar came to blows more than once over a gag, literally putting the punch into punchline, Brooks knew how to handle his boss.