{"id":934324,"date":"2026-05-03T04:54:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-03T04:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/934324\/"},"modified":"2026-05-03T04:54:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-03T04:54:18","slug":"the-1984-movie-mel-brooks-cant-stand-thats-not-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/934324\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1984 movie Mel Brooks can’t stand: “That’s not comedy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mel<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Comedy is an entirely subjective art form, but having probably forgotten more about making audiences laugh than most people will ever know, Mel Brooks<\/a> has a pretty good idea of what it means to be funny.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been his business for the last 70 years, with the comic and filmmaker getting his start in television before upending the genre in the eyes of mainstream Hollywood with his signature brand of anarchic farce, usually accompanied by studio executives and producers panicking in the boardroom.<\/p>\n

They questioned The Producers, and it won Brooks an Academy Award for \u2018Best Original Screenplay\u2019 before taking its place as a classic. They questioned him on Blazing Saddles, and he delivered what he thinks is the funniest feature film ever made<\/a>, and one of big-screen comedy\u2019s all-time greats.<\/p>\n

While he wasn\u2019t delivering classic after classic after classic, the EGOT-winning icon has been around for so long that he\u2019s now the elder statesman\u2019s elder statesman of comedy, with his influence spanning several generations and giving him almost deified status among the many writers, directors, and actors who hold him up as a shining beacon of how to tickle the funny bone.<\/p>\n

Brooks\u2019 humour was often crude and aimed at the lowest common denominator<\/a>, but he still developed an aversion to the more risqu\u00e9, puerile, and gross-out films that took the formula he\u2019d perfected in the 1960s and 1970s and applied it to their own work, albeit without the heart and personal touch.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1980s, cinemas were rife with those kinds of pictures, with Revenge of the Nerds, Bachelor Party, The Last American Virgin, Porky\u2019s, and others ushering in a new age of R-rated shenanigans. Taking the lay of the land, Brooks didn\u2019t like what he saw, singling one of them out for particular scorn.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s always been of the mind that comedy wasn\u2019t treated with the respect that it deserved<\/a> in the United States, where it was written off as a lower form of entertainment. That\u2019s why he had such a soft spot for France, where he was treated as a filmmaker first and foremost, not just a comedian.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver there, comedy is an ironic term,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a matter of being funny. The word itself translates more as, \u2018Can we laugh through our tears?\u2019 The French know it\u2019s hard. They don\u2019t laugh at Police Academy. That\u2019s not comedy. They want comedy to be about something, to have a philosophical base.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the definition of the term, 1984\u2019s Police Academy is a comedy. A very successful one, too, earning $150 million at the box office. That said, its scattershot approach to gags and lack of any cohesion beyond throwing every joke at the wall in the hopes that some of them would stick didn\u2019t sit too well with Brooks, who had such a low opinion of the franchise-launcher that he didn\u2019t even consider it a comedy at all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still Comedy is an entirely subjective art form, but having probably forgotten more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":912598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,10621,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-934324","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-mel-brooks","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116508863173910635","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/912598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}