Top 100 Mel Brooks Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We’re unrehearsed.”

— Mel Brooks

2. “It’s good to be the king.”

— Mel Brooks

3. “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

— Mel Brooks

4. “Everything starts with writing.”

— Mel Brooks

5. “As long as the world is turning and spinning, we’re gonna be dizzy and we’re gonna make mistakes.”

— Mel Brooks

6. “My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives.”

— Mel Brooks

7. “That’s it baby, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

— Mel Brooks

8. “I don’t think in terms of results at all. I think: what next insanity can I shock the world with?”

— Mel Brooks

9. “Life literally abounds in comedy if you just look around you.”

— Mel Brooks

10. “No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn’t. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.”

— Mel Brooks

11. “You got to be brave. If you feel something, you’ve really got to risk it.”

— Mel Brooks

12. “Not only should we laugh about Hitler. We must laugh about him. Especially in Berlin.”

— Mel Brooks

13. “We mock the things we are to be.”

— Mel Brooks

14. “Good taste is the enemy of comedy.”

— Mel Brooks

15. “My liveliness is based on an incredible fear of death. In order to keep death at bay, I do a lot of “Yah! Yah! Yah!” And death says, “All right. He’s too noisy and busy. I’ll wait for someone who’s sitting quietly, half asleep.””

— Mel Brooks

16. “Ill just say whats in my heart: Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.”

— Mel Brooks

17. “If you’re alive, make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death.”

— Mel Brooks

18. “Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before.”

— Mel Brooks

19. “Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made.”

— Mel Brooks

20. “The final test of fame is to have a crazy person imagine he is you.”

— Mel Brooks

21. “An egg cream can do anything. An egg cream to a Brooklyn Jew is like water to an Arab. A Jew will kill for an egg cream. It’s the Jewish malmsey.”

— Mel Brooks

22. “The egg cream is psychologically the opposite of circumcision – it pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness.”

— Mel Brooks

23. “Humor is just another defense against the universe.”

— Mel Brooks

24. “I was born on the kitchen table. We were so poor my mother couldn’t afford to have me; the lady next door gave birth to me.”

— Mel Brooks

25. “Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.”

— Mel Brooks

26. “Critics can’t even make music by rubbing their back legs together.”

— Mel Brooks

27. “Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy and Mel Brooks didn’t! Niezsche was right! There is no God! There is no God!”

— Mel Brooks

28. “Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.”

— Mel Brooks

29. “The only weapon I’ve got is comedy.”

— Mel Brooks

30. “Evil will always triumph because good is dumb” – Dark Helmet.”

— Mel Brooks

31. “I usually start with the words. The rhythm of the words gives me the rhythm of the song, and then I look for the musical highlights in it to carry it.”

— Mel Brooks

32. “Usually when a lot of men get together, it’s called a war.”

— Mel Brooks

33. “Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin...”

— Mel Brooks

34. “I’ve always loved songwriting, and I vowed to be a songwriter like Cole Porter when I was only 9 years old.”

— Mel Brooks

35. “Look, I had to take chances or it wasn’t fun being funny.”

— Mel Brooks

Featured in: Fun Quotes

36. “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.”

— Mel Brooks

37. “Woody Allen is a genius. His films are wonderful. He’s poetic, but he’s also a critic. He artfully steps back from a social setting and criticizes it without – I suspect – without letting himself be vulnerable to it.”

— Mel Brooks

38. “Sir, I have seen your film and it is vulgar! Madame, my film rises below vulgarity.”

— Mel Brooks

39. “I was out in the combat engineers. We would throw up bridges in advance of the infantry but mainly we would just throw up.”

— Mel Brooks

40. “In every spoof I make real love to the things I am spoofing.”

— Mel Brooks

41. “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!’”

— Mel Brooks

42. “Everything we do in life is based on fear, especially love.”

— Mel Brooks

43. “Nothing is free. You got to pay to be in society. First you start with homework.”

— Mel Brooks

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

44. “I’m married to a beautiful and talented woman who can lift your spirits just by looking at you.”

— Mel Brooks

45. “All right, I am often brash, rude and brutally direct. Someday I’m going to die and I don’t have time to toe-dance around the periphery of hatred.”

— Mel Brooks

46. “Be interested in everything. You don’t have to adore it. I don’t adore hip-hop, I don’t think it’s great music, but I’m interested, I listen. I watch a lot of new films, I see everything. I still read, I like books, whether they are old books, new books. I’m interested – you gotta stay interested!”

— Mel Brooks

47. “You cannot have fun with anything that you don’t love or admire or respect.”

— Mel Brooks

Featured in: Fun Quotes

48. “If you’re quiet, you’re not living. You’ve got to be noisy and colorful and lively.”

— Mel Brooks

49. “One day, God said ‘Let there be prey.’ And he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder.”

— Mel Brooks

50. “My job is to go out and entertain the most people possible. The job is to make people laugh. I don’t have a mission. I don’t have a torch to burn.”

— Mel Brooks