No. 1

He started a novel titled “Springtime for Hitler.”
No. 2

He turned that into a play.
No. 3

He turned that play into a flop film titled “The Producers.”

....No. 26

No one mocked Hitler as often or with as much force.

.....No. 36

“Blazing Saddles” is the greatest revisionist western of all time. (Sorry, Clint.)

No. 37

You couldn’t do “Blazing Saddles” today. Or then. But he did.

....No. 49

Mel Brooks did more than anyone to take the Jewish sensibility out of the closet of American comedy.

It didn’t budge easily. In fact, though he and Carl Reiner regularly killed at parties in the 1950s with an improv double act, they initially didn’t record it because Brooks felt the humor was too insular. This was the 2000 Year Old Man, a heavily accented ancient figure interviewed about his experience with everything from the invention of fire to time with Shakespeare.

When Reiner, playing the straight-man interviewer, asked him about Paul Revere, Brooks called the hero of the American Revolution an “antisemite bastard,” saying that he ran through town crying, “The Yiddish are coming! The Yiddish are coming!” Informed of his mistake, Brooks turned sheepish, saying he felt bad about missing Revere’s funeral......

Once Brooks decided to make this inside joke for everyone, he spent his career inverting this formula, taking the most gentile mass culture, whether it be James Bond or “Star Wars,” and filtering it through a Jewish lens. He mainstreamed Jewish comedy by making everyone sound like a Jew, even cowboys and robots. A few peers did something similar, but none were as relentless, as pointed or as successful as Brooks in making the Jewish comic voice the lingua franca of American comedy.

This began with the 2000 Year Man, where the core of the joke imagined what would happen if we saw every major event ever from the perspective of a grousing unimpressed salesman. In the original album, Brooks describes his business as selling Stars of David — “As soon as religion came in, I was one of the first in that” — but when the opportunity arose to make money off crosses, he passed. With a verbal shrug, he said: “I didn’t know it would be such a hit.”

— Jason Zinoman