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Ask Americans--well, Jews, well, most Jews, well, some Jews--over the age of 60 who is the funniest man on Earth? The answer is "Mel Brooks." Brooks is the last great Hollywood Jew and when he goes--kinahora not for another 25 years--something will die with him. He might be the last great American Jew, period, some cross between a Kishinev shochet and a Williamsburg ganif, with that voice so full of wryness that the mere anticipation of what it might next utter brings a smile to our lips and comfort to our hearts.

It started in Europe, where the American-born Brooks followed his brothers into the army and ended up serving in the final advance on Germany in 1945. Mel says it was the war that really connected him to a deeper sense of his Jewish identity. In Patrick McGilligan's exhaustive biography, Funny Man, he says, "I knew what Hitler was doing to Jews, so I really did feel this was a proper and just war." He even tells a story of being called a "dirty Jew" by a fellow GI during training and reflexively lunging at him, proud of being "a tough Jew from Brooklyn." By the end of his tour, he was entertaining troops with what would become his signature impression: Adolf Hitler with a comb for a tiny mustache and manic German gibberish.

Upon returning to New York, and every day hence, he has carried the torch of Jewish indignation, and pride. Publicly. This torch has created gifts for the millions, Jew and gentile, but especially a subset of us Jews for whom the jokes are not only funny but deeply personal and somehow cleansing--an unabashed embrace of being one of us.

Though he wrote for Sid Caesar throughout the 1950s and beyond, Mel's big break came with the release of the "2000 Year Old Man" in 1960, recorded with his friend Carl Reiner. In it, Reiner plays the straight man to Brooks' ancient storyteller, the twist being that the ancient man speaks like a Lower East Side loxmonger circa 1925. Part of what makes the conceit hilarious is that the 2000 Year Old Man's responses to Reiner's questions don't often reflect the answer an ancient Israelite might give, but rather the answer that your great-uncle Sauly would. On Ed Sullivan in 1961, he waxes rhapsodic about the greatness of wax paper, "mankind's greatest development." When asked about the discovery of space he says, "That was good. That was nice. Finding space was cute."

Interviewed by McGilligan, Carl Reiner is asked why it took them so long to actually perform the sketch publicly. "Would WASP America get him? ... Would Christians find the old Jew funny? Do 'our people' still consider the Yiddish accent to be non grata?" Whatever the Jews thought about the accent, the Christians ate it up. Including the Queen Mum apparently. As Reiner recalled, "If the biggest shiksa in the world loves it, we're home free."

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