The fact that one of the most renowned performers in American history—a man who went on to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award—never completed college is something to think about. Mel Brooks, who was born Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, intended to study psychology at Brooklyn College. Any formal education he had planned for himself was put on hold when the Army arrived.
In January 1944, Brooks received his diploma from Williamsburg’s Eastern District High School. According to him, he didn’t feel especially appreciated or celebrated at high school. He was small, bullied a lot, and discovered that humor was more effective than confrontation. He claimed that his humor stemmed from anger for a reason. It wasn’t abstract. It originated from particular hallways, particular children, and particular instances of feeling the tiniest person in any space.
However, he did take in music during those years. Buddy Rich, who was raised in the same Williamsburg neighborhood, taught him how to play the drums. It’s an important but often overlooked detail. By the time Rich was instructing a teenage Brooks in timekeeping, he was already a jazz legend. Brooks was shaped by that kind of unofficial, community-based mentoring in ways that a classroom most likely couldn’t.
At the age of fourteen, Brooks secured employment as a poolside performer at a Borscht Belt hotel before he was even drafted. He was giving a performance. observing crowds. In front of actual people who had paid to be somewhere but weren’t necessarily there to watch him, we learned what landed and what didn’t in real time. You either make it through that type of education or you don’t.
Brooks was initially sent to the Virginia Military Institute as part of the Army Specialized Training Program after being drafted in 1944. There, he received instruction in saber fighting, electrical engineering, and horseback riding. It’s really difficult to imagine. As Allied forces advanced into Germany, he ultimately served in the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion of the 78th Infantry Division, taking part in the Battle of the Bulge and assisting in the removal of booby-trapped buildings. He found land mines. He constructed bridges across the Rhine and Roer rivers. It is highly unlikely that Brooklyn College offered any psychology courses.
For Brooks, surviving that ordeal seems to have made things more clear. He has talked about responding to German propaganda loudspeakers by singing Al Jolson songs into a bullhorn, which reveals something about how he dealt with fear. Not in silence. Not by retreating. With cacophony, disrespect, and a specific kind of defiance.
His formal education was essentially over after the war. The years that followed were more akin to an apprenticeship; he worked as a stand-up comedian and drummer in the Catskills, hanging around Sid Caesar until Caesar eventually paid him to write jokes. By the time Brooks was twenty-four, he was working full-time as a television writer on Your Show of Shows with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. By most accounts, that writers’ room was a sort of graduate school unto itself. Brooks once received a copy of Gogol’s Dead Souls from head writer Mel Tolkin, who told him he had “the beginnings of something called a mind.” According to Brooks, he still reads it once a year.
Perhaps Brooks would have been a better psychologist if he had completed college. It’s difficult to think it would have made him a more humorous director. Brooklyn, the Borscht Belt, a European war, and a writers’ room full of nervous, intelligent people who had to fill an hour of television every week were all part of his education. No transcript reflects that type of education. However, it is clearly present in all of his creations.
