The joy of the two-part HBO documentary “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” is, naturally, spending time with the work of its subject, one of the most reliably funny people in Hollywood history. But there’s also a thread of sorrow that runs through the three-and-a-half-hour series, and by the time you finish, those laughs may be mixed with tears.
Directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, “The 99 Year Old Man!,” premiering Thursday night on HBO, is an exhaustive look at Brooks’s life and art. As such, it’s easy to find yourself giggling uncontrollably over clips from “The Producers” (1967) or “Blazing Saddles” (1974). That alone is a pleasure. Still, this is more than just a history of how these cinematic classics came to be. It is also about Brooks’s longevity and the loneliness of being one of the last of a generation.
That’s fitting for Brooks, whose output has always had a lot of depth lingering beneath the fart jokes. In interviews with Apatow, he plays down just how risky and groundbreaking his satire was, whether his targets were Nazis, racists in America or the ruling class (or his critics). He still insists that laughs were always his primary goal.
“The 99 Year Old Man!” — the title of which is a riff on Brooks and Carl Reiner’s famous routine “The 2000 Year Old Man” — charts the well-known ups and lesser-known downs of Brooks’s career. He was, in some ways, a perpetual underdog who thought he was washed up in the early 1960s and was never fully embraced by critics. (He was often downright disparaged.) It also is a multifaceted love story, devoting extensive time to his collaborative, passionate romance with his wife of over 40 years, Anne Bancroft, who died in 2005, and his deep friendship with Reiner, who died in June 2020.
The losses that Brooks has experienced hang heavy over Part 2. It opens with a delightfully funny bit in which he recounts the mental exercises he performs each morning, but soon a profound sadness creeps in, as we get a look into the loneliness that eventually comes with a very long life. Compounding that sense of melancholy are new interviews with other colleagues whom Brooks has since outlived, including David Lynch, Carl Reiner and Reiner’s son Rob, who offers moving insights into the close relationship between his father and Brooks. That the documentary was finished before Rob Reiner’s murder last month adds another layer of sadness. You can’t help but wonder how Brooks must be dealing with the news.
But for all of that tragedy, “The 99 Year Old Man!” demonstrates, in often hilarious fashion, how even now, Brooks always has a joke at the ready. He’s still laughing. Why shouldn’t we?
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