That might sound like an odd answer for someone who has so unabashedly lived nearly a century in the public eye. Yet Brooks has been such a non-stop performer that it can sometimes be difficult to see where the schtick ends and the self begins.
One person describes Brooks, as a newborn, thinking the delivery doctor smacking him on the rear was applause. In an earlier clip, an interviewer laments Brooks’ apparent lack of introspection. He replies that he’s merely “a coalescence of vapor.” When Brooks gave his Oscar speech, for the screenplay to The Producers, he said he would speak from the heart: “Ba-bum, ba-bum.”
So is what’s inside Brooks just jokes? I’d say — and I think this is what makes The 99 Year Old Man not just an exhaustive documentary but a moving and even stirring one — it’s more the opposite. Brooks’ comedy, from the “2000 Year Old Man” to History of the World, Part I, has always derived from something deeper, more personal and intrinsically Jewish than its slapstick qualities sometimes have suggested.
“Comedy is a sensational and sometimes spectacular political weapon,” Brooks says in the film.
There are countless big names who come in to speak to Brooks’ boldness as a comedian, among them Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Adam Sandler and Conan O’Brien. But I’m tempted to think Brooks’ legacy is in how, for him, life and comedy are one: pulse and punchline together.
You can see that in Brooks’ decades of marriage with Bancroft, who describes, every time her husband came home as like a party. And you can see it in Brooks’ undying friendship with Reiner. After the deaths of their wives, the two friends would nightly meet to eat deli sandwiches and watch old movies. Reiner once recalled they’d watch films “with lines like ‘Secure the perimeter!’”
