Katie Kaminsky already had three boys, and had been hoping for a girl. But instead, she got little Melvin, born June 28, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. When Mel was only two, his father, Max, died, marking his youngest son with a “brushstroke of depression that really never left.”
From the start, Mel was his mother’s darling. He was also spoiled by his three older brothers and an extended network of aunts, uncles, and neighbors in his poor but tightly knit Jewish neighborhood. “I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again,” Brooks writes. “Until I was five, I don’t remember my feet touching the ground.” (The reader wonders if all this affection may have contributed to Brook’s legendary ego, amply evident in All About Me!)
He paints a loving picture of his bustling, crowded childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn, swarmed with kids playing stickball, going to the movies, and cutting up on the corner.
The irrepressible Brooks became the “undisputed champ at corner shtick.” As the shortest kid in class, it was a powerful weapon against bigger, tougher boys. “Comedy made me friends, big friends to protect me from bullies,” he writes. “I made them laugh, and you don’t hit the kid that makes you laugh.”
Brooks also had overwhelming ambition, which found its purpose when his uncle took him to his first Broadway show: Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. While hiding on the floor of his uncle’s cab on the way home (since he was an illegal fare), Brooks announced:
“Uncle Joe, I am not going to go to work in the Garment Center like everyone else in our neighborhood.” I knew I had bigger fish to fry. I said, “I am going into show business and nothing will stop me!” And, strangely enough, nothing did.
Borscht Belt Busboy
“I wasn’t getting kissed for just being Melvin anymore,” Brooks writes of his teenage years. “Now I had to go out and earn it. I needed to be kissed for being somebody. So, I sought the spotlight.”
A persistent pest, Brooks came under the mentorship of local comedian Don Apple. When he was 14, Apple got him a summer gig as a busboy at a Catskills resort in the legendary Borscht Belt, where countless comedians honed their chops.
English (US) ·