Later on, the president turned to each of the honorees to say a few words about their contributions to the arts. Dave Brubeck was before me, and Obama said very complimentary things about Brubeck and his musical genius. When he was finished and it was my turn, I interrupted him with an ad-lib about Brubeck. I said, “He never understood 4/4 time.”
That got a big laugh, especially from Brubeck. And Obama retorted with, “Mel, I’m trying to say something nice about you, now. Please don’t upstage me!”
That kept me quiet! Now I’m going to take this opportunity to shamelessly share with you the praise that the president of the United States heaped upon me.
“By the time he was nine, this boy from Brooklyn had seen his first musical and dreamed of becoming ‘the King of Broadway.’ But World War II meant service in the Army—or, as he put it, ‘the European Theater of Operations’ with ‘lots of operations’ and ‘very little theater.’ Returning home, he found success cranking out quips for Sid Caesar—or as Mel described his reaction to success—‘panic, hysteria, insomnia…and years of psychoanalysis.’
“That’s right, we’re reading back all your golden moments here, Mel. Unfortunately, many of the punch lines that have defined Mel Brooks’ success cannot be repeated here. I was telling him that I went to see Blazing Saddles when I was ten. And he pointed out that I think, according to the ratings, I should not have been allowed in the theater. That’s true. I think I had a fake ID. But the statute of limitations has passed.
“Suffice it to say, in his satires and parodies, no cow is sacred, no genre is safe. He mocked the musical—and Hitler—in The Producers, the Western in Blazing Saddles, and the horror film in Young Frankenstein.
“But behind all the insanity and absurdity, there’s been a method to Mel’s madness. He’s described his work as ‘unearthing the truth that is all around us.’ And by illuminating uncomfortable truths—about racism and sexism and anti-Semitism—he’s been called ‘our jester, asking us to see ourselves as we really are, determined that we laugh ourselves sane.’？”
I hope he didn’t get in trouble for revealing that he had snuck into Blazing Saddles!
Later on, when I was talking to the president alone, he put his arm around my shoulders and asked me how I was getting along having recently lost Anne after our forty-five years together. There is no good answer to that question, but I told him how much I appreciated that he was so caring.
The part of the Kennedy Center Honors that you see on TV happened later that night. It was a veritable explosion of talented people saluting talented people. Someone wisely asked Susan Stroman to be the one to put together a little show for my section of the gala. One of the funniest moments was Harry Connick, Jr., singing my song “High Anxiety.” After the first few notes the little section of the stage he was standing on started to rise. By the time he finished the song he must have been forty or fifty feet in the air and was clearly feeling the anxiety in “High Anxiety.” He got a roar of laughter when right before the final note he said, “Can someone get me down from here PLEASE?”
An unexpected laugh at my expense came when Ben Stiller took the stage to salute Robert De Niro. He looked up at the balcony where we were seated and decided to have some fun with the other honorees. He called me, “A pioneer. A trailblazer. He’s like the Barack Obama for short funny Jews.”
That got a big laugh out of both me and the president. It was all kind of surreal. It’s hard to really explain how many different things I felt coursing through me that night, but suffice to say, it was another night to remember.
Me and the prez, laughing it up.
* * *
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The Kennedy Center Honors was not the last time I would visit the White House. In 2015 I was named as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor given to artists by the United States government. （Up until then, the highest honor that had been bestowed on me by the government was making me a corporal in the U.S. Army.） So the following year I went back to Washington, D.C., to receive the medal from someone who now I considered my old pal, President Barack Obama.
I was filled with emotion by the president’s speech:
“We are here today to honor the very best of their fields, creators who give every piece of themselves to their craft. As Mel Brooks once said to his writers on Blazing Saddles, which is a great film: ‘Write anything you want, because we’ll never be heard from again. We will all be arrested for this movie.’ Now, to be fair, Mel also said, a little more eloquently, that, ‘Every human being has hundreds of separate people living inside his skin. And the talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living within him.’ And that, I think, is what the arts and the humanities do—they lift up our identities, and make us see ourselves in each other. And today’s honorees each possess a gift for this kind of creative empathy—a gift that allows us to exchange a sense of what’s most important and most profound in us, and to identify with our collective experience as Americans.”