Not surprisingly （and not politely） he said no. And not surprisingly, I was not taking no for an answer. Every once in a while I would suffer an attack of outright no-holds-barred madness. This was one of them.
I went nuts. I ran around the rehearsal area, which had a lot of props. I saw a straw boater hat and then I grabbed a white duster coat （a long coat that people wore to drive cars in 1893） that Carl used to wear sometimes in sketches. I put on the hat, coat, and a pair of goggles, and I burst into the meeting! I jumped up on the long conference table and yelled: “Lindy landed! He’s in Paris, he made it!” And I hurled my hat out the open window.
They quickly threw me out. Sarnoff and Weaver were puzzled, Max was mortified, but Sid collapsed in laughter.
Two years later, I was working at the top floor of the RCA building and General Sarnoff walked past me with another executive. He nodded at me. And then at the end of the corridor I heard him say to the other executive in a loud whisper: “Lindy landed!”
He never forgot what happened. And I’m sure neither did whoever was walking on the street in Rockefeller Center when the straw hat landed.
I took a big chance in demanding that I no longer just be Sid’s boy, but rather a real, full-fledged member of the writing team with credit, etc. There was a stormy argument between Sid and Max when Sid proposed this, but Sid won and Max reluctantly gave me credit on Your Show of Shows as “Additional Material by Mel Brooks” onscreen. Not to mention, a hundred and fifty dollars a week—which would be paid by the show and no longer by Sid. When Sid slapped me on the back and told me all this, I nearly fainted. Wow! My name was going to be on the show, and I was going to be making more money than my three older brothers’ salaries put together. Sometimes dreams really do come true.
I had never actually thought of myself as a writer until 1950, when I first saw my name on the credits of Your Show of Shows. I got scared. I said to myself, “I’m not a writer, I’m a talker.” I wished they’d change my billing on the show to “Additional Talking by Mel Brooks,” so I wouldn’t feel so intimidated. But I worked hard and conquered my fear of the empty page, which is the journey that all writers have to make. I worked my ass off thinking and writing day and night. I was lucky that Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen （who had followed Max Liebman to Your Show of Shows from The Admiral Broadway Revue） welcomed me aboard. They couldn’t have been kinder and more helpful.
As well as contributing to the guest stars’ sketches, my special writing province turned out to be Sid’s monologues and a new feature of the variety show in which Sid played a series of characters that were interviewed by a reporter every week. My first contribution was an interview sketch where he played “Jungle Boy,” a Tarzan-like character wearing a loincloth and carrying a big club, who somehow managed to survive in urban New York City. It went like this…
Reporter: Where are you from, sir?
Jungle Boy: Jungle.
Reporter: Sir, how do you survive in New York City?…What do you eat?
Jungle Boy: Pigeon.
Reporter: Don’t the pigeons object?
Jungle Boy: Only for a minute.
Reporter: What are you afraid of?
Jungle Boy: Buick.
Reporter: You’re afraid of a Buick?
Jungle Boy: Buick. Buick big. Buick yellow. Buick have big shiny teeth. Wait for eyes to go dark. I sneak up on sleeping Buick, punch in grille hard. Buick die!
It got huge laughs, and Sid was effusive in his thanks for my helping make “Jungle Boy” work.
Originally, the comedy interviews were conducted by one of the leading singers on the show, Tom Avera. Tom was doing a very good job for a singer, but he wasn’t what Sid needed. Sid was looking for a real second banana that could also do double-talk for the foreign movie satires that we had begun to write. Sid was a genius at mimicking foreign languages. Luck was with us. On a TV show called The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue we discovered Carl Reiner, a tall, good-looking, fast-talking comedy find. He was added to the top-drawer talent that already included Sid and Imogene Coca, and was talented enough to keep up with Sid’s brilliant French, Italian, German, and Japanese crazy double-talk. What a find!
（Small digression here, you’re going to hear a lot about Carl Reiner in the future. He became my partner in the 2000 Year Old Man, and has become my very best friend for too many decades to count.）
Carl met and interviewed a series of comedy characters played by Sid. The most consistently funny one that always worked was “the German Professor,” a know-it-all scholar dressed in an old-fashioned swallowtail coat, wide tie, the yellow W. C. Fields vest with the roll collar, baggy striped pants, and a broken-down top hat. He was an expert on everything. I remember helping Sid get big laughs on an interview with the German Professor as a world-famous expert on mountain climbing.