Two Brooks
Albert & Mel, together
Kathleen Norris on THE REAL ALBERT BROOKS
If you need a sweet film with some good belly-laughs — and who doesn’t these days — if you want to shake helplessly at comic bits that aren’t cruel, just insanely silly, I highly recommend the documentary Albert Brooks: Defending My Life. It consists of a conversation between two men who knew each other for over fifty years, Albert Brooks and Rob Reiner. Reiner directed the film, which focuses on Brooks’s life and career. A daunting group of comedians — Chris Rock, Conan O’Brian, Jon Stewart, Ben Stiller, Wanda Sykes, Sara Silverstone, Tiffany Haddish, and Nikki Glaser — sing Brooks’s praises and talk about how his work has influenced their own David Letterman calls Brooks “the caviar of comedy.”
Letterman’s remark may explain why Brooks is not a household name. His comedy is more cerebral than physical, even when he resorts to slapstick. It’s hard to define exactly why it’s so funny to see Brooks portray the world’s worst pickpocket or a hapless ventriloquist. One bit that reveals a good deal about Brooks himself begins with him asking, “Where do I fit in?” and complaining that his five-year plan for success as a comic has been a failure. “Why?” He repeats, “I can break an egg over my head as well as the next guy.” So he does that, and also hits himself in the face with a pie, saying. “This is the real me; the real Albert Brooks.” The audience roars with laughter.
In exploring Brooks’s life this film never becomes maudlin, but it does help us understand why he would say that about himself, his face smeared with egg and whipped cream. Brooks had an extraordinary childhood. His father Harry was a prominent comedian on American radio for thirty years, and died of a heart attack at a Friars Club gala in 1958, on a night when the legendary comedian’s club was admitting its first female member, Lucille Ball. Brooks’s father delivered a talk that Albert, at the age of eleven, had helped him to write, sat down, and died. Brooks learned of his father’s death in the morning, and tells Reiner that comedy had prevailed even as the event organizers were panicking about how to remove his father’s body from the dais. One man asked a popular singer, Tony Martin, to perform his latest hit. Unfortunately its title was “There’ll Be No Tomorrow.”
Brooks met Rob Reiner’s in a high school drama class. Reiner’s father Carl was a celebrated comedian, and Brooks soon found that he was able to make Carl Reiner and his good friend Mel Brooks laugh. On the Johnny Carson show Carl Reiner said that the funniest person he knew was “a sixteen-year old named Albert.”
