Here’s an appearance from the Colgate Comedy Hour in 1967 of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner doing their famous ‘2000 Year Old Man’ routine. This is a year before ‘The Producers’ was released and Mel was not yet the household name he was shortly to become. Rather he was an ‘acquired taste’–a ‘comic’s comic’…in other words, a much admired but slightly unsung man in his field. (‘Get Smart’ was a hit on TV but he wasn’t the face of it–the creator, yes, but people didn’t take much notice of creators back then). I remember finding the 2000 year old man LP in the mid 70s buried deep in the storage area of my parents massive Magnavox console and loving it so much that I wound up memorizing it and reciting whole routines for my friends at school. None of them seemed to grasp that it had something to do with the movies ‘Blazing Saddles’ and ‘Young Frankenstein’–by then Mel’s ‘brand’ had flourished and he was thought of mostly as an insanely popular in-your-face comedy filmmaker/actor/talk show guest. The 2000 year old man routines by contrast were a bit subtle and are thought by some to belong to an earlier era, a ‘kinder, gentler Mel’…but I challenge that! Mel’s humor is Mel’s humor–unexpected, funny, bold, philosophical and surreal. Every one of those attributes applies both to his movies and stand-up creations. He’s often like that in conversation as well. Proof of this can be found in (GET READY FOR A PLUG) my two-part interview with him on my podcast ‘Movies Til Dawn’ which can be found at https://www.moviestildawnpodcast.com/new-page-2

 Enjoy!