This past Sunday evening, in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore, over 4,000 people rose to sing “Happy Birthday” to a flickering screen. The recipient, appearing via video link from Santa Monica, California, was Mel Brooks, who had just turned 100. The tribute closed the 40th edition of the Cinema Ritrovato festival, where hours earlier audiences had watched his 1974 comedy-horror spoof Young Frankenstein. The serenade, spontaneous and transcontinental, distilled the peculiar hold Brooks still exerts on the global imagination: a centenarian who has never stopped insisting that laughter is the most serious business of all.

That career began in a Brooklyn tenement, where Melvin Kaminsky – the youngest of four sons raised by a widowed mother during the Great Depression – discovered that making people laugh could fill a room with light. He served as a combat engineer in Europe during the Second World War, an experience that, according to the 2024 documentary Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, “changed him”. He would later describe humour as “a protest against death”, and his work has repeatedly returned to the darkest chapters of the twentieth century. His first feature film, The Producers (1967), imagined a Broadway musical titled Springtime for Hitler, a gambit so audacious that, as Brooks himself noted, “any subject, no matter how sensitive, can be object of parody and laughter”. The script won an Academy Award and, decades later, its stage adaptation swept the Tonys.

In Mexico, theatre producers Alejandro Gou and Guillermo Wiechers regard Brooks as a foundational figure whose influence rivals that of Charlie Chaplin. “He makes you laugh and he knows how to make you laugh. To laugh at others, he knows how to laugh at himself”, Gou told the newspaper El Norte, pointing to a reflexive self-mockery that runs from Blazing Saddles to Spaceballs. From Dhaka, a columnist for Prothom Alo observed that Brooks operated on the conviction that “you may not defeat a dictator by giving a speech against him, but if you make people laugh at him, you can break his power”. That idea found its ultimate expression in The Producers, where the absurdity of Nazism is defused not through moral condemnation but through relentless ridicule.

Brooks’s career arc now reads like a map of post‑war American comedy. He wrote for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows alongside Woody Allen and Neil Simon, created the television spy parody Get Smart, and directed eleven features that systematically deconstructed genres – the Western, the gothic horror, the space opera – with a style Wiechers calls “irreverent, with an acidic, farcical tone that resembles no‑one else’s”. He is one of only a handful of artists to hold the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony), and his papers and photographs are being donated to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, New York. Even now, he is preparing a cameo for a Spaceballs sequel and lending his voice to an animated film, still living by the maxim he offered People magazine: “Laughing keeps you healthy and happy.”

Perhaps the most enduring image of Brooks’s irreverence is not on celluloid but in concrete. In 2010, at the handprint ceremony outside the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, he pressed his palms into the wet cement – but only after attaching a prosthetic sixth finger to his left hand. The imprint remains, a permanent wink to the tourists who will, for decades, place their own hands in the grooves and smile.