Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! takes a big-hearted look at an American original

Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio's two-part HBO documentary unpacks a long, resilient life and career.

By Tim Lowery | January 16, 2026 | 3:00pm

Photo: Courtesy of Mel Brooks/HBO

TV Reviews Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!

Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! takes a big-hearted look at an American original

Mel Brooks can really tell a story. That, admittedly, will come off as a painfully obvious observation to anyone who is even remotely aware of him. But one of the charms of Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!—and there are good amount of them in this two-part HBO documentary from directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio—is watching the guy do just that over years, whether it’s on Johnny Carson’s couch in the ’60s, at his home across from Apatow today as he nears triple digits, on a black-and-white TV panel show, or on stages across the States in front of live audiences as they laugh along to jokes he’s probably landed at countless smoke-filled cocktail parties (and they’ve likely heard or read before too).

This move—splicing together footage from across the decades as our storyteller tells the same tale and nails a particular beat, sometimes with more youth and motor-mouthed gusto than others but always with an enviably energy, sharpness, and clear, simple, glint-in-the-eye want to entertain—becomes a signature in The 99 Year Old Man early on. And it helps drive home not just how long Brooks has been around and in the game, but how much that game has changed while the multi-hyphenate continuously figured out a way to carve a space in it. He’s a living link to the dawn of television as a medium, having first been hired as a comedy writer back in the 1940s by Sid Caesar after serving in World War II—and, soberingly, he’s outlived so much of the budding talent he encouraged. (David Lynch tells a wonderful anecdote Brooks, who would go on to produce the The Elephant Man [and took his name off the credits to not confuse his fanbase], coming out of a screening of Eraserhead: “The doors blew open, and Mel came running toward me. He embraced me and said, ‘You’re a madman; I love you; you’re in.'”)

In the opening minutes of the documentary, Apatow lays out Brooks’ breadth of work and unique career plainly: “You’re on TV. You’re funny in the interviews. You’re doing the 2000 Year Old Man. You’re kind of doing stand-up. You’re directing the movies, you’re acting in the movies, you’re writing the movies. To a lot of people who went into comedy, they thought, That seems like the best job in the world, the Mel Brooks job.” (Brooks’ reply: “I’m glad nobody took it.”)

But the documentary, and Brooks himself, does a nice job of selling that his rare position wasn’t without its struggles and, despite his hits (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were the second and third highest-grossing films of 1974, respectively), he hardly felt on solid ground. While working on the Caesar-starring Your Show Of Shows, the young writer started experiencing panic attacks, would vomit between parked cars during breaks from the stress, and experienced debilitating self-doubt. “I had a dream about being at the wheel of the car and the car was out of control,” Brooks recalls. “I’m not a genius. I’m not smart. I’m not funny. I don’t deserve this. They’re gonna find me out and fire me.”

After the famous 2000 Year Old Man bit with Carl Reiner, Brooks still struggled financially and stayed surprisingly anonymous, with his second marriage getting the headline “Anne Bancroft Weds Writer” in the paper. And even years removed from that aforementioned one-two box-office punch and becoming a household name here and abroad, he’d worry about whether he had to juice to get another movie made and was consistently bummed out by negative reviews of, say, 1981’s History Of The World, Part I and 1991’s Life Stinks. (Of the former, Pauline Kael wrote, admiringly, “It’s an all-out assault on taste and taboo, and it made me laugh a lot.”)

Outside of his career, too, the future filmmaker had to grapple with a lot, losing his dad to tuberculosis when he was a two-year-old in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, dealing with antisemitism in the army before fighting in France and Belgium, and suffering bouts of depression near the end of his first marriage. And as the documentary presses on, it becomes not just an appreciation but a story of resilience, where each bad stretch for the comedian is followed by an unlikely success, like The Producers nabbing the most Tony wins to date in the early aughts.

The many talking heads here—Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Conan O’Brien, Nick Kroll, Tracey Ullman, and Patton Oswalt, to name a few—form a chorus of appreciation and make some explicit ties between Brooks’ output and character work and the likes of Zoolander and Oh, Hello on Broadway. But less explicitly, the documentary also shows how much Brooks touched not just American filmmaking but culture. And for a certain set of viewers, a lot of fun can be had in connecting the career dots of someone who wrote with everyone from Richard Pryor to Neil Simon. (A good one: Brooks co-created Get Smart with Buck Henry, who would go on to adapt The Graduate, which starred Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman…who took that life-changing role and had to drop out of The Producers.)

In that respect, the wide scope and weight of history makes this feel more in the vein of Apatow and Bonfiglio’s George Carlin doc than the former’s solo effort on Garry Shandling. Which isn’t to suggest that this isn’t an intimate sketch. It very much is, and it’s hard not to be moved as Brooks revisits scenes of him dancing with Bancroft in his 1983 war comedy, or, when they were both widowers, he and longtime pal Reiner chat in front of TV trays during their nightly ritual. Even if you aren’t a huge fan of his films’ humor, there is so much to appreciate here. And the fact the guy’s final message at the three-and-a-half-hour mark, after so much personal heartbreak and joy and so many career ups and downs have been chronicled, is essentially “be kind to each other” speaks volumes—and can’t help but make his legacy feel far bigger than comedy.

Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! premieres January 22 on HBO.

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