The Inquisition, what a show! Of legendary Jewish comedian Mel Brooks’ entire oeuvre, The Spanish Inquisition vignette from “History of the World, Part I” is remembered as perhaps his most iconic joke. But as “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!,” a new documentary from Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, lays out, not everyone in the Jewish community has always been as fond of Brooks’ scatting, tap dancing, showboating Torquemada.
In fact, in a scathing review, one critic essentially called Mel Brooks a “kapo.”
In one section of the documentary, Apatow and Bonfiglio include a portion of a review of “History of the World, Part I” from the July 1, 1980 edition of the St. Louis Jewish Light. The author, St. Louis Jewish Light’s editor-in-chief (at the time) Robert A. Cohn castigates Brooks. “The fact that Brooks himself is an unapologetic Jew does not justify his descent into the kind of humor which would have received a standing ovation from an audience of stormtroopers and concentration camp commanders,” Cohn writes. “By ridiculing the suffering of his own people so cruelly, Brooks is indulging in kapo humor.”
Ouch.
ICYMI, a kapo was a type of concentration camp prisoner whom the Nazis allowed to oversee other prisoners on a labor detail. According to the United States Holocaust Museum, kapos “often whipped, beat, and even killed prisoners under their command.” It is an especially cruel insult for any Jew to hurl at another, let alone Brooks, who served in the United States army during World War II and saw Nazi destruction firsthand.
Cohn was not the only person who found The Spanish Inquisition section of “The History of the World, Part I” distasteful. In one clip in the documentary, an interviewer tells Brooks that some theater-goers walked out of showings in disgust and that some “gossip columnist” argued that he shouldn’t be making fun of such a horrific moment in history. For his part, Brooks responded gracefully, “They thought the Inquisition was not the subject matter for comedy. And I maintain seriously that there is nothing that is not the subject matter for comedy, because comedy is a sensational and sometimes spectacular political weapon.”
To be fair, Cohn’s review acknowledged this argument — he just happened to think the sketch was not funny. But that is, of course, where he and I (and documentary talking heads Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer and Josh Gad) happen to disagree. So I suppose all there’s left to say is: The Inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay!
