“I think when all my awards go to eBay, it will be the last,” Brooks said of the Kennedy Center medallion. “That's how much I treasure it.”
At the same reception, this picture was taken. Does this look to anyone else like an unbeatable Democratic presidential ticket for 2016?
It’s a good thing they gave Mel Brooks the Kennedy Center honor, because the world is running out of awards to give him. He’s one of only ten people to have won an Oscar, a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy. Just last week, Brooks told an interviewer from the Onion A.V. Club, “I’m at my desk surrounded by every award that show business could imagine…I’m incredibly humble. I’m one of the most wonderfully humble guys.”
That interview, done with Carl Reiner in promotion of the new 2000 Year Old Man boxed set, includes a few other notable passages (though it also repeats a lot that was already said in their recent Times interview). Brooks says, of the 2000 Year Old Man act:
I think the real engine behind it is Carl, not me. I’m just collecting the fares. But he’s the guy that creates the subjects, the questions, and creates a kind of buoyant, effervescent, terribly naïve character. He keeps saying, “Sir, I find that hard to believe, that you’re 2,000.” [Laughs.] He actually says that. So I didn’t even start it. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was eating a piece of sponge cake and drinking Manischewitz wine in a corner somewhere at a party, and suddenly Carl comes over with a tape recorder and says, “I understand, sir, you were at the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” And I was off. I was off doing what I had to do.
Brooks also reveals that he likes Stephen Colbert:
Right from the beginning, I wanted the laughs. I wasn’t going to waste a minute setting things up. But Carl loved that job. I think today, Stephen Colbert does that beautifully. He plays this kind of naïve far-right Republican, and he plays it so earnestly and so naïvely, just the way Carl would play it with me and the 2000 Year Old Man.
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