A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches existence and triumphant career in television, movies, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed writer of Small Orson: The Many years of Luck and Genius in relation to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.

Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award-winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in the front the surveillance camera too) of a few of the most influential humor strikes of our time, about Funny Man: Mel Brooks like the 2,000 Yr Old Guy, Get Wise, The Suppliers, Blazing Saddles, and Adolescent Frankenstein. But before this acting professional, writer, director, comedian, and composer interested the globe, his first target audience was his family members.

The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s dining room table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and had not been quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to help make the family laugh.

Beyond boyhood, following transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family members proved even more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself right into a brand of popular laughter is at the guts of professional biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. With this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional lifestyle, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that designed Brooks’ mindset, his willpower, his persona, and his humor.

McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that is the famous funnyman’s life tale, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television-working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner-to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a deep breathing around the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots from the fantastic age of humor, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated displays and movies, and a telling go through the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ stressed first relationship. Engrossing, nuanced and eventually poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable existence tale and an anatomy from the American dream of success.