Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, to Max and Kate Brookman Kaminsky. His comedy career began at an early age with humorous routines he performed for his classmates at school, routines that he later incorporated into his films. As a young man, Brooks worked at various jobs at resorts in the Catskills before changing his name to avoid identification with a well-known musician of the time, Max Kaminsky. He attended Virginia Military Institute in 1944, and from 1944 to 1946 he served with the U.S. Army in a combat engineering group in Europe.

In 1947 he began to write gags for a young comic he had met before the war, Sid Caesar. When in 1949 Caesar began appearing on a television variety show, The Admiral Broadway Revue, he hired Brooks as a writer. Renamed Your Show of Shows in 1950, the program employed many young comedy writers, including Woody...