If you’ve already watched the new HBO documentary “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!” you may want to rewind Episode 2 and pay a little closer attention.
About an hour and six minutes in, the laughter slows and the praise briefly pauses. Director Judd Apatow steps away from his near-universal admiration of Brooks to acknowledge something less tidy: when “History of the World, Part I” hit theaters in 1981, not everyone was laughing, including some voices within the Jewish community.
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One of those voices came from St. Louis.
The St. Louis Jewish Light – Mel Brooks documentary connection appears quietly but deliberately, as the film highlights a July 1, 1981, column published by then-editor Robert A. Cohn. On screen, the filmmakers reveal a paragraph from the article word by word, letting its discomfort unfold in silence.
When that harsh critique is read in isolation, it’s easy to miss that Cohn’s column was not a wholesale rejection of Brooks or his comedy.
What Cohn wrote
Cohn’s review made clear that he understood why audiences loved Brooks and where the humor landed. He acknowledged scenes that worked, including one that has become inseparable from Brooks’ legacy.
It’s the moment when Brooks appears as Moses, descending the mountain with 15 commandments, only to drop one tablet, pause, mutter “Oy,” and then announce, “Ten. Ten commandments.”
Cohn singled out that sequence by name, praising what he called “The Old Testament,” scene where Brooks “does a lighthearted send-up of Moses, which is quite funny.”
It was when that same comic approach moved into darker historical territory that his tone shifted.
“The most outrageous sequence is, of course, ‘The Spanish Inquisition,’ where Brooks appears in a red cassock as Torquemada, the grand inquisitor who sent hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews and other ‘heretics’ to their horrible deaths in torture chambers or at the ‘autos da fe,’” wrote Cohn.
That contrast matters. It shows Cohn weighing where Brooks’ humor felt familiar and playful against where it collided with history that carried a different kind of weight. His response wasn’t outrage. It was more unease.
Before publishing this story, the Light reached out to Cohn, now Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, to let him know we planned to revisit the moment. He gave us his blessing.
When Jewish humor splits the room
Apatow’s documentary treats the 1981 column as part of a larger conversation, not a rebuke. Brooks’ belief that mocking Nazis strips them of power sits alongside the reality that not every audience experiences that mockery the same way.
As I’ve said often, including in the prologue to my Jewish joke storytelling, the strange thing about Jewish humor is that not everyone finds it funny. That tension has always existed.
Seen today, Cohn’s column reads less like criticism and more like a snapshot of a community doing what Jews have always done: arguing thoughtfully about where the line is, even while laughing on both sides of it.
