I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, Conversations About Connecting and Communicating.

I'm Melvin Brooks.

I've come to stop the show.

Just a ham whose mind is looks but in your hearts I'll grow.

I'll tell you gags.

Sing your songs.

Little snappy tuner roll along out of my mind.

Won't you be kind and please love.

Melvin Brooks.

I was got a big hand.

That's the song Mel wrote to begin his comedy act when he was just a kid in a hotel in

McCat's Kill Mountains.

From there he went on to write for the great Sid Caesar.

And in the writer's room for that show he met Carl Reiner and together they created the

phenomenal 2000 year old man comedy album.

Then Mel wrote the producers won an Oscar for Best Screenplay and after that nothing

could stop him.

At the age of 95 Mel is as saucy as ever.

Maybe a little more willing to reveal more of himself now than he has in the decades we've

been friends.

For me the mind of Mel Brooks is a silver globe in a cosmic pinball machine.

And zigz and zags its way to a punchline but always ricocheting off deep and passionate

...