A Mel Brooks Appreciation!

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Biancooley.

Today we're celebrating Mel Brooks, one of the few egots in show business. Egot is a clunky acronym that's shorthand for the four major popular arts awards. The Emmy for television, the Grammy for the recording industry, the Oscar for Motion Pictures, and the Tony for the Broadway stage. Mel Brooks has won them all. For television, he won one Emmy as a writer for a Sid Caesar TV special and three others as a guest actor on the sitcom Mad About You.

He won Grammys for one of his 2000-year-old man comedy records with Carl Reiner and for his original cast recording for Broadway's The Producers. For the movies, he won an Oscar for his screenplay for his original 1967 version of The Producers. and before that, another one for his work on the Oscar winning 1963 animated short The Critic. And finally, on Broadway, he won three personal Tonys for his musical version of the producers Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Book of a Musical. In 2021, at age ninety five, he finally wrote his very funny memoir, titled All About Me, and featured prominently in a documentary about one of his many passions, the Automat.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (50 minutes, 8,135 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.