Illustration by Robert Risko At 99, Mel Brooks does not speak like a man arranging his legacy. He speaks like a man still chasing the next laugh. Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!, the new HBO documentary directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio (and titled as a nod to Brooks' classic "2000 Year Old Man" comedy routine with Carl Reiner), excavates with unusual tenderness the life and career of arguably the most influential American humorist since Mark Twain. Twain, of course, never stooped to fart jokes or hunchback gags in pursuit of a giggle. Brooks did both, proudly, repeatedly and to seismic effect. That anything-for-a-laugh ethos is not a flaw in his canon but its animating principle. Brooks' comedy is funny because it refuses reverence. It is funny because it is reckless. It is funny because it believes, with almost religious conviction, that laughter is worth the risk. Related Stories Movies Judd Apatow on Mel Brooks, Interviewing Rob Reiner and What It'll Take to Revive Studio Comedies TV 'Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!' Review: Judd Apatow's HBO Doc Pays Loving, Lovely Tribute to a Comedy Giant Across nearly a century, Brooks has repeatedly tested the limits of taste, commerce, politics and patience. He has offended studio executives, television censors, foreign governments and polite society at large, often all at once. He also has reshaped the grammar of American comedy, leaving behind a body of work that includes The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part 1, High Anxiety and Spaceballs. Several of those films were dismissed or misunderstood on arrival, only to be adored later. Others were instant detonations. All of them bear the same unmistakable fingerprint: an artist who believes that nothing is sacred except the laugh itself. The HBO documentary tracks Brooks from his childhood in Brooklyn through World War II, the writers room of Your Show of Shows, his creative marriage of nearly 41 years to Anne Bancroft, his lifelong brotherhood with Reiner and his creative partnerships with Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor and countless others. What emerges is not merely a portrait of a comic genius but a portrait of a man driven by affection. Love, not cruelty, is the motor of Brooks' humor. Love of people. Love of laughter. Love of the audience. Brooks recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about the risks that paid off, the ones that didn't and the strange clarity that comes with having spent a century testing how far comedy can go before it breaks. What's your favorite joke of all time? Myron Cohen was one of the Jewish comics that used to work the Borscht Belt in the Catskills. He told a joke that I loved: A guy walks into a grocery store and says, "I would like a half a pound of lox. I'd like a quarter of a pound of cream cheese. I'd like six bagels." And then the guy says, "Excuse me, I don't like to pry, but I see that all your shelves are filled with these red boxes of salt. Salt, salt on every shelf. Just boxes and boxes of salt. How come? Do you sell a lot of salt?" And the grocer answers, "Me, if I sell a box of salt a week it's a miracle. I don't sell much salt. But the guy that sells me salt - boy, can he sell salt!" That's one of my favorite jokes. Let's talk about some of your movies and just how groundbreaking and envelope-pushing they were. Blazing Saddles jumps to mind. What were your studio notes on that? They must have been a little bit perturbed. No, actually. That was Warner Bros. John Calley was in charge of production, and he was crazy about the script. The notes were like, "Keep going! Be as crazy as you want." He encouraged stuff that was in questionable taste, like the farting scene and stuff like that. Once you filmed the farting scene, was the studio happy with it? Well, the guys that wore suits, the executives, were very unhappy with it. But John Calley - who never wore a suit, he just wore casual clothes - he loved it. Even though the suits had something to say about finance, they had really nothing to say about content. I still had final cut, so I knew I could do mostly whatever I wanted. Did Blazing Saddles ever end up on TV? It did end up on TV. Of course, they murdered it by bleeping out anything they felt was in questionable taste. They had their own ideas of what the public could take, and they were cowards. The director with Cleavon Little on Blazing Saddles. Courtesy Everett Collection You hear people say, "No one could get away with making that movie anymore." Do you think you could still make Blazing Saddles today? Sure. There were certain words we used [that would not fly today]. We used the N-word a lot, because Richard Pryor used it a lot and he was one of our writers. There were so many different things in Blazing Saddles that were in questionable taste, but who cares? Good taste doesn't mean a thing. They realized that funny is money, so they let us get away with a lot of stuff. Plus, it wasn't just bad taste. It was