The 99 Year Old Man!’ is a sweeping tribute to a comic genius

It’s not often we get to pay tribute, in full, to our giants while they’re still with us. But in “Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” Judd Apatow dutifully and affectionately celebrates the laugh-filled life of a comedy legend who’s still here to tell the story — and the jokes — himself.

“The 99 Year Old Man,” which debuts Thursday in two parts on HBO and HBO Max, is a big-hearted tribute to Brooks, an indefatigable comic force who did more than most anyone to lighten the mood of the 20th century. At 99 (he’ll turn 100 in June), Brooks remains a remarkably great raconteur.

One of the cleverest tricks by directors Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio is playing some of Brooks’ stories — like a memorable lunch with Cary Grant — across not just his sit-down interviews with them, but over multiple talk show appearances. He’s been telling some of these jokes for decades. It doesn’t matter. They’re still good.

“The 99 Year Old Man” takes the whole life in: the formative childhood in Brooklyn; the Sid Caesar-aided entry to “Your Show of Shows”; the lifelong friendship with Carl Reiner; the 2000 Year Old Man sketches; “The Producers”; the marriage to Anne Bancroft; “Blazing Saddles,” and beyond.

But if there’s an ongoing question in “The 99 Year Old Man,” it’s posed early by Apatow, who appears on-screen as Brooks’ interviewer. Do people really know who he is? “No,” Brooks answers straightaway.

That might sound like an odd answer for someone who has so unabashedly lived nearly a century in the public eye. Yet Brooks has been such a non-stop performer that it can sometimes be difficult to see where the schtick ends and the self begins.

One person describes Brooks, as a newborn, thinking the delivery doctor smacking him on the rear was applause. In an earlier clip, an interviewer laments Brooks’ apparent lack of introspection. He replies that he’s merely “a coalescence of vapor.” When Brooks gave his Oscar speech, for the screenplay to “The Producers,” he said he would speak from the heart: “Ba-bum, ba-bum.”

So is what’s inside Brooks just jokes? I’d say — and I think this is what makes “The 99 Year Old Man” not just an exhaustive documentary but a moving and even stirring one — it’s more the opposite. Brooks’ comedy, from the 2000 Year Old Man to “History of the World, Part I,” has always derived from something deeper, more personal and intrinsically Jewish than its slapstick qualities sometimes have suggested.

“Comedy is a sensational and sometimes spectacular political weapon,” Brooks says in the film.

There are countless big names who come in to speak to Brooks’ boldness as a comedian, among them Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Sarah Silverman, Adam Sandler and Conan O’Brien. But I’m tempted to think Brooks’ legacy is in how, for him, life and comedy are one: pulse and punchline together.

You can see that in Brooks’ decades of marriage with Bancroft, who describes, every time her husband came home as like a party. And you can see it in Brooks’ undying friendship with Reiner. After the deaths of their wives, the two friends would nightly meet to eat deli sandwiches and watch old movies. Reiner once recalled they’d watch films “with lines like ‘Secure the perimeter!’”

Bancroft died in 2005 and Reiner in 2020. Any life that stretches as long as Brooks’ takes on an elegiac quality. Appearing in the documentary, before their deaths, are both Rob Reiner and David Lynch (whom Brooks, a believer, got to direct “The Elephant Man”).

But the losses that add up in Brooks’ life never outstrip the laughter. You’re left wondering if Brooks is one of the funniest people to ever live, or one of the wisest.

“Comedy is lively. Comedy is joy,” he says. “And that’s what keeps us going. We have to look forward to little happinesses, little joys.”

“Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!” an HBO Max release, begins streaming Thursday. Running time: 216 minutes (playing in two parts). Three stars out of four.