“Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you don’t laugh, you’ll die.”
Mel Brooks, born June 28, 1926, has kept the world rolling along since he broke into the entertainment business in early TV. Director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor 
and producer, he is best known for his comic film farces and parodies.
He began his career as a stand-up comic and writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows then teamed up with fellow writer Carl Reiner, as The 2000 Year Old Man. In the 70s he became one of the most successful film directors, producing such comedy classics as Blazing Saddles, The Producers, Young Frankenstein (numbers 6, 11 and 13 on the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time), The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, became a smash hit on Broadway. Brooks is one of the few entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.
A true funny man, no joke was ever beneath him.
TRUE CONFESSIONS: MY DARK DAYS AS A REPUBLICAN
I used to be a Republican. There, it’s out in the open. It was a long time ago, and I was too young to see the error of my ways. At the time, our family was pretty much all Republican – not avid table thumping Republicans, but Republicans all the same. Truman was a swear word, and we all liked Ike. Ike was like a grandfather, and my grandmother loved him.
As long as I’m confessing, I might as well admit that I probably would have voted for Nixon over Kennedy. Fortunately, I was not old enough to vote. It was a couple of years later in college that I began to change. See, the conservatives are right. Colleges take our respectable fresh-faced Republican youths and teach them unsavory liberal things like literature and philosophy and science.
It happened to me, and I never saw it coming. For a few days, I was just an independent. But it’s a slippery slope indeed, and the leftward lurch was inevitable. And by the time I graduated from the halls of propaganda, my mind had been molded into the liberal quagmire it is today.
Tomorrow: I cozy up to the Second Amendment.
Wretched Richard's Almanac 