Mel Brooks Trivia
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50 free Mel Brooks trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
43 free Mel Brooks trivia questions with answers. Mel Brooks has been making people laugh for nine decades, from the writers' room of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows to a Broadway record for The Producers and a Spaceballs sequel announced when he was 99. This Mel Brooks trivia quiz covers the whole run: the Borscht Belt and the Battle of the Bulge, the 2000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, his Oscar for The Producers, the twin 1974 triumphs Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, Spaceballs, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, his serious films through Brooksfilms, and his marriage to Anne Bancroft. The 50 questions start with things every fan knows and work up to the details only people who have read All About Me! will remember, so it suits a solo run or a movie round at trivia night. Every answer is checked against Brooks's own accounts and the documented history of the films, not fan lists.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Mel Brooks's birth surname?
Kaminsky
Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in 1926; he took Brooks by shortening his mother's maiden name, Brookman, partly to avoid confusion with the jazz trumpeter Max Kaminsky.
Q 02In which New York borough was Mel Brooks born and raised?
Brooklyn
Mel Brooks was born in Brooklyn in 1926, in Brownsville, and raised in the borough's Williamsburg neighbourhood; his father died of kidney disease when Mel was two.
Q 03Which jazz drummer taught the teenage Mel Brooks to play drums?
Buddy Rich
Buddy Rich, the jazz drummer, gave Mel Brooks drum lessons as a teenager; Brooks earned money as a drummer from 14 and got his first comedy break filling in for a sick emcee.
Q 04In which December 1944 German offensive did Mel Brooks serve as a combat engineer?
The Battle of the Bulge
Brooks, a corporal combat engineer, saw action in the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944–January 1945), clearing mines and booby-trapped buildings; he says he answered German loudspeaker songs by singing Al Jolson through a bullhorn.
Q 05Mel Brooks began his writing career on which comedian's 1950s TV show?
Sid Caesar
Brooks joined Sid Caesar's writing staff on Your Show of Shows (1950–54) and followed him to Caesar's Hour, after the two had met in the Catskills when Brooks was a teenage tummler.
Q 06With which collaborator did Brooks create the comedy sketch The 2000 Year Old Man?
Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner played the deadpan interviewer to Brooks's 2000 Year Old Man, a routine they improvised at parties in the 1950s; their album The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 won a 1999 Grammy.
Q 07Which spy-spoof sitcom did Brooks co-create with Buck Henry in 1965?
Get Smart
Get Smart ran on NBC from 1965, with Don Adams as bumbling Agent 86; Brooks said no one had ever done a show about an idiot before, so he decided to be the first.
Q 08Agent 86 in Brooks's 1965 spy-spoof sitcom works for which secret agency?
CONTROL
Agent 86 works for CONTROL, the Washington spy agency locked in battle with KAOS, 'the international organization of evil'; Don Adams played Agent 86 and Barbara Feldon Agent 99.
Q 09For which film, his directorial debut, did Mel Brooks win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay?
The Producers
The Producers (1967) was Brooks's first film as director; its script won him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the April 1969 ceremony, beating 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Q 10What is the title of the deliberately terrible musical-within-the-film in Brooks's 1967 debut?
Springtime for Hitler
Springtime for Hitler is the sure-fire flop Bialystock and Bloom stage; Brooks first blurted the title as a joke at a 1962 press conference when asked what he would do next.
Q 11Which two actors starred as Bialystock and Bloom in Brooks's original 1967 film?
Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder
Zero Mostel played Max Bialystock and Gene Wilder the nervous accountant Leo Bloom, whose name nods to Leopold Bloom of Joyce's Ulysses; Wilder earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for the role.
Q 12Brooks's second film, The Twelve Chairs (1970), is based on a Russian novel by which writing duo?
Ilf and Petrov
The Twelve Chairs adapts the 1928 Soviet satirical novel by Ilf and Petrov (Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov); Brooks cameos as Tikon, an ex-serf who 'yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear'.
Q 13Which comedian was among the co-writers of Blazing Saddles, whom Brooks called 'very brave and very far-out'?
Q 21What is the label on the brain Igor accidentally brings back for the monster in Young Frankenstein?
Abnormal
The jar is labelled 'Abnormal' (Igor later claims it belonged to 'Abby Normal'); he was supposed to bring back the brain of the 'scientist and saint' Hans Delbrück but dropped it.
Q 22Which Oscar-winning actor makes a cameo as the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein?
Gene Hackman
Gene Hackman, a tennis friend of Wilder's, asked for the uncredited part of the blind hermit, who scalds the Monster with soup and lights his thumb instead of his cigar.
Q 23Which two science-fiction awards did Young Frankenstein win, unusually for a comedy?
The Hugo and the Nebula
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor was one of the credited writers of Blazing Saddles; Brooks wanted him to play Bart, but the studio would not cast him, so Pryor stayed on as a writer.
Q 14Who plays Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles?
Cleavon Little
Cleavon Little plays Sheriff Bart, the railroad worker appointed sheriff to drive the townsfolk off their land; Little had won the 1970 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for Purlie.
Q 15What is the name of the town the railroad must pass through in Blazing Saddles?
Rock Ridge
Rock Ridge is the frontier town the villains want emptied so the railroad can be rerouted through it; nearly every citizen is surnamed Johnson, and they build a fake Rock Ridge as a decoy.
Q 16Which bandleader plays 'April in Paris' in the middle of the desert in Blazing Saddles?
Count Basie
Count Basie and his orchestra appear playing 'April in Paris' in the desert as Bart gallops past, one of the film's deliberate anachronisms alongside Slim Pickens's 'Wide World of Sports' line.
Q 17Which two roles does Mel Brooks play in Blazing Saddles?
Governor Le Petomane and an Indian chief
Brooks plays the lecherous Governor William J. Le Petomane and a Yiddish-speaking Indian chief; the film cost $2.6 million and grossed about $119 million in North America.
Q 18On what condition did Gene Wilder agree to replace Gig Young in Blazing Saddles?
That Brooks would next direct his Frankenstein spoof
They wrote Young Frankenstein as soon as Blazing Saddles wrapped and shot it in spring 1974.
Q 19Who plays the monster in Young Frankenstein?
Peter Boyle
Peter Boyle plays the Monster, complete with a zipper in his neck; his top-hat-and-tails 'Puttin' on the Ritz' duet with Wilder is the film's showpiece.
Q 20How does Frederick Frankenstein insist his surname be pronounced at the start of Young Frankenstein?
Fronkensteen
Frederick insists on 'Fronkensteen' to distance himself from his infamous grandfather's work; Marty Feldman's Igor retaliates by insisting his own name is pronounced 'Eye-gor'.
Young Frankenstein won both the Hugo and the Nebula for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1975, a rare double for a comedy; it was also Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound.
Q 24In Silent Movie (1976), who speaks the film's only audible word of dialogue?
Marcel Marceau
Marcel Marceau, the celebrated mime, says 'Non!' when asked to appear in a silent film, the only spoken word; Burt Reynolds, Liza Minnelli and James Caan play themselves.
Q 25High Anxiety (1977) is Brooks's parody of which director?
Alfred Hitchcock
High Anxiety spoofs Alfred Hitchcock, with Brooks as a Nobel-winning psychiatrist in set pieces lifted from Spellbound, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds; Hitchcock sent Brooks a case of wine in thanks.
Q 26Which 1980 David Lynch film did Mel Brooks produce, keeping his name off the poster so audiences wouldn't expect comedy?
The Elephant Man
The Elephant Man (1980) was a Brooksfilms production; Brooks hired Lynch after seeing Eraserhead and kept his own name off the credits so audiences would not expect a comedy. It earned eight Oscar nominations.
Q 27Which 1986 David Cronenberg horror film was produced by Brooksfilms?
The Fly
The Fly (1986), with Jeff Goldblum as the scientist who fuses with a housefly, was a Brooksfilms production; Brooks told Cronenberg, 'When it comes to gore, extreme whatever, don't hold back.'
Q 28How many roles does Mel Brooks play in History of the World, Part I?
Five
Brooks plays five roles: Moses, Comicus the stand-up philosopher, Torquemada, King Louis XVI and Jacques the garçon de pisse; Orson Welles narrates.
Q 29History of the World, Part I plays on an unfinished multi-volume history by which Elizabethan figure?
Sir Walter Raleigh
The title nods to Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World, written during his imprisonment in the Tower of London and published in 1614 with only its first volume finished.
Q 30On which streaming service did the series History of the World, Part II premiere in 2023?
Hulu
History of the World, Part II premiered on Hulu on 6 March 2023 as an eight-episode sketch series, with Brooks narrating and co-creating alongside Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes and Ike Barinholtz.