The Best Quote From All 11 Mel Brooks Movies (2025)

Mel Brooks is a legend of the comedy world, and what he’s done within the entertainment industry extends beyond the 11 movies he directed between 1967 and 1995. But many of those films he made are considered classics, especially within the ranks of all-time great parody movies, and, taken as a whole, his filmography is a pretty great representation of his unique and influential sense of humor.

There’s also more to his movies than just funny lines of dialogue, but in the interest of celebrating that particular area within each Mel Brooks movie, what follows is a chronological outline of his 11 movies, with the single best and/or funniest quote from each. With some of the greatest films, picking just one was difficult, but it’s not worth getting hysterical (or wet) about any inevitable omissions.

11 'The Producers' (1967)

"How could this happen? I was so careful. I picked the wrong play, the wrong director, the wrong cast. Where did I go right?"

The Producers was one hell of a directorial debut for Mel Brooks, and is funny enough to rank up there as one of the very best films of the 1960s. It has a genius premise, following two men enacting a fraudulent scheme that involves putting on an extremely tasteless musical destined to fail, only to find themselves in hot water when people actually enjoy it.

The above quote doesn’t need explaining; it sums up the central joke of the movie incredibly well, and kind of works as a plot synopsis, in a way (or it could at least be a tagline). Zero Mostel really sells the line, too, and the full-on/anxiety-ridden performances both he and co-star Gene Wilder give also go a long way to making The Producers hold up so well.

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The Producers

PG

Comedy

Music

Where to Watch

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Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Zero Mostel , gene wilder , Dick Shawn , Kenneth Mars

Runtime

88 minutes

10 'The Twelve Chairs' (1970)

"Remember the famous Russian proverb: 'The hungrier you get, the tastier the meal.' On the other hand, the French have a proverb: merde!"

A bit of an oddity among Mel Brooks movies, and possibly one of the filmmaker’s most underrated overall, The Twelve Chairs is a solid farce based on a 1928 Soviet novel, also called The Twelve Chairs. It takes place around that time, too, following a bunch of characters as they have various misadventures while searching for treasure apparently hidden inside one of 12 chairs that have all gone missing.

It's pretty heavy on the physical comedy and feels appropriately mad dash, but it mostly works, and has a little Brooks bite to what’s already a fairly funny story. That all does ensure that The Twelve Chairs is far from Brooks’s most quotable movie, but it has its moments and, dialogue aside, is still a decently enjoyable watch.

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The Twelve Chairs

G

Comedy

Release Date

October 28, 1970

Cast

Frank Langella , Ron Moody , Dom DeLuise , Andréas Voutsinas , Diana Coupland , David L. Lander , Mel Brooks

Runtime

94 minutes

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9 'Blazing Saddles' (1974)

"You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."

It’s hardest to pick a great quote (again, just one) from Blazing Saddles compared to all other Mel Brooks movies, because it’s probably his most consistently funny, and the dialogue is immensely quotable. Gene Wilder, though, might well deliver the best line of the movie, a long, understated spiel that ends with him labeling the “common clay of the new West” as “morons.”

Call it one of the most quotable Westerns of all time if you want to, as that’s probably not a hot take. Among comedies, Blazing Saddles is about as classic as they get, but 1974 was such a great year for Mel Brooks that the other film of his which contends with Blazing Saddles for the title of “best Mel Brooks movie” just so happened to also have its release that year.

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Blazing Saddles

R

Comedy

Western

Where to Watch

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Release Date

February 7, 1974

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Cleavon Little , gene wilder , Slim Pickens , Harvey Korman , Madeline Kahn , Mel Brooks

Runtime

93 minutes

See Also

18 Famous Movie Quotes You've Been Getting Wrong    - Best Movies by Farr81 Timeless Movie Quotes About Life That Will Inspire You

8 'Young Frankenstein' (1974)

"No, it's pronounced 'Fronkensteen.'"

Just as Blazing Saddles was a perfect Western movie parody, so too was Young Frankenstein about as good as a parody of 1930s/1940s horror is ever going to get. While perhaps not as monumentally quotable as Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein has more to marvel at from a technical perspective, given how uncannily it recreates the visuals, feel, and atmosphere of the kind of movie it’s parodying.

Also, Gene Wilder gets to shine here arguably even more than he does in Blazing Saddles, and his character’s repeated corrections about how to pronounce his surname are always funny. And, sure, it’s perhaps a little comparable to the Hedley Lamarr/Hedy Lamarr joke in Blazing Saddles, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and nothing about Brooks’s two 1974 releases needed fixing.

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Young Frankenstein

PG

Comedy

Sci-Fi

Release Date

December 15, 1974

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

gene wilder , Peter Boyle , Marty Feldman , Cloris Leachman , Teri Garr , Kenneth Mars

Runtime

106 minutes

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7 'Silent Movie' (1976)

"Non!"

Given Silent Movie is pretty much, y’know, a silent movie, there’s not a lot of dialogue to choose from when it comes to singling out one particularly great line. As luck would have it, outside some title cards used in the place of dialogue, there’s actually only one line in the entire movie: “Non,” which is French for “No.”

Explaining the joke here will ruin it, but Brooks got a mime artist named Marcel Marceau to deliver this one line, making it a rare occasion where he got to speak in a role. Outside that context, though, it’s still a funny (if perhaps expected) subversion of the whole silent movie style that’s otherwise parodied quite well throughout Silent Movie. You could call it a bit gimmicky in its approach, but at least it’s a fun gimmick.

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Silent Movie

PG

Release Date

June 17, 1976

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Mel Brooks , Marty Feldman , Dom DeLuise , Sid Caesar , Harold Gould , Ron Carey , Bernadette Peters , Carol Arthur , Liam Dunn , Fritz Feld , Chuck McCann , Valerie Curtin , Yvonne Wilder , Harry Ritz , Charlie Callas , Henny Youngman , Arnold Soboloff , Patrick Campbell , Eddie Ryder , Al Hopson , Rudy De Luca , Barry Levinson , Howard Hesseman

Runtime

87 Minutes

Main Genre

Comedy

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6 'High Anxiety' (1977)

"I beeped! I beeped! Take me away! Take me back to Russia! Put me in irons! I beeped! The mad beeper is loose! Take away the beeper! Take me away!"

Just as there’s a lack of dialogue in Silent Movie, so too is there a good deal of anxiety in High Anxiety, though it’s always played for laughs. This is Mel Brooks putting a comedic spin on the sorts of thrillers Alfred Hitchcock was known for directing, with the plot centering on a high-strung psychiatrist who uncovers a plot involving murder while working at a particularly strange psychiatric facility.

He has to sneak a weapon through airport security at one point (the 1970s were a different time), and opts to cause a massive scene as a way to basically annoy and/or dissuade the security personnel from wanting to search him further. Maybe the way the scene has aged has made it even funnier – or at least more surreal – when watched nowadays, but either way, it’s fun seeing Mel Brooks get highly anxious in High Anxiety.

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High Anxiety

A psychiatrist with intense acrophobia (fear of heights) goes to work for a mental institution run by doctors who appear to be crazier than their patients, and have secrets that they are willing to commit murder to keep.

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5 'History of the World: Part I' (1981)

"The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen..." [drops tablet] "Oy! Ten! Ten commandments for all to obey!"

Inconsistency is the name of the game when it comes to History of the World: Part I overall, given it’s made up of a number of different segments, each focusing on a different era in history. It’s kind of Mel Brooks doing an anthology movie of sorts, so it’s not too surprising that some parts end up hitting a little harder than others.

The film’s best moment, though, is classic Mel Brooks, and sees him playing Moses, who’s about to announce that he’s been handed 15 commandments, only to drop one of the three tablets he’s holding. He pauses awkwardly, then clarifies that he’s been given 10 commandments. Again, like with that Silent Movie moment, it’s not as funny when it gets explained like that; it’s all in the timing, and the way Brooks delivers the line that makes it so great.

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History of the World: Part I

R

Comedy

Release Date

June 12, 1981

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Dom DeLuise , Mel Brooks , Madeline Kahn , Harvey Korman , Cloris Leachman , Ron Carey , Gregory Hines , Pamela Stephenson , Shecky Greene , Sid Caesar , Mary-Margaret Humes , Orson Welles , Rudy De Luca , Leigh French , Richard Karron , Susette Carroll , Sammy Shore , J.J. Barry , Earl Finn , Suzanne Kent , Michael Champion , Howard Morris , Charlie Callas , Dena Dietrich , Paul Mazursky

Runtime

92 minutes

Rent on Apple TV

4 'Spaceballs' (1987)

"God willing, we'll all meet again in Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money."

History of the World: Part I called itself that without necessarily expecting a sequel, but then got one of sorts with a limited series in 2023 called History of the World, Part II. Spaceballs didn’t tempt fate with its title in quite the same way, but did so with some of its (very on-the-nose) meta humor, with one of Brooks’s two characters, Yogurt, being very aware of the fact he’s in a movie, even referencing “Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.”

Yogurt is all about money, even referencing tie-in merchandise for Spaceballs, one of many (again, obvious) jokes made at the expense of Star Wars. But if you're going to parody such a famous film, you may as well go broad, which makes Spaceballs one of the more approachable and comparatively “blockbuster” efforts Brooks has directed, parody-wise. And it’s pretty funny overall, still, hitting a bit more than it misses.

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Spaceballs

PG

Adventure

Comedy

Sci-Fi

Where to Watch

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*Availability in US

Release Date

June 24, 1987

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Mel Brooks , John Candy , Rick Moranis , Bill Pullman , Daphne Zuniga , Dick Van Patten

Runtime

96

3 'Life Stinks' (1991)

"They force me to live in the crap, and now they're taking the crap away? No!"

Overall, considering it’s a Mel Brooks movie, Life Stinks is kind of obscure. Perhaps it’s understandable why, given it’s far from one of Brooks’s greatest, but it’s not a total disaster by any means. It’s interesting for the fact that it functions as something of a dramedy, rather than an outright comedy, and also because it’s not a parody of a certain genre the way many Brooks-directed movies are.

Life Stinks is about a wealthy man undertaking a bet that he can live without anything by way of comfort or security for a certain amount of time, in turn struggling and becoming more sympathetic to the downtrodden; the sorts of people he’d usually ignore. The above quote, like the previously mentioned line from The Producers, does a pretty good job of summarizing the whole movie in just one sentence.

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Life Stinks

PG-13

Comedy

Release Date

June 5, 1991

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Lesley Ann Warren , Mel Brooks , Jeffrey Tambor , Stuart Pankin , Michael Ensign , Howard Morris , Matthew Faison , Rudy De Luca , Teddy Wilson , Stanley Brock , Billy Barty , Raymond O'Connor , Brian Thompson , Sammy Shore , Robert Ridgely , James Van Patten , Mike Pniewski , Marianne Muellerleile , Anne Betancourt , Darrow Igus

Runtime

92 minutes

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2 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights' (1993)

"Because, unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent."

After Life Stinks, Mel Brooks went back to parodies with what ended up being his penultimate (and arguably final good) movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights. It sees Brooks debatably in autopilot mode, or at least sticking within his wheelhouse, but doing so with enough solid gags, fourth-wall breaks, and moments of absurd humor that it mostly works, and generally proves entertaining.

Given Kevin Costner had just played Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and because that film had only come out two years earlier, Men in Tights inevitably pokes fun at it. And one of the easiest targets was Costner’s portrayal, and the way he played Robin Hood with an American accent. This choice on Costner's part can be explained/justified, but nonetheless, it still makes for a decently funny zinger in Men in Tights.

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Robin Hood: Men in Tights

PG-13

Comedy

Adventure

Musical

Where to Watch

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Not available

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Release Date

July 28, 1993

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Cary Elwes , Richard Lewis , Roger Rees , Amy Yasbeck , Mark Blankfield , Dave Chappelle , Isaac Hayes , Megan Cavanagh

Runtime

104 Minutes

1 'Dracula: Dead and Loving It' (1995)

"I must move the coffin or the chandelier."

On paper, the idea of Mel Brooks turning his sights on Dracula, similarly to what he’d done for Frankenstein in 1974, might've sounded neat, but the execution – as demonstrated by Dracula: Dead and Loving It – left a lot to be desired. This is probably the biggest miss of Brooks’s directorial career, and it’s a shame it stands as what will almost certainly be his final movie. As of 2024, Brooks is still somewhat active in the entertainment industry, but the guy’s 98, and this came out three decades ago, so…

Anyway, it has parody god Leslie Nielsen, and it’s still Mel Brooks-esque at times, so you occasionally get a joke that sort of works. Nielsen, as Count Dracula, does a dramatic rise out of his coffin but bumps his head, then talks about the whole thing like it’s happened more than once. Simple, and kind of middling compared to Brooks at his best, but it’s a small laugh in a movie that, while it has some, could certainly have used a few more.

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Dracula: Dead and Loving It

PG-13

Comedy

Fantasy

Horror

Release Date

December 22, 1995

Director

Mel Brooks

Cast

Leslie Nielsen , Mel Brooks , Amy Yasbeck , Peter MacNicol , Lysette Anthony , Harvey Korman , Steven Weber , Mark Blankfield , Megan Cavanagh , Gregg Binkley , Anne Bancroft , Clive Revill , Chuck McCann , Avery Schreiber , Cherie Franklin , Ezio Greggio , Leslie Sachs , Rudy De Luca , Darla Haun , Karen Roe , Charlie Callas

Runtime

88 Minutes

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