MEL BROOKS AND DAVID STEINBERG
In Conversation
Presented by The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Writers Bloc
October 6, 7:30pm. At the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. Buy tickets here.
Consider, if you will, the following television shows and movies. Your Show of Shows. Get Smart, created with Buck Henry. The Producers. Blazing Saddles. Young Frankenstein. The 2000 Year Old Man, created with his friend Carl Reiner. Spaceballs. Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Mel Brooks has created some of our favorite—and most enduring—comedies. He’s won Tonys, Emmys, Oscars and Grammys. The Producers: The New Mel Brooks Musical, was on Broadway for five years, and still holds the record for most Tony Awards for a musical. He’s won the Kennedy Center Honors and the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award.
David Steinberg is another legendary comedian— a sort of hybrid of Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce, and “comic institution himself,” according to the New York Times. Acclaimed as being one of the funniest and most incisive comedians of his generation, David Steinberg appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show 140 times. He’s still on television, on both sides of the camera—he created Showtime’s Inside Comedy, a virtual who’s who of American comedy, featuring interviews with America’s most interesting comedians. Behind the camera, David has directed films and countless television shows, including Curb Your Enthusiasm, and wrote several Seinfeld and Newhart episodes as well. He cut his teeth writing subversive material for The Smothers Brothers Show in the late 60’s. David has singular bragging rights to bringing down a beloved and most influential television series: his satirical and emphatically controversial sermons on that show provoked CBS to cancel The Smothers Brothers.