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
Kaminsky was his surname until his teens, when the young drummer built a stage name by trimming Brookman, his mother's maiden name, down to Brooks.
Q 02In which New York borough was Mel Brooks born and raised?
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is where Brooks grew up small, sickly and often bullied after his father died when he was two, and where he learned to disarm bigger boys by making them laugh.
Q 03Which jazz drummer taught the teenage Mel Brooks to play drums?
Buddy Rich
Buddy Rich gave the teenage Brooks his drum lessons, and drumming paid first: Brooks worked as a jazz drummer in the Catskills resorts before he turned stand-up comedian.
Q 04In which Second World War battle did Mel Brooks serve as a combat engineer?
The Battle of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge drew in Brooks's combat-engineer battalion, which also cleared land mines as the Allies advanced; he says he answered German loudspeakers by singing Al Jolson.
Q 05Mel Brooks spent the 1950s writing sketches for which television comedian?
Sid Caesar
Sid Caesar kept Brooks on his writing staff for Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour; Neil Simon later turned that writers' room into the play Laughter on the 23rd Floor, with a hypochondriac modelled on Brooks.
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 was created to cash in on the James Bond craze, with Don Adams as the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart.
Q 08Agent 86 in Brooks's 1965 spy-spoof sitcom works for which secret agency?
CONTROL
CONTROL is the Washington agency that fights KAOS, 'the international organization of evil'; its Agent 86 reports in on a telephone hidden in the sole of his shoe.
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 chosen as a sure-fire flop so Bialystock and Bloom can pocket the investors' money, but the audience takes it for a comedy and it becomes a hit.
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 12In Mel Brooks's The Twelve Chairs, what is hidden inside one of the dining chairs?
A fortune in jewels
A fortune in jewels was sewn into a seat cushion to keep it from the Bolsheviks, and a deathbed confession sends a ruined aristocrat chasing the scattered set across Soviet Russia.
Q 13Which stand-up comedian was among the credited co-writers of Blazing Saddles?
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 plays Harold, the lonely blind hermit who prays for a visitor, then pours boiling soup over the Monster and sets light to his thumb instead of his cigar.
Q 23Which two science-fiction awards did Young Frankenstein win for best dramatic presentation?
The Hugo and the Nebula
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor was also Brooks's first choice to play Sheriff Bart; he lost the part but stayed on the script and shares the writing credit.
Q 14Who plays Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles?
Cleavon Little
Cleavon Little plays Bart, a railroad worker about to hang who is made sheriff because the villain hopes a Black lawman will so offend the townsfolk that they leave.
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 pair of roles does Mel Brooks play in Blazing Saddles?
Governor Le Petomane and an Indian chief
Governor Le Petomane and an Indian chief who speaks Yiddish are both Brooks; the governor is named after Le Pétomane, a French stage star whose whole act was breaking wind.
Q 18By Mel Brooks's account, which western star turned down Blazing Saddles but promised to be first in line to see it?
John Wayne
John Wayne read the script when Brooks offered him a part and turned it down to protect his family-friendly image, yet reportedly promised to be first in line to see the film.
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'.
The Hugo and the Nebula both went to Brooks's horror spoof, which beat John Carpenter's Dark Star and Rollerball to the Nebula.
Q 24Who speaks the only audible word of dialogue in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie?
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
Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers are the target: Brooks plays a psychiatrist who has a fear of heights himself and takes charge of the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous.
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 David Cronenberg horror film was produced by Brooksfilms?
The Fly
The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum as a scientist who fuses with a housefly, reached Cronenberg after he walked away from Total Recall; he signed on once Brooks's company let him rewrite the script.
Q 28Which grim event is a musical number in History of the World, Part I?
The Inquisition
The Inquisition, the Spanish one, becomes an extended song-and-dance number, with Brooks himself singing and dancing as the grand inquisitor Torquemada.
Q 29History of the World, Part I plays on an unfinished multi-volume history by which Elizabethan figure?
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh began The History of the World as a prisoner in the Tower of London and never got past the first volume, so Brooks's 'Part I' was a joke: no sequel was planned.
Q 30On which streaming service did the series History of the World, Part II premiere in 2023?
Hulu
Hulu's sketch series arrived in March 2023, 42 years after a film whose 'Part I' was only a title joke, with Brooks narrating and Nick Kroll, Wanda Sykes and Ike Barinholtz writing and starring.