JTA — When Judd Apatow was growing up on Long Island, there was no debate about who ruled the comedy world.

“Nobody was funnier than Mel Brooks,” Apatow once wrote. “Mel Brooks was the king.”

Decades later, after himself becoming a prolific Jewish filmmaker and comedy impresario, Apatow has turned that childhood certainty into a sweeping tribute. “Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man!,” a two-part HBO documentary debuting January 22, is a career-spanning portrait of one of American comedy’s most influential figures.

“A lot of us looked up to him as someone who was brilliant and funny and succeeding in multiple fields, writing, directing, producing, performing, and he was an inspiration,” Apatow told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think so many of us, like Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller and Amy Schumer, went into the business because they saw him and thought, ‘Oh, it’s possible.’”

He continued, “They loved his style and sense of humor, and his morality that, beneath the comedy and so much of his work, are a lot of very ethical ideas. And he’s using riotous laughter to inject people with things that are important to learn.”

Co-directed by Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio, the film traces Brooks’ life from his Brooklyn childhood to his work on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour,” his run of landmark films like “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein,” to later success that included the blockbuster Broadway version of “The Producers,” his guest arc on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and his update to “History of the World.”

The anarchic Borscht Belt tummler and comedy writer of the 1950s is shown evolving into a beloved elder statesman, praised by generations of Jewish admirers and disciples who include Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller and Nick Kroll, all of whom are featured in the documentary.

“There’s not anybody our age or up that didn’t have the pride of Mel being Jewish,” Sandler says in the film. “‘You know that dude you quote all the time? He’s one of us.’”

That sense of Jewish pride runs throughout the documentary, which leans unapologetically into Brooks’ Jewishness — from the “Jews in Space” sequence........

© The Times of Israel