Mel Brooks Was Right
There’s a great sketch that Mel Brooks wrote for Your Show of Shows. He performed it at a reunion event for Caesar’s Writers that I attended at the Writers Guild in 1996. It reunited many of the great writers of the legendary TV series, Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. On the panel were Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and others who had wonderful careers but those first five are plenty enough…
Actually, the whole video is a total joy. It’s probably the funniest night I’ve spent in a theater. For two hours. It’s not a joy just because of all the jokes and them acting out old sketches, but also because of the great affection that these people clearly have for each other – supporting one another, but also trying to top each other in front of an audience of their peers. Happily, the videotaped the event and put it out as a DVD, and an edited, one-hour version aired on PBS.
I mention all this because at one point in the evening, Larry Gelbart brought up an old sketch they did about an American spy. That gets everyone smiling and talking about how it went, and them Mel Brooks took over and acted it out.
The short version is that an American spy is in desperate need of money and decides to flip to the other side. He surreptitiously meets with the foreign agent and offers to sell secrets. The foreign agent offers to pay him 10 million zlotneys for the intelligence. The American spy is amazed by the amount – “10 million zlotneys??!!!” -- and agrees. They make the transaction.
Left alone, the American spy heads from a train, but first stops at a newspaper vendor and goes over to buy a paper. The vendor says, “That will be six million zlotneys.”
I was reminded of this sketch today when I saw the news about how the woman who ran onto the Russian TV news was just found guilty in court and fined 30,000 rubles. (I’m sure she’s at greater risk, but that’s where it stands now. A fine of 30,000 rubles.
Today in Russia, that is the equivalent of $280. So, just under a penny per…well, zlotney.
It’s certainly not nothing. But the next best thing. More than the cost of a McDonalds, as a friend said, but about dinner for four, tax and tip included, at a nice restaurant, though not even a high-end one.
By the way, I found video of that night when they tell the joke. This is the one-hour version that got edited down and aired on PBS. If you just want to see the joke, jump to the 30:45 mark.
(That's Larry in the center, in the camel-colored coat. To his right is Aaron Ruben, who co-created The Andy Griffith Show and created Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. You can probably recognize the Brooks fellow.)
Actually the whole video is a total joy. And worth watching. Highly recommend.
Or even better, you can watch the full, two-hour evening, which I posted here back in August, 2020.
Zlotneys just don’t go as far as they once did…
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