Brooks’ follow-up, “Modern Romance,” is one of the great studies of romantic and sexual obsession, about a couple that keeps breaking up and getting back together even though they make each other miserable. If you squint a bit, you can see the influence of “Taxi Driver,” the Martin Scorsese film in which Brooks played a campaign worker who’s in love with a colleague played by Cybill Shepherd; that role also feels like a bit of a dry run for the character of Aaron Altman in “Broadcast News,” which was written specifically for Brooks by his friend James L. Brooks (no relation). He followed it up with “Lost In America,” about a couple of married yuppies who sell their house and buy a Winnebago to enact a safe version of their “Easy Rider” fantasy about seeing the real America, then lose their nest egg in Las Vegas and learn how most Americans actually live. Then came “Defending Your Life,” an afterlife comedy which, as Brooks and others put it, is really about how hard it is to life one’s life without fear. Brooks, it seems, actually managed to do that, to some degree—although it meant that he never achieved superstar status and remained a “comedian’s comedian,” appreciated most fervently by other artists, and fans of comedy that could seem weird, confusing, or uncomfortable if you weren’t tuned into its wavelength.
Brooks became semi-famous as a high schooler when Rob Reiner’s father, actor and filmmaker Carl Reiner, declared him one of the funniest people he’d ever seen. The movie gives us an account of a Brooks routine that impressed the elder Reiner: at a party, young Brooks presented himself as a master escape artist in the vein of Harry Houdini, then asked a guest to bind and gag him (by placing one napkin loosely over his wrists and putting another one wadded-up in his mouth) and then “imprisoned” himself behind a curtain, then began writhing and wailing about how he was trapped and was dying. A lot of Brooks’ early comedy bits are like that: they take the germ of an old showbiz routine or trope and pulls the guts out of it (as in the classic moment on the old “Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson where Brooks does “celebrity impressions” by eating different kinds of food). Incredibly, some of Brooks’ best-known bits as a guest on talk and variety shows weren’t rehearsed: he just thought them up in the dressing room before airtime and did them publicly for the first time. “Your brain has to work at a certain level to do comedy without trying it out,” Chris Rock tells Reiner.
That exuberant, at times reckless-seeming quality has always run beneath Brooks’ art, along with a brainy, theoretical aspect that is difficult to unpack and scrutinize—although one sometimes wishes the film had tried harder to do so. The weakest element of “Defending My Life” is the litany of sound bites from other performers and filmmakers (including Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Conan O’Brien, and Jon Stewart) that needlessly fluff Brooks’ reputation and repeat wearying variations of “he’s a genius, he was so revolutionary, so amazing,” or compare him to Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier or the like. It’s not until confrontational standup comic Anthony Jeselnik shows up that we get a bit of real insight about what, exactly, Brooks’ comedy was always about: “It was punk rock, almost, for comedy,” he says of Brooks’ earliest routines, especially the ones he did for Carson. “He saw what was going on, he saw the old Holywood way, and instead of just saying ‘this is bad, this is corny,’ he showed them.” The notion of Brooks as ground zero for the self-aware or “anti-comedy” movement, which birthed everyone from Bill Murray and David Letterman (also an interviewee) through Silverman and the “Mr. Show” cast, is fascinating enough that it could be a film unto itself, but it’s merely glanced at here.
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