Mel Brooks, direc­tor, pro­duc­er, writer, and actor, is an EGOT — one of the few enter­tain­ers in an elite group to earn all four major enter­tain­ment prizes: the Emmy, the Gram­my, the Oscar, and the Tony. His career began in tele­vi­sion writ­ing for Your Show of Shows, after which he helped cre­ate the TV series Get Smart. He and Carl Rein­er wrote and per­formed the 2000 Year Old Man Gram­my-win­ning com­e­dy albums. Brooks won the Oscar for Best Orig­i­nal Screen­play for his first fea­ture film, The Pro­duc­ers. Many hit com­e­dy films fol­lowed includ­ing The Twelve Chairs, Blaz­ing Sad­dles, Young Franken­stein, High Anx­i­ety, His­to­ry of the World Part I, To Be or Not to Be, Space­balls, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. His film com­pa­ny, Brooks­films Lim­it­ed, pro­duced crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed films such as The Ele­phant Man, Frances, My Favorite Year and 84 Char­ing Cross Road. In 2009 Mel Brooks was a Kennedy Cen­ter Hon­oree, rec­og­nized for a life­time of extra­or­di­nary con­tri­bu­tions to Amer­i­can cul­ture. In 2013 he was the forty-first recip­i­ent of the AFI’s Life Achieve­ment Award. In 2016 Mr. Brooks was pre­sent­ed with the Nation­al Medal of Arts by Pres­i­dent Obama.