Gene Wilder And Mel Brooks' Only Fight During Their Friendship

Mel Brooks' 1974 spoof "Young Frankenstein" is one of those movies that gets parsed in film schools, and which is on many of the lists of movies you just have to see, published by various media outlets (such as Bravo, which ranked it #56 on its list of 100 funniest comedies of all time, via

Mel Brooks' 1974 spoof "Young Frankenstein" is one of those movies that gets parsed in film schools, and which is on many of the lists of movies you just have to see, published by various media outlets (such as Bravo, which ranked it #56 on its list of 100 funniest comedies of all time, via The Film Spectrum).

For those not familiar (and spoilers for a half-century-old movie follow), Gene Wilder plays Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, the great-grandson of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, who learns that he's inherited his family's Transylvania castle. As IMDb reports, he returns to his ancestral homeland, and comedic hijinks ensue.

A key moment in the film — and indeed, in all of comedic cinema history — occurs when Dr. Frankenstein (Wilder) and the monster (Peter Boyle) don tuxedos and perform a rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz," with the monster making crude vocalizations rather than actually singing. It's a non sequitur, fourth-wall-breaking bit of comic absurdity that subverts the audience's expectations — and it was also the one thing that Wilder and Brooks ever fought about, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

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