What came first: the Mel Brooks movie or the cliché? The classic Hollywood Sci-Fi spaceship always gets gratuitous screentime from every camera angle. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood spaceship appears in a continuous one minute and 40 second scene detailing its ridiculous length.

For Mel Brooks the spoofing is in the details. The classic Hollywood Horror film is always black-and-white and includes scene transitions like iris outs, wipes and fades to black. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood Horror is no different. He even tracks down the original equipment from the mad doctor’s lab first used in the 1931 Frankenstein film.

Mel Brooks never met a stereotype he couldn’t upend. The classic Hollywood cowboy is always white. Mel Brooks’s Hollywood cowboy is black. And his Indian chief speaks Yiddish.

The logic here is, as long as it isn't happening to Mel Brooks, it's funny.

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner in conversation with director and writer Judd Apatow, marking the day on which the 2000 Year Old Man joins Twitter.

Take a ride on the Philip Roth Tour Bus and see the sights of Roth's Newark, New Jersey -- his hometown and setting of several of his books, like Goodbye Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and I Married a Communist.

The scene is England in 1964. You hear the band playing when Sister Rosetta Tharpe pulls up on a horse drawn carriage to a make-shift stage at an abandoned railroad station. It's a rainy day and Sister Rosetta is in her Sunday overcoat. You can almost hear a train whistle blowing when she belts out "Didn't it Rain" accompanied by a full-blooded, swaggering electric guitar sound.