Mel Brooks is singing into the telephone. "He vas a bully und a brute, he vas as crazy as a coot," the comic half-growls, impersonating an elderly Transylvanian housekeeper. "Still, I didn't give a hoot - he vas my boyfriend."

The fabled filmmaker/Broadway producer is 83 and still has most of his factory-issued parts, so it's not surprising that the pipes occasionally show a speck or two of rust. Besides, Brooks was giving this impromptu concert strictly for educational purposes, to illustrate a point about the musical stage version of "Young Frankenstein." A national tour containing much of the original Broadway cast (including "Desperate Housewives" alumnus Roger Bart) runs through Jan. 24 at the Hippodrome Theatre.

"The second child is always shunned," he says of the critical pans received by the New York production. (Some reviewers find the musical to be overly similar to the 1974 film.) "I think it's the best score I've ever written. It's twice as good as 'The Producers.' If I'd done 'Young Frankenstein' first, I would have gotten the 12 Tonys for that. But it had to follow 'The Producers.' "

Not that Brooks is dissing his maiden stage effort, the show containing the immortal number "Springtime for Hitler," the show holding the record for the most Tony Awards ever won by a stage musical. Praise the subversive intelligence behind "The Producers," and Brooks becomes so instantly joyful that the telephone receiver practically glows.

"Whether my characters are cavemen or sophisticates, my stories are always about the human condition," he says. "I just talk about how people behave. The whole ballgame is ideas - how they're couched in language, and how they're performed."

He loves every one of his artistic children passionately and indiscriminately, and will tell you that each of his 11 movies is his favorite, ranking such relative unknowns as "Life Stinks" alongside "Blazing Saddles." Ditto for his two stage musicals and the television shows he created, which include both the iconic ("Get Smart") and the quickly forgotten ("When Things Were Rotten.")

"Look, I made a movie called 'The Twelve Chairs' that sold three tickets maybe, and then I made a movie called 'Young Frankenstein' that sold 3 million tickets," he says. "I tell you, it has absolutely nothing to do with quality or merit. 'The Twelve Chairs' is just as good a movie as 'Young Frankenstein.' I'll send you the box set. You watch it sometime, and you call me back and tell me if I'm right."

Go ahead - try not to be charmed.

Brooks has succeeded, and succeeded spectacularly, in every genre in which he has worked. He is one of a smattering of artists to have achieved the Grand Slam of performing awards, racking up one Oscar, two Emmys, three Grammys and three individual Tonys. Three of his films ("The Producers," "Young Frankenstein" and "Blazing Saddles") make every list of top comedies.

Brooks' quirky humor has informed not just his shows, but those created by other writers. For instance, when Carl Reiner put together his seminal 1960s television sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show," he based the character of sidekick Buddy Sorrell on Brooks.

But despite four decades of accolades for his screen work, the comic apparently derives the greatest satisfaction from his two stage shows.

"Of all the things that Mel has accomplished, writing a Broadway musical has been the most fulfilling for him," says Brooks' frequent collaborator, the director and choreographer Susan Stroman. "He loves hearing an audience react instantly to his work. There is nothing more fun than being with Mel in the theater. He sparkles. He shines. It makes him so happy to make people laugh."

Like many comics, Brooks gets his audiences to laugh at things that once frightened him. An anecdote that he likes to tell demonstrates both where he gets his story-telling ability and the genesis of his obsession with Frankenstein's monster. One stifling summer day in 1931, the then-5-year-old demanded that his mother close the window leading from their fifth floor flat to the fire escape. When she refused, he burst into tears.

"I told her, 'Frankenstein's going to come up the fire escape and bite me and kill me.'

"She sat me down and said: 'Melvin, listen: Frankenstein lives in Romania. In order for him to go through our window, he'd have to make it to a seaport. He'd have to get on a ship and sail all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Then he'd have to take the trolley to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, find South Third Street and climb up the fire escape. Why would he climb all the way to the top when it would be so much easier for him to climb in through the open windows on the first floor?'

"I told her, 'It's OK, you can leave the window open.' "

In retrospect, Brooks says, Frankenstein's monster gripped his imagination as a child "because you couldn't reason with him. No matter what you said, no matter what you did, you could not reach his mind. I think I understood that there are some things in nature that there is no way to prevent or stop. It was an incredible revelation to a 5-year-old."

Brooks acknowledges that his subsequent career, in which ideas are finely polished and songs (sometimes ironically) extol the benefits of pure reason, can be seen as an effort to refute that uncomfortable truth.

Of course, there's more than one way to interpret the Frankenstein myth, and Stroman says that Mary Shelley's monster also helped her old friend cope with a devastating loss. Anne Bancroft, Brooks' wife of 41 years, died in 2005 while Brooks was writing the score and script for his second musical.

"The Frankenstein story is about bringing the dead back to life," Stroman says. "Losing Anne was very difficult for Mel, and being able to immerse himself in a project where people were singing about love and about creating life helped him to survive."

Bancroft's name comes up again in conversation when Brooks talks about a ceremony he attended in December in Washington, when he was one of five American artists selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors for 2009.

"I kept missing my wife a lot," he says. "Anne was a Democrat, and she would have enjoyed that night."

The televised ceremony featured a musical medley from several of Brooks' shows. At one point, the cameras panned to Brooks in the honorees' box where, with a huge smile on his face, he was mouthing the words to his lyrics along with the performers on stage.

"It was thrilling, absolutely thrilling," he says, "really the highlight of the year for me. I nearly cried when Matthew Broderick was singing, and I'm not a sentimental guy. Plus, in a few weeks, I can put the award they gave me on eBay. I should get a few thousand for it."

And, like the seasoned pro he is, Brooks waited for the laugh he knew was coming.