Remembering Siskel and Ebert's great debate: Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?

Of the great debates in film history, a few dominate. How much of Citizen Kane did Orson Welles really write? Is the auteur a film’s true author? And the one that will never be resolved, can we separate the art from the artist?

In 1980, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert devoted an episode of their PBS review series “Sneak Previews” to the following question: Who’s funnier, Mel Brooks or Woody Allen?

The camps fall out as one might expect. Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Chicago Sun Times, whose work spoke to the everyman, preferred Brooks.

“Mel Brooks satirizes old movies, he plays...