Mel Brooks is a sophisticated guy. He collected fancy French wines and did a tasting on Johnny Carson’s show. He drops references to Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls.” He was married for 40 years to that epitome of elegance, Anne Bancroft. He was a favorite lunch companion of Cary Grant, the suavest man who ever lived.

But in the new Hulu show “History of the World, Part II,” you can still find all the Mel Brooks signature comedy stylings: penis jokes, puke jokes and fart jokes.

“I like fart jokes,” he said, Zooming from his home in Santa Monica, Calif. “It adds some je ne sais quoi to the comedy. A touch of sophistication for the smarter people helps move the show along.”

After all, with the percussive campfire scene in his 1974 comedy classic, “Blazing Saddles,” where the cowhands sit around eating beans and passing wind, he elevated flatulence to cinematic history.

The comedy legend, 96, preferred to meet on Zoom because he’s wary of Covid. Strangers love to hug him and say, “Mel, I love you!” he said, adding, “I’m a target.”

The man behind outlandish, hilarious movies like “The Producers,” “Young Frankenstein,” “Spaceballs,” “High Anxiety,” “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and “History of the World, Part I,” along with the hit TV spy comedy “Get Smart,” no longer lives in a time where he can have “absolutely no restrictions on any and all subjects,” as he said about writing “Blazing Saddles” (which was slapped with its own content warning in 2020 when it was on HBO Max). And he lost the two loves of his life, Ms. Bancroft and Carl Reiner. But Mel Brooks is still a ball of fire.

Having lived through nearly a century of history, Mr. Brooks is sneaking up on his famous character, the 2,000 Year Old Man. But his taste in comedy is still as merrily immature as ever. He has sharp takes on world history, greed and hypocrisy. He knows who the villains are and what the stakes are, and yet he’s not afraid of the lowbrow.

Max Brooks, his son with Ms. Bancroft, said his father’s mantra is: “If you’re going to climb the tower, ring the bell.”

“He believes if you’re going to make a piece of art, don’t be safe, don’t be careful, don’t pander to a certain group to win their favor.”

Mr. Brooks’s parents were immigrants, his mother from Ukraine and his father from Germany. His father died of tuberculosis when Mr. Brooks was 2; there was no money to send him to a sanitarium, Max Brooks said. When the little boy, born Melvin Kaminsky, needed fillings for his teeth that would have cost a dollar apiece, his mother could not afford it, so she had to let the dentist rip them out for half price.

He fought in the U.S. Army against the Nazis, and dealt with antisemitism among some of his fellow soldiers. He said he felt like Errol Flynn when he got instruction on cavalry charges with horses and sabers. He was a corporal, a combat engineer who defused land mines and cleared booby-trapped buildings in France and Germany. (He was in the German town of Baumholder on V.E. Day.) His three other brothers also fought in the war and one, Lenny, an Air Force pilot, ended up a prisoner in a Nazi P.O.W. camp for 19 months, where he had to pretend he wasn’t Jewish.

“I was on a troop ship, and I paid a sailor on deck $50 to let me sleep under a lifeboat in case we were torpedoed,” Mr. Brooks recalled. “The smells were dreadful, 500 guys on a ship. It was 16 or 17 days from the Navy yard in Brooklyn to Le Havre, France, zigzagging and trying not to get torpedoed.”

And ever since the war, he said, “I’ve tried to get even with Hitler by taking the Mickey out of him, making fun, but it’s difficult.”