Mel Brooks is the funniest. That we all agree on. There is no need to debate it. All of us who try to make comedy know we will never be the best. Mel wins. What we can debate is which is the best Mel Brooks movie. Yes, this is a subjective question. If you choose Blazing Saddles or The Producers or High Anxiety, I can’t prove you wrong, but allow me to make the case for Young Frankenstein. Young Frankenstein is perfect. It’s the comedy equivalent of Sgt. Pepper or The Great Gatsby or the 1986 New York Mets. The pace and joke compression are off the charts. The laughs are huge. The jokes land like the punches of a prize fighter in furious volleys from all different angles. The big ones landing when you least expect them. What modern comedy doesn’t owe a debt of gratitude to Young Frankenstein? The physical comedy is both precise and insane. The genre parody is spot-on and meticulously detailed. There have been a million spoof movies since, but none of them even comes close. You don’t need to know a thing about Frankenstein to love this movie. Plus, Marty Feldman’s looks to camera are so well-timed and iconic, he’s basically inventing The Office in 1974 … Another thing to keep in mind: Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles in the same year. Has a director ever had a better year than Mel Brooks in 1974? Victor Fleming made Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939, but Gone with the Wind isn’t funny at all. Mel wins again. A few years ago, I went to see Young Frankenstein at a revival house, and it got the loudest, most sustained laughs I have ever heard in a theater. I was jealous, but then I realized I will never fight as well as Ali, I will never paint as beautifully as Picasso, and I will never be as funny as Mel Brooks. But even if you’re only a third as funny as Mel, that still will make for a comfortable living.

Judd Apatow, in Mel Brooks (with Rebecca Keegan), Young Frankenstein: The Story of the Making of the Film, Black Dog & Leventhal, New York 2016

The moment, when it comes, has the inevitability of comic genius. Young Victor Frankenstein, grandson of the count who started it all, returns by rail to his ancestral home. As the train pulls into the station, he spots a kid on the platform, lowers the window and asks, “Pardon me, boy; is this the Transylvania Station?”.

It is, and Mel Brooks is home with Young Frankenstein, his most disciplined and visually inventive film (it also happens to be very funny). […] In his two best comedies, before this, The Producers and Blazing Saddles, Brooks revealed a rare comic anarchy. His movies weren’t just funny, they were aggressive and subversive, making us laugh even when we really should have been offended. (Explaining this process, Brooks once loftily declared, “My movies rise below vulgarity.”). Young Frankenstein is as funny as we expect a Mel Brooks comedy to be, but it’s more than that: it shows artistic growth and a more sure-handed control of the material by a director who once seemed willing to do literally anything for a laugh. It’s more confident and less breathless.

That’s partly because the very genre he’s satirizing gives him a strong narrative he can play against. Brooks’s targets are James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the first the most influential and the second probably the best of the 1930s Hollywood horror movies. Brooks uses carefully controlled black-and-white photography that catches the feel of the earlier films. He uses old-fashioned visual devices and obvious special effects (the train ride is a study in manufactured studio scenes). He adjusts the music to the right degree of squeakiness. And he even rented the original Frankenstein laboratory, with its zaps of electricity, high-voltage special effects, and elevator platform to intercept lightning bolts.

So the movie is a send-up of a style and not just of the material […]. From its opening title (which manages to satirize Frankenstein and Citizen Kane at the same time) to its closing, uh, refrain, Young Frankenstein is not only a Mel Brooks movie but also a loving commentary on our love-hate affairs with monsters. This time, the monster even gets to have a little love-hate affair of his own.

Roger Ebert, “Chicago Sun-Times”, 1 January 1974