Mel Brooks is 77, but his eyes glinted with spry appreciation at the question. Did he think there was mileage in a Broadway musical with a title like Springtime for Osama, and would he consider writing one?

"There might be. I might do it," he told the Guardian yesterday, "and I will give you 10% of anything that comes out of it."

On Brooks' current track record, 10% would be worth quite a few million pounds. The man who skewered and ridiculed an earlier bogeyman in The Producers, the legendary film about a musical entitled Springtime for Hitler, complete with the chorus lyric
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out - here comes the master race
was in London to promote next November's West End production of the record-breaking Broadway musical based on the film.

"Here I am, practically 100 years old, and I have got this enormous hit," he said. As he put it delightedly, it was "Groundhog Day". Or, as his co-writer Thomas Meehan put it, it was "going round in circles".

You make a film about a stage musical. Then you write a stage musical from the film. And finally - as Brooks announced yesterday - you go on to plan a new film based on the stage musical.

There were many reasons for making the film, Meehan said. But one of them was that, after the stage version's huge box office takings, "there's this thing called money. Somebody wants to make money out of it."

First, however, Brooks has to decide whether to risk opening the stage musical, which so mocks part of the German past, in Germany itself.

"It's not a matter of taste," he said. "It's a matter of the show closing if they don't like it - or of me being shot in the head by a sniper's rifle."

The current plan is to fly in a "representative sample of Germans" - or as Brooks put it unrepentantly, "25 Krauts with their helmets on" - to vet the London production.

The Producers is about two conmen who set out to stage the world's most off-putting musical as a device to cheat investors. Brooks wanted it called Springtime for Hitler until the Hollywood mogul Joseph E Levene told him: "I can't get the movie booked by cinemas with that title."

He said of the show yesterday: "Rhetoric does not get you anywhere, because Hitler and Mussolini are just as good at rhetoric. But if you can bring these people down with comedy, they stand no chance."

Meehan said: "Mel Brooks is a little man from Brooklyn who has no power except to ridicule. He takes on Hitler, and makes him a figure of fun.

"There is something charmed about Mel. If anybody else did that, they would get themselves killed."

The West End version will star the veteran American actor Richard Dreyfuss and the British comedian Lee Evans.