Happy birthday, Jerome Silberman!

You may know Jerome as Gene Wilder. In honor of the cuddly redhead's 74 candles this day, here are some multimedia highlights of a full -- and very funny -- life.

1962: Wilder makes his broadcast debut, voicing an ad for Alka Seltzer, and introducing America to a new epidemic: the blahs.

1968: In The Producers, Wilder's first big-screen collaboration with writer-director Mel Brooks, he plays the flappable Leo Bloom to Zero Mostel's Max Bialystock.

1972: Wilder is Dr. Doug Ross, who falls for Daisy the sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.

1974: It's pronounced FRONK-en-steen -- Young Frankenstein, that is, in the classic Mary Shelley send-up that Wilder co-wrote with Brooks.

1976: In their first buddy picture, Wilder teams up with Richard Pryor who (in the film's most famous, and by today's standards, most politically sensitive scene) helps the strawberry blond go on the lam -- in blackface.

2005: Wilder publishes Kiss Me Like a Stranger, an engaging (and highly personal) series of vignettes from his life and art, with appearances by Pryor, wife Gilda Radner, Madeline Kahn, Peter Sellers and many more. Hear him talk about it here.