Carl Reiner’s Legacy: More Than Just The “Straight Man” For Mel Brooks

Some of the greatest laughs ever generated in American comedy were initially created for private audiences. Thank God that Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks eventually deigned to record them for the delectation of a greater public, however.

Carl Reiner, whose death at the age of 98 was announced today, was the “straight man” of what became an immortal character comedy bit. It was something that he and his best friend Brooks, the perennial “on” comedy figure, concocted while brainstorming as writers at the pioneering 1950s-era sketch-comedy TV program, Your Show of Shows. Reiner, inspired by a tabloid-type show he’d scene, imagined interviewing figures not from contemporary history but ancient. Putting on an interviewer voice and saying to Brooks, “Here’s a man who was actually seen at the Crucifixion 2000 years ago,” he then just watched Brooks go. The two did the bit at parties for a while, and then in a recording studio with an audience, at the behest of Steve Allen. Once the bit caught on, they took it to television.

“The 2000 Year Old Man,” as Brooks’ character became known, had seen and done it all, meeting prominent Jews from Jesus Christ to Al Jolson, and many historical gentiles as well. Of Jesus, the nameless super-senior citizen observed, “He was a nice boy. Lovely. Thin. Wore sandals…He came into the store, he never bought anything.”

In these sketches, Reiner proved a master of the joke setup. The team took their Q & A routine to other places and other characters. On the 1962 album The 2000 Year Old Man At The Cannes Film Festival, Reiner’s interviewer meets a very hifalutin Italian filmmaker (“a director of the ‘New Wave’ school”) named Federico Fettucini. Querying the director about his rape-filled oeuvre (these improvised routines did yield some objectionable humor, for sure), Reiner’s flummoxed inquirer asks, “Why do you do these films, sir?” and Fettucini instantly shoots back “For money, yes.”

Because Reiner and Brooks preferred to enjoy each others’ company rather than monetize it, they only made four albums together, and there was a ten-year gap between Cannes Film Festival and 2000 and Thirteen. As a writer, director, and actor, Reiner went about proving, albeit with less public prominence than Brooks for a time, that he was quite a lot more than a straight man. 

The sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, which starred Van Dyke as a television writer, was one of the earliest, and best, workplace comedies on American television. Reiner based Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie on himself, and the show on Your Show of Shows, which was overseen by the manic genius Sid Caesar. 

The Bronx-born Reiner was a great lover of silent comedy, and his affinity with the performer Van Dyke drew on that. Both men were not blind to the cruelties of the business that gave birth to comedic greatness, nor to the fierce and fiercely self-defeating egos of the men and women who had made them laugh. Reiner’s second movie as a feature director, 1969’s The Comic, starred Van Dyke as an embittered silent film star telling his story from beyond the grave. Reiner’s feature debut, Enter Laughing, is sunnier — a somewhat autobiographical tale of a very naïve and unschooled showbiz newbie, and a spectacularly entertaining one. It features remarkable character bits from luminaries such as Jose Ferrer and Elaine May, and showcases Carl’s son, the actor and future director Rob, as an uber-schlub in the movie’s hysterical audition scene. 

But let’s talk for a minute about Where’s Poppa?, Reiner’s 1970 George Segal starrer. Yes, if you’re looking it up on IMDb, your eyes do not deceive you: its tagline in “The tush scene alone is worth the price of admission.” Made at a time when our understanding of Alzheimer’s and dementia was squeezed under the insufficient and inadvertently cruel umbrella of “senility,” the movie is about the hapless Gordon Hocheiser (Segal) and his aging and increasingly unhinged mother (Ruth Gordon). “Where’s Poppa” is her persistent cry concerning her absent husband, whom she’s forgotten is dead. She transfers an awful lot to Gordon, including amorous feelings; there is where, I’m afraid, the “tush scene” comes in.

In an era of increasingly raw “Jewish mother” jokes (this was also the time of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint), Where’s Poppa? was in a sense the grimmest and most shocking of all. And we have not even gotten to the stuff with Gordon’s brother, a frequent mugging victim whose Central Park sojourn, wearing the gorilla suit that Gordon has previously donned in an abortive attempt to scare mom to death, is…well, there are no, and perhaps there indeed should not be any, words for it.

The point is that Reiner was unobtrusively pioneering the extreme bad taste/grossout comedy here, and even fifty years later, Poppa? is, with good reason, very tough to take for some. As the years went on, Reiner’s directorial efforts became more anodyne (in a sense, how could they not?). You don’t get more ingratiating, for instance, than casting beloved old-time comic George Burns, in 1977 a hale 81 years of age, as The Almighty himself in Oh God! That movie spawned a mini-franchise — but for Reiner it was one and done. The 1978 The One And Only, starring Henry Winkler, was a period piece with an affectionate look at pro wrestling in the ‘50s. 

There followed a very productive collaboration with Steve Martin, transforming him from gonzo standup comic to movie star. While some of the jokes in both 1979’s The Jerk and 1982’s technically innovative old-movie pastiche Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid have aged poorly, The Man With Two Brains, from 1983, still stands as a work of transcendent comic genius, while 1984’s All of Me, pairing Martin with Lily Tomlin, is a charming picture that helped ease Martin into a more serious mode of performance.

There’s a lot of Reiner to enjoy. In recent years his best work was on Twitter, with accounts of good times with friends and relatives (much Mel!) and passionate political observations. (He made it clear that he was very eager to outlive the current administration, and it does seem a shame that he now will not.) On screen, he was the beautifully grumpy uncle, so to speak, to the robbers and con men of the Ocean’s movies starring Clooney/Pitt/Damon et. al. He kept reassuringly popping up, doing voice work and cameos in TV and film. (In Toy Story 4 he voiced the character Carl Reineroceros, ar ar ar.) The age of 98 is a nice long run, but for those of us still here, it is a disappointment that he could not live forever.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.