Funny man was always ‘the fool in charge’

Carl Reiner, a driving force in American comedy as a writer for television pioneer Sid Caesar, partner of Mel Brooks and creator and co-star of the classic sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, has died at age 98 of natural causes at home in Beverly Hills.

He was still taking voice roles in his 90s and had a key role in If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast, a documentary about people who keep busy into their 90s.

Reiner is survived by three children, including director Rob Reiner. Reiner’s wife of 64 years, Estelle, died in 2008.

Reiner expressed his approach to his work in his book My Anecdotal Life when he said, “Inviting people to laugh at you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be the fool but you are the fool in charge.”

Born in the Bronx, Reiner performed Shakespearean plays as a teenager. While in the Army Signal Corps in the Second World War, he began writing and performing his own comedy material.

He was hired for Caesar’s popular TV sketch comedy series, Your Show of Shows, in the 1950s.

Brooks joined Reiner in creating the 2,000-Year-Old Man routine in which Reiner interviewed the world’s oldest living man, played by Brooks, who deadpans satiric first-person anecdotes of history in a thick Jewish accent.

Asked why the cross became a symbol for Christianity, for example, Brooks replied: “It was easier to put together than the Star of David.”

The sketch became the basis for five comedy albums, the latest earning a 1998 Grammy Award.

Reiner followed Caesar to his next series, Caesar’s Hour, and earned his first two Emmys.

Encouraged by Estelle to develop his own TV show, Reiner created a sitcom pilot, casting himself as a TV writer with a wife and two kids. CBS picked up the series only after it was recast and retitled The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Reiner earned several Emmys writing and producing it, and played Petrie’s boss, the temperamental variety show host Alan Brady.

A reprisal of that role three decades later, for a guest spot on the 1990s sitcom Mad About You, earned Reiner another Emmy.

He directed George Burns in the 1977 comedy Oh God! and collaborated with Steve Martin on The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and The Man with Two Brains

Starting in 2001, he played an elder con artist in the remake and two sequels of Ocean’s Eleven.

Carl Reiner