Carl Reiner, TV comedy pioneer, dies at 98

Carl Reiner, a gifted comic improviser who created the enduring 1960s sitcom “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and Mel Brooks’s 2,000-YearOld Man character – a cranky Jewish rascal who claimed to have dated Joan of Arc (“what a cutie”) and have 42,000 children (“and not one comes to visit me”) – died June 29 at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 98.

Actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner, one of his sons, confirmed the death in a tweet.

The elder Reiner gained a national following in the 1950s as a brilliant straight man opposite Sid Caesar on influential TV comedy programs, directed movies that launched Steve Martin’s film career in the 1970s and 1980s, and played an aging con man in the popular “Oceans 11” movie franchise of the 2000s starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.

Reiner was masterful at following comic logic to its most ridiculous conclusion – especially when he collaborated with Brooks on ad-libbed comedy routines about the 2,000-Year-Old Man. The first of their five albums, released in 196, influenced a generation of comedians, including Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Albert Brooks and Paul Reiser.

“I went into this business after hearing Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner do their 2,000-Year-Old-Man routine,” Cosby once said. “I loved their flow of humor, the looseness of it and the fact that any second, a piece of greatness could suddenly be created.”

Reiner played the eager, probing questioner who tried to elicit pearls of wisdom any average listener would want to know from a man who was 2,000 years old, played by Brooks.

einer “Sir, what do you consider the greatest medical discovery in the 2,000 years that you’ve lived, to be? Would it be the advent of transplants of organs, the use of antibiotics, the heart-lung machine?”

None of the above, Brooks replied. It was liquid Prell shampoo, whose bottle was unbreakable. “A heart-lung machine is in your medicine cabinet and falls out – it’s gonna break!”

Reiner pushed for information about historical figures with whom the 2,000-Year-Old Man crossed paths. Brooks revealed that Helen of Troy had a less-attractive sister named Janice who had a body that could “launch a few canoes.”

Brooks once said of Reiner “His genius was in getting this little Jewish rat in a corner and trapping him. He’d always say, µProve it, prove it.’

“I’d come up with these fantastic statements ... and he never let me up, he’d be demanding real proof for all my statements. Which was insane, since the first statement was I was 2,000 years old, and that wasn’t challenged.”

As Reiner told the Los Angeles Times, “I knew a man in panic was just hilarious. I knew that if he was against the wall, he’d always find gold.”

During the 1950s, Reiner and Brooks would only perform the 2,000-Year-Old Man interviews for friends at dinner parties. They were reluctant to record the routine.

In a 1999 New York Times interview, he recalled telling Brooks, “We can’t do it for anybody but Jews and non-anti-Semitic friends. The Eastern-European Jewish accent Mel did was persona non grata in 1950. The war had been over for five years, the Jews had been maligned enough.”

Reiner and Brooks slowly built a following among the show-business elite – comedian George Burns threatened to steal the idea if they did not record it first.

The first Reiner-Brooks record, “2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks,” reportedly sold more than 1 million copies. In an era when a lot of Jewish comics and writers hid their ethnic identities, the album was among the first to help make Jewish humor mainstream, the comedy historian Gerald Nachman said in an interview for this obituary.

Reiner said the movie star Cary Grant once played it for the 4ueen Mother at Buckingham Palace, and she apparently “roared” with laughter.

8sing a Yiddish expression for non-Jewish woman, Reiner told Brooks, “Well, there’s the biggest shiksa in the world. We must be all right.”

Carl Reiner was born March 20, 1922, in the Bronx to Romanian immigrants. After completing high school at 16, he was working as a machinist’s helper in the millinery trade when he began taking drama classes sponsored by the federal Work Projects Administration.

Tall, lean and rubbery-faced, he was a physical comedian with a booming voice and a talent for foreign-accented gibberish. After serving in an Army entertainment unit during World War II, he appeared in Broadway musicals before joining the cast of the Caesar comedy program “Your Show of Shows” in 1950.

“We really needed a second banana, somebody who could dive in and out of Sid and support him,” Brooks once said. “Nobody could do foreign gibberish better than Sid Caesar, but this Reiner guy could keep up with him.”

Both “Your Show of Shows” (1950-54) and its successor, “Caesar’s Hour” (1954-57) were live programs on NBC that drew tens of millions of viewers every week with their blend of slapstick comedy and sophisticated farce. They set the standard for later programs such as “The Carol Burnett Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

The Caesar shows featured some of the most inventive comedy writers ever assembled, including Brooks (who went on to direct “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein”), Mel Tolkin (later a writer for “All in the Family”), Larry Gelbart (a creator of the TV series “M.A.S.H”) and Neil Simon (who immortalized the writers’ room in his play “Laughter on the 23d Floor” and also wrote, among many other plays and movies, “The Odd Couple.”)