The comedy legend who happily played second fiddle

Carl Reiner was a master at helping other comics shine. Tall and rubbery-faced with a booming voice and knack for foreign-sounding gibberish, he played second banana to Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows, the 1950s comedy revue known for its cutting-edge silliness. He was also a member of Caesar’s storied writers room, spitballing with Neil Simon, Mel Tolkin, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and other soon-to-be legends. The experience birthed a friendship with Brooks—whom Reiner would mock-interview in their iconic bit “The 2,000-Year-Old Man”—and inspired Reiner to create a sitcom about a variety-show writer who lives in the

New York suburbs. The pilot for Head of the Family, with Reiner in the lead role, was a flop. But recast with Dick Van Dyke as the star and Reiner playing his egomaniacal, toupee-wearing boss, the sitcom became a roaring success. The Dick Van Dyke Show ran from 1961 to 1966 and has been in syndication ever since. “We got a better actor,” Reiner said. “A much better actor.”

Reiner was born in the Bronx to immigrants from Eastern Europe, said The Times (U.K.). According to family lore, his watchmaker father “invented the first battery-operated clock—only to have the patent stolen by the Nazis.” At age 16, Reiner was working as a mechanic when his older brother read about free acting classes provided by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency. Reiner “enrolled and a new career beckoned.” After touring the Pacific with an entertainment unit during World War II, he returned to the U.S. and starred in several Broadway musicals.

In 1950, Caesar hired Reiner for his “pioneering live TV sketch comedy program,” said NPR.com, with Reiner as the straight man to Caesar’s eccentric characters. “Being a second banana to such a massive first banana,” said Reiner, “wasn’t a comedown at all.” He also lit the comedy fuse for Brooks in the 2,000-yearold man routine, feeding questions to the ancient sage in a routine the pair would initially perform “only for friends at dinner parties,” said The Washington Post. Brooks, ad-libbing in a Yiddish accent, reminisced about his thousands of children (they never visit), Jesus (“Thin lad. Wore sandals. Always walked around with 12 other guys”), and Sigmund Freud (“a good basketball player”). Reiner thought mainstream audiences would reject their Jewish humor, but when they put it on record, the first of five albums sold a million copies. Film star Cary Grant said when he played the LP at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother “roared” with laughter. “Well, there’s the biggest shiksa in the world,” Reiner told Brooks. “We must be all right.”

The Dick Van Dyke Show helped Reiner land a starring role in the 1966 Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, said The New York Times, but he spent most of his career “letting others get the laughs.” Reiner directed box-office hits such as 1977’s Oh, God!, featuring George Burns as “a downto-earth deity,” and 1979’s The Jerk, his first of four movies starring Steve Martin. Reiner’s later films, such as 1985’s Summer Rental and 1990’s Sibling Rivalry, were less successful, as were the two Broadway plays he directed. He returned to acting as an aging con man in the 2001 remake of Ocean’s Eleven and its two sequels. In his 90s, Reiner kept up a daily routine that included writing and tweeting about politics, said Vanity Fair, “then having fellow widower Brooks over to his Beverly Hills home” to eat dinner and watch Jeopardy! on his massive TV. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a better friend than Carl,” Brooks said in a joint interview with Reiner earlier this year. “My God, the thought of being without him,” Reiner responded. “The world would be too bleak!”