Generation influenced by comedy master Reiner
Television comedy pioneer rose to fame in 1950s and excelled as straight man
Carl Reiner, a gifted comic improviser who created the enduring 1960s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show and Mel Brooks’s 2,000 Year Old 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 on 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 an international following in the 1950s 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 Ocean’s Eleven 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 1961, influenced a generation of comedians, including Billy Crystal, Albert Brooks and Paul Reiser.
Carl Reiner was born March 20, 1922, in the Bronx, N.Y., 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 the Second World War, he appeared in Broadway musicals before joining the cast of the Caesar comedy program Your Show of Shows in 1950.
Both NBC’S Your Show of Shows (1950-54) and its successor, Caesar’s Hour (1954-57) were live programs that drew tens of millions of viewers every week, blending slapstick comedy with sophisticated farce. They set the standard for such later programs 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, among others), Mel Tolkin (later a writer for All in the Family), Larry Gelbart (a creator of the TV series MASH) and playwright Neil Simon.
After Caesar’s Hour ended its run, Reiner was dissatisfied with the TV offers that came his way. So he created a sitcom, called Head of the Family, based on his life as a variety-show writer who lives in the New York suburbs.
The pilot, starring Reiner and Barbara Britton as his wife, flopped. But actor and veteran TV producer Sheldon Leonard rescued the concept from the trash bin.
“I knew he was talented,” Leonard once said of Reiner, “so I wondered why it hadn’t sold. He had been miscast. He didn’t look or sound like a Scarsdale (commuter). His willingness to step aside and let someone else carry the ball was the reason for the existence of The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
Van Dyke, a rising Broadway actor, was his replacement, and the little-known actress Mary Tyler Moore played his wife. Reiner cast himself as the megalomaniacal TV host, Alan Brady, whose toupee became a running gag.
Reiner shared five Emmy Awards for writing and producing the sitcom, which aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966 and has been in near-constant syndication ever since.
It was one of the first shows about the process of writing for television, an exotic world for most viewers at the time, and it showed a far more playful, believable married couple than earlier sitcoms, comedy historian Gerald Nachman said.
Van Dyke’s character also had a self-doubting vulnerability that was rare in an era of two-dimensional sitcom dads. Nachman called the show a transition between “goody two-shoes sitcoms” of the 1950s and grittier fare like All in the Family in the 1970s.
Reiner went on to focus on a movie career. He had a leading role in the Cold War film comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966) with Jonathan Winters. He later became a commercially successful director with Oh, God! (1977), starring George Burns, and early Steve Martin comedies, including The Jerk (1979) and the film-noir send-up Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982).
Reiner had frequent guest roles on TV shows and won another Emmy, in 1995, when he revived the Brady character on the NBC sitcom Mad About You. He also was a poker buddy of Johnny Carson and made 47 appearances on The Tonight Show.
In his screen work, Reiner was perhaps overshadowed by his wife, Estelle (Lebost) Reiner, who spoke one of the best-remembered movie lines of all time.
Son Rob Reiner cast her in When Harry Met Sally (1989) as the deli patron who watches Meg Ryan fake a very public orgasm and then tells a waitress, “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Estelle died in 2008, after nearly 65 years of marriage. They had three children.
Crystal wrote in the foreword to Reiner’s 2013 memoir, I Remember Me, “I’ve always looked at his career as one of the best ever and one of the most important ... He didn’t have to be a star. Always willing to be second if it helped the team finish first, Carl has never had an air about him. He is what he is: a nice genius.”
The Washington Post