FROM THE VAULT: An Interview With Carl Reiner (Patreon)

Conducted ~10/2004

Be it his work with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows (and various iterations), the creation of The Dick Van Dyke Show, numerous “2,000 Year Old Man” pairings with Mel Brooks, Steve Martin’s classic comedies, or any number of accomplishments too long to list, Carl Reiner was a true comedy legend.

He penned quite a few books (his Enter Laughing is a must-read), plays, and films, and even made a return to acting as a key member of the gang in the Ocean’s 11 franchise.

I leapt at the chance to chat with Carl, even if it was originally offered to me as a fluff promotional piece for the short-lived Dreamworks CG show Father Of The Pride. Would you pass up an opportunity like that just because the show it was attached to was an unwatchable mess (through no fault of Carl’s, it must be said, as he just provided a voice)? Me neither.

It was a truly memorable experience talking to Carl – particularly the technical gaffe that erased the last 10 minutes of our conversation. Honestly, I would have been disappointed if I had walked away from it without creating at least one embarrassing anecdote for myself, so I count it as a winning loss.

I hope you enjoy this blast from the past (and please consider supporting me being able to present more of these archive pieces, and all-new material, by becoming a Patron)…

KEN PLUME: It’s a pleasure to be speaking with you…

CARL REINER: Yes, how are you!

PLUME: I’m doing well – hope you’re doing well…

REINER: Yes, but just give me your name again…

PLUME: Ken Plume…

REINER: Ken! That’s all I need… I’m not gonna call you Mister….

PLUME: Should I call you “sir” ?

REINER: Yes, please… Absolutely…

PLUME: Well, it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you, sir…

REINER: Thank you… You’ll have to amend that after we finish – you’ll say, “I was mistaken at the beginning,” or “It’s just what I figured.”

PLUME: Even if I was mistaken, I would never admit it…

REINER: Never! You’re an honest man… An honest man! A man who wants to be honest, anyway…

PLUME: I try… I often fail, but I try… You’re one of two people that I’ve wanted to interview for years…

REINER: That’s what you say every time you open a conversation…

PLUME: No, honestly! I’m being truthful now…

REINER: Oh, okay…

PLUME: You and Mel Brooks…

REINER: Oh, well, I agree with that. I would rather speak to Mel Brooks than anybody I know. I’m not kidding! I mean, we speak on the phone once in awhile… A couple of days ago, he was going to London… and I never come away from the phone after speaking with him that I’m not laughing.

PLUME: I’ve tried for years to get interviews with both of you, to little success…

REINER: Well, you’ve got the second level…

PLUME: Right now, you’re tops…

REINER: The best you can do right now!

PLUME: Touche! So I have to ask – is there anything left that you haven’t done, that you’d still like to do?

REINER: Yes… It’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever do now. When I was very young, and I heard Enrico Caruso sing “Pagliacci,” I said, “That’s what I want to do with my life! I want to be an opera singer!” I was 7 or 8 years old, and I had a wonderful voice. As a matter of fact, I sang in Broadway musicals. The only thing I’m missing is I have no rhythm and I sing off-key often, if there’s no music helping me. So if I had different genes or if someone could infuse a gene – or maybe the stem cell thing will find a gene for me – to make me so that I could sing. I would probably have a different career than I think I would want, and if I did have it, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as good as the one I have!

PLUME: Maybe you should just get a small electrical device implanted to shock you into tempo…

REINER: (laughing) Yes! As a matter of fact, in my first Broadway musical – Call Me Mister – the show opens on a bunch of guys, G.I.s, onstage in a military formation, and offstage you hear, “Sound off!” and they have to go, “One, two!” But I have to hit the right note, because they’re going to sing in the key I give them. I said, “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna goof it!” So they arranged for a trumpet to hit that note right before – “BAAA-RUUMPH” – so I never missed it. But if that trumpet weren’t there, I don’t know what would have happened…

PLUME: It would have been a whole set of keys…

REINER: Yeah!

PLUME: In listening to the opera music, was it the performance that drew you in, or just the music in general?

REINER: You grow up with what’s in the house, and your tastes are honed by that, and my father liked classical music. He listened to the Saturday afternoon operas from the Met, and he had these red seal records – one-sided records – and Caruso was one of the ones he had. And this was a soaring song – if you know “Pagliacci,” it soars. It makes your hair stand up! And I was thrilled by it, and I never lost the interest in hearing a good tenor belt opera.

PLUME: Do you in any way regret not being able to pursue that?

REINER: No, I don’t regret it. As a matter of fact, I had the best of two possible worlds – comedy and opera – when I did Your Show of Shows. I could always sing opera recitative, fake recitative, and when we got Earl Wild as the pianist, and he found a way that we could do operas – because you can’t follow recitative. I mean, how are you going to get an orchestra to play in the key you’re singing? But he did a brilliant thing… He said, “We’ll do the operas in the style of…” In other words, say if we did a Verdi opera, he d said, “We’ll take a song…” I remember the first one he suggested, which was “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” done in the style of either Verdi or Mozart. (I've attached an audio clip to this of post of Carl singing this bit, if you want to hear him.) The orchestra could be playing the key and we’d be singing gibberish, but “in the style of….” So I got to sing opera on Your Show of Shows, and it was very satisfying for me and, I think, for the audience! Did you notice I was singing fairly on key?

PLUME: (laughing) I did notice that…

REINER: (laughing) Yeah, okay… Just checking…

PLUME: Do you think comedy, as a genre, allows you to incorporate elements of just about everything else into it, whereas others – like drama, for instance – are far more limiting?

REINER: I think that comedy really tells you how it is. The other thing about comedy is that – you don’t even know if you’re failing in drama, but you do know when you’re failing in comedy. When you go to a comedy and you don’t hear anybody laughing, you know that you’ve failed. When you go to a drama and you’re rapt, there’s nobody making a sound – and if they’re crying, why, then you know that you’ve really done something. But you don’t have to cry – they could be sitting quietly and not be liking what they see, but you’d never know it because they’re quiet. You get instant reviews when you’re doing comedy.

PLUME: Is it something that you found easy to do, right off the bat?

REINER: Well, I think two things happen. You’re born in an environment that likes comedy – and my father and mother, they did take me to the Marx Brothers movies, and I waited for those. The radio in those days was giving us a big sampling of comedy all the time, from every radio show that you heard, you had big, big chances to laugh… The Jack Benny Show, The Fred Allen Show, The Burns & Allen Show, Fibber McGee & Molly… there was a lot of shows – shows you never heard of. And we honed our skills by listening to them, and the kids that had comedy bones and really laughed at those things remained interested in comedy.

PLUME: Can comedy be learned?

REINER: A fellow who has a funny bone can learn to hone his skills, but I don’t think you can develop a funny bone – you either have it or you don’t. And by the way – when you get it, we don’t know it. It might be environmentally very early when you get your comic sense, but it’s usually somebody in the house who knows what’s funny, or somebody in the neighborhood. But we don’t know where that comes from. But everybody wants to laugh – you know that. They need to laugh… People need to laugh.

PLUME: Is there a defining moment where you say, “Okay, this is my comic sensibility. This is what I find, and am able to make, funny…” ?

REINER: Well, you know, when you’re very young – it’s the same kind of development as in playwriting. You have a playwright – take any great comic playwright – and they start off telling a joke when they’re very young. They heard a joke – they repeat it. And then they embellish a joke. The real comedians are the people who’ve heard a joke, and then tell a joke a little longer than they’ve heard it by embellishing, and performing the characters that they’re talking about. They’ll do more with a joke than a guy that just heard it. And then the next thing, when you start being a writer, you write maybe a little 3 or 4 page sketch, and then a longer sketch, and then a one act play, and then maybe a three act play… And then maybe a book someday. It’s an incremental development when you’re very young. You don’t start off being who you are – you start off with that one joke! I remember repeating… There was a guy named Lou Holtz who did these jokes about the most stubborn man in the world, I remember, very young, him talking about a man who was so stubborn that when he had a toothache, he told the dentist, “I have a toothache…” And the dentist said, “Which tooth?” And he said, “You’re the dentist, you have the diploma, you tell me!” He wouldn’t tell him which was the tooth! So he pulled out all the tooths from the mouth, and he still wouldn’t tell him which tooth! I mean, that was a silly joke, but you can embellish it – it was a story joke. And then you develop into a performer when you can tell a story joke fully.

PLUME: So it’s basically treating comedy like jazz…

REINER: Yes! There’s a great similarity to jazz – it’s riffing. Comedians are really writers who don’t have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.

PLUME: So it’s really extemporaneous…

REINER: Yeah. You think that Woody Allen was a writer, but he talked! Actually, he wrote for us, believe it or not. When he was 18, he wrote for us, but somebody said he was to shy. A lot of writers are shy comedians, and there was no room for shy comedians in vaudeville – you had to be brash. And all of a sudden a new type of comedian came out – a shy comedian.

PLUME: Are these the type of writers that tend to flourish within the safe environment of a writers room, where they weren’t out in the public eye?

REINER: I think so. I think that writers are really comedians, and either they have no urge to show off – they all have an urge to want people to know they wrote it, but they don’t particularly have an urge to perform. And by the way – we keep forgetting that performing is a talent. There is such a thing as a performing talent, and not everybody has that, and not everybody has the psyche to do it. Most writers are performers, but they’re performers who perform on paper, and they don’t want to get up and do it. As a matter of fact, they had to talk Woody into doing it – “Get up and do that thing you were doing!” Because it was very funny in the room, I guess, telling his stories.

PLUME: I can’t imagine what Mel was like in that room…

REINER: Well, Mel was a performer right away. I mean, he’s a talking writer. He has a tough time sitting with a pencil. The most disciplined he’s ever been was on The Producers. When he wrote the lyrics and music for The Producers, he really had to sit down and do it. But he has a tough time sitting with a pencil. He’s a guy who can wing off the top of his head – and it comes and goes and flies away, and he hasn’t got time to put it down.

PLUME: Did you feel a sense of envy within the Caesar writing room, that you got the chance to be both a writer and a performer?

REINER: Everybody was – not envious, but solicitous of their own contributions. They wanted to make sure that people knew they did what they did! (laughing) Writers were always saying to their wives, “I wrote that…” when they go home and watch the show on a Saturday night. “I wrote that line.” As a matter of fact, I once told a director who was working on The Dick Van Dyke Show, when I came to see what the run-through was like – as the producer/writer – he would say, “I gave him that piece of business.” And I told this director, “If you didn’t say that, I would assume that every piece of business in the thing was something we had written. Now I only know that that’s the piece you gave him – so don’t say that anymore!”

PLUME: I’m surprised there’s never been a show where someone’s kept a log book of every contribution…

REINER: Yeah! (laughing) Well, writers have that with their wives. That’s what they do with their wives…

PLUME: They’re the repositories of the knowledge of all the contributions…

REINER: Yeah!

PLUME: And I’m sure the wives are thrilled…

REINER: Most of the time, yes. They want to know that their lives are secure and their husband’s going to bring home the bacon.

PLUME: If there’s one thing you would like people to consider your greatest accomplishment, what would that be?

REINER: My true accomplishment – First of all, this sounds silly, but the truth of the matter is it’s sending really good people into the world…. Our three children and five grandchildren. That’s your only truck with immortality. If you send out good people into the world, you know you’ve done something good. And it’s absolutely true – there’s no question about that. The other thing is – as far as theatrical things – it’s the thing that you got the most kick out of doing. Really, the biggest kick I ever got was starting with a blank page. As far as a claim, I guess it would be The Dick Van Dyke Show, because I wrote and produced those for 5 years, and I wrote the first 40 out of the first 60. I was writing all the time, and doing all the re-writing, so I was very proud of that. But what gives me the greatest pleasure – and has given me – is writing a novel. And when I wrote Enter Laughing, I was thrilled! I hadn’t written anything like that before, and I was 35 years old… It was late maturity. Since then, I’ve written 3 or 4 novels, and An Anecdotal Life. But that’s the most thrilling to me. Right now in my typewriter, as I’m sitting with you here, I have something that I’ve been working on for over a year-and-a-half, and I can’t get a bead on where I can go with this. It’s so different and so crazy, but I think I’m starting to get it. I put it away for 5 months, and just got back to it. That’s the most thrilling thing – if you can get out of bed and go, “Oooo, I think I know where that thing can go now!” I mean, one of these things that was really a perfect example of letting your mind go where it wants to… I wrote a thing called All Kinds of Love. I had written Enter Laughing and I had written something else after that, another novel, and then I wanted to write what I thought would be a romantic novel. I said, “I want to do a romantic novel…” – And I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. So I write a first line. I had really no idea where I was going, but the first line – and this is the exact line – was, “But he had no idea that hiring a Japanese tutor would have the impact on his marriage that it did.” That’s a line I wrote… I had no idea why I wrote it. I knew something was in my head. So I asked, “Who is this guy? Why is he hiring a Japanese tutor?” And you keep asking yourself questions. And I said, “Ooo, maybe because he’s gotta go to Japan. Why would he go to Japan? Well, maybe he’s a producer who’s going to do a movie there or something.” And I always go to showbusiness, because then I don’t have to research it. If I make him a doctor, then I have to go find out what things mean.”

PLUME: No use in completely abandoning your knowledge base…

REINER: Yeah. It makes everything easier when you don’t have to research, and most everything I’ve written about is showbusiness.

PLUME: You’ve got to sugarcoat your motives – you should just say you wanted it to be more authentic…

REINER: It makes it authentic, and it makes it a lot easier, too!

PLUME: That way no one can say, “Oh, you’re just lazy, Carl…”

REINER: (laughing) Yeah. So what I ended up with was perfect for me. It’s exactly what I wanted to do, and I was so happy with that one, and people loved it and said it was good, so I figured I was all right. But that was thrilling to me – not having a thing in my mind, and it ended up where I never thought it would go. It became All Kinds of Love because there’s a bunch of love stories in there, and it ends up with a love story of a 15 and 16 year old – which is the real love story. The rest of them are all cocking around. They’re not really seriously romantic people.

PLUME: Would you say it’s the intimacy of writing that appeals to you?

REINER: You know what it is? It’s like the writer that says, “I wrote that, honey.”

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