Carl Reiner

Robert Trachtenberg: Okay, so I was saying, you’ve said during your shows that Mel was basically using Sid as a vehicle because you know Mel wanted to perform but Sid Sid was his

Carl Reiner: Sid was a big flame, and all the moths came to that flame. And one of the moth that came was Mel Brooks, who actually knew Sid. Actually, Mel worked for Sid, not for Max Liebman or the show of shows. He paid him like $50 a week to hang around. And then when he came on the show of show, he didn’t want to work for that anymore. He wanted Max to pay him. So Max paid him out of petty cash, which he thought was abominable. He finally got a salary, but he was really, he did all the things that Sid could do. Not as well as some of the things Sid did, Mel couldn’t do, but as far as a funny brain, Mel had the funniest brain in the room, no question.

Robert Trachtenberg: Everyone in all the archival interviews of all the writers, the first thing they usually talk about is Mel showing up late. But you said, which is good, is Mel’s showing up late was worth more than some schmuck showing up at nine.

Carl Reiner: You know, I’ve written a book called I Remember Me and about five chapters are devoted to Mel Brooks. And one of the chapters is showing up late. And the chapter is entitled, oh, show me the, oh he ate so many carrots that. Mel, he suffered from low sugar, high sugar, whatever it was. So he never came, we all arrived at 10 o’clock. He arrived at 12. And we were always waiting for Mel. We knew Mel was coming because his bagel and coffee would precede him from the stage delicatessen. It would come, and I would pay for it. It would be 25 cents for the coffee, 25 cents, no, 25 for the bagel, and a quarter tip, 50 cents. This day, everybody was really upset. We were doing a sketch and we’re looking for a punchline, couldn’t get it, and we said, milk and we’d probably come up with this one. He didn’t show up, and everybody was really angry with him, really angry that day. So to show how displeased we were, when the guy came for the coffee and bagel, I gave him his 50 cents and a 25 cents and the $25 tip. And when Mel came in, he gave me the half a dollar. I said, no, no it’s no, it’s it’s $50. And he paid it. He knew he was, he could see the anger in the room. He paid it without anything, drank his coffee. And then he said, all right, show me the brilliance. What do you mean? He knew exactly that he was wanted for something. And I’ll never forget the joke. The joke was, he ate so many carrots that, you know, he didn’t have a punchline for it. And Mel Brooks said, oh, the old carrot joke, huh? Dave said, the millionth carrot, you know, there’s no nuke. And he acted as if he were being crucified. He paced himself against the wall. And he came up with… But the carrots, he ate so many carrots that he couldn’t sleep. Why couldn’t he sleep? He saw right through his eyelids. The whole idea, we all knew the carrots give sight. He found a new way to do it. And I’ll never forget that because there were six writers and there were five writers and Mel came up with it. That’s an indication of how his brain worked a little differently than anybody else’s.

Robert Trachtenberg: Tell us about We the People Speak, hosted by Dan Seymour.

Carl Reiner: Oh, that’s the genesis of the 2,000-year-old man. I came in one morning. I was allowed into the writer’s room. I was kept out for the first three or four weeks of my career as a second banana. I was waiting in the hall for them to call me in to tell me here’s the stuff. And I was upset by that. The writers worked either in Max Liebman’s office or in the men’s room, Lucy of Callen couldn’t come to the men’s rooms. They used to split up. Some worked on a stairwell. I mean, there was not enough room. And I came up with the idea for the silent, for foreign movies. I knew I could do double talk, not like Sid. I came with that and then I was allowed into the writer’s room. But in the writer room, while I was there, I said, gee, I saw a program, it was called We the People Speak with Dan Seymour. He used to recreate the news. This happened yesterday in Kremlin. A man was in, a plumber was in Stalin’s toilet and heard Stalin say, going to bloody well Thursday. And I said, hey, that’s a good thing to take off. And they said, oh, it’s okay. It didn’t work. And I was a little frustrated. And I knew it was a good idea, you know, to have somebody. So I turned to Mel who was sitting on the couch and here’s a man who was actually at the scene of the crucifixion 2,000 years ago. And Mel, I’ll never forget his first words were, oh boy. I said, you were there. Yes, yes. You knew Jesus. Thin lad, all right, thin lad? Yes, always walked around with 12 other guys. They wore sandals. Nice boys. They used to come into the store, never bought anything. Always asked for water. I gave it to them. Nice boys, that was the first war, John. For the next, that 1950, from 1950 to 1960, we were the most asked for people at parties. We were invited to all kinds of parties just to get up and do that. Every party we ever went to, get up, fellas, do that. It started to become a command performances. And the last one we did was Joe Fields. This is 1950 to 1960, we’re doing it at parties. Joe Fields had what we call a class A party out here. Mel lived in New York, he happened to be out here, so he made a party for us, and he invited all his big star friends. And this is a. I’ve said this many times, and it’s absolutely accurate. After Mel killed everybody, one by one, these stars came up. The first one was George Burns with his cigar. He says, is there a record on this? And we said, no. He says put it on record or I’ll steal it. He actually said that. Edward G. Robinson, he said, make a play out of it. The thousand-year-old man, a thousand- year-old man, I can play it on Broadway. And we said, it’s 2000, I can play any age, I’m not gonna get him saying that. And it was Steve Allen, who was one of the dearest men ever in comedy, his whole thrust in life was to find fun and hand it to people. He didn’t care if he did it, he just wanted fun to get out there. And he said to us, he said, you know, I have a studio that I record in. He’s, why don’t you guys sit in that studio? And he’s just wailed for a couple hours. He said, if you like it, use it, otherwise you can cut it, expunge it, Whatever you want. And it was an offer we couldn’t refuse. The World Pacific records, we got 200 people, I don’t know, maybe 100 friends, and for two and a half hours we wailed and cut it down to 47 minutes and it became the 2,000-year-old man. You want to start the whole thing again?

Robert Trachtenberg: Thing. Hold on for one second. Do you see a color mark? Okay. You know in one of your books you make a really interesting point in regards to the 2,000 year old man that I’m just gonna read what you wrote that one hesitation was there one hesitation because you did it for 10 years in recording Mel had the Yiddish accent which was, it’s a staple in Vaudeville, Fanny Brace, Weber and Fields. Along comes Hitler, ruins everything as we know. And the act, I’m reading from your book, the accents acceptability as a tool of comedy.

Carl Reiner: You want me to tell that back? Oh, yes. During the year, when we did the 2,000-year-old man, Mel was using the middle European Jewish accent. Now, remember, this was 1950, four or five years after the war ended. And even though the Jewish accent was a prime use in comedy for many years, Webber fields, you name it, Lou Holtz. Mr. Kitzel on radio on the Eddie Cantor show and Mrs. Nussbaum on the Fred Allen show, they all used the Jewish accent to good effect. But when Hitler came and Hitler decimated the Jews and anything that would be deleterious to the Jewish, to the body of Jews was persona non grata. And everybody stopped doing the Jewish accent during the war. I wasn’t—after the war, it came back slowly with—on the Ed Sullivan show, Myron Cohen did these wonderful Jewish stories, slowly sneaked back. And at that point, we said, OK. But we still didn’t think it would be for anybody but for our Semitic friends and non-Anti-Semitic friends who, you know, were not Antisemitic Gentiles. And we only did it at parties. And everybody who asked us to do a record, we still said, no, it’s only for friends. It’s really very special. And for 10 years, we didn’t do it. We stopped thinking about recording. And then when we did record it, we still weren’t sure. And it was funny, because I wrote about this, and Mel had the same thing. I was at Universal and doing my first motion pictures. By the way, at that very first meeting… Where everybody told us about make a record out of it and do it. Another guy who came up and he was Ross Hunter who said, hey, do you have a movie in here? I had never written a movie. He said, I said, no, I don’t have an idea for a movie, he said, well, you think like a movie maker. He says, you came up with ideas. And I wrote my first movie, The Thrill of It All, all based on that first day there. So many things happened that first, that from the 2000-year-old-man performance. And so It’s out, the record is out, and at Universal, next door to me was Cary Grant, who came by one day to say hello, and I said, here’s a record you might like. He came back, he said, that’s funny, funny. He asked me for a dozen. I said I’m going to England. I said you’re gonna take this? Yeah, they speak English there, he told me. And he came back and he said she loved it. I said ooh, he’s the queen. I said he took it to Buckingham Palace and played it, and I say to Mel, you know something? The biggest shicks in the world. Understood it and laughed at it, so we’re okay. By that time, we were sort of getting the idea that people were gonna like it.

Robert Trachtenberg: The, you know, Mel was talking about playing the drums and the sort of freedom of that. But also, in a way, what you guys did together, this improvisation is not unlike improvisation, jazz, you It’s

Carl Reiner: Well, Mel is, it’s very apparent that Mel is very, very musical. We didn’t know how musical he was at that time, except that he was a great drummer. He wouldn’t drum anytime he felt the need to. But today, I mean, at 80-something, he wrote some of the best lyrics ever for young Frankenstein, lyrics and music, and he’s really an extraordinary musician. But he has rhythms in his head, and all of his jokes are… They’re great structures of rhythm. You’ll laugh at the rhythm of the joke sometime. But Mel has, as I said, a genius brain in panic is the best thing in comedy, a genius comic brain. I try to throw Mel curves. The bigger the curve, the farther he swatted it out. I really try to find things that he couldn’t possibly answer. And he found ways to answer it in panic. When he gets in panic, there’s nothing like it. By the way, I was just thinking that Mel is truly a man who wants to get laughs. There’s a thing in my book I wrote about, Mel and I, eye to eye and nose to nose. Did I describe that? Can I describe it to you? Mel and are alone in the house. This is an indication of who Mel is and how important it is for him to be funny, to get a laugh. We’re alone in a house. There’s only two of us there. A couple of weeks before, I had been to Veve, France. Charlie Chaplin, Jr. Invited me to speak, to do a charity event there. And so at the event, I do speak French. I learned it in Georgetown University during the war. And I had an interview in French on the air. And I couldn’t understand the questions because he was talking French so fast. I said, can somebody feed me the questions in English and I’ll answer in French? And I was doing that. And at one point, the questions were getting more and more deep, like, what do you think about the Nouvelle Vague? And I could start to answer it in French. And then I realized I needed words that I’d have to look up in the dictionary. So rather than not speak French, I says, la Nouvele Vague est très intéressante. C’est une nouvelle introduction to the ways of the mores of the time. The mores of the time. Reflect what in the institutions of the day. So I spoke broken French, and everybody was laughing, you know. And when I just addressed the people in the square, I talked French and then I used broken French and explained, I wanted to only speak French, but if I can’t speak French I said this in French, I will talk like this, which is a French accent, but it’s similar, and can’t really, it’s more fancy, I will use it, anyway that’s right. So I was saying to Mel, you know, it’s very important to learn French, to learn a language because when you’re in a foreign place, if you say to somebody in broken English, you say, want to eat something, food, you’re no place to go see, come eat food. They’ll always be nice to you if you try to speak in their language. So I said, I’m going to teach. We’re alone in the house. I’m going to teach you to speak funny French, but you will speak good like I took Now, say after me, the chin, nose, nose. I say, he says the chin. No, not the chin the chin say after, how I say the chin? Almost, the cheek, the cheeks says after me is the cheek. The cheek, no the cheek the cheek almost. The nose, say, after me the nose. Nose, nose all right. Now, this is the eye that say after the eye? And Mel says, that’s not the eye. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. This is the eye! And he says, no, no. That’s not that eye. That is below the eye, this is the eye. And he took his finger and actually touched his eyeball. For the sake of a laugh, he actually touched this eyeball. And his eye was tearing, it was red, and there were two of us in a room. And I got hysterical. I said, they’re for a joke. And nobody’s going to know, except that I write in the book, that luckily he did that joke for a guy who wrote a semi-important book, a book that 90 people might read, so other people will know about this joke. But there, I couldn’t believe it. And nobody, I don’t think I ever told anybody that until I wrote about it. There it is. He touched his eyeball.

Robert Trachtenberg: But, you know, you talk about him swinging it out of the park for you, but the thing is is that we should also, it’s an important point to make that you knocked it right back. So in a way, this is what I’m saying, it almost, well, it is almost like you two were dancing.

Carl Reiner: Oh, it’s an improvisation. No, I have the ability to build, building blocks. I do have, I’m never at a loss to start something. I don’t, I haven’t got the punch lines all the time, but I do, I write, I that ability. As a matter of fact, I used that once. Had nothing to do with Mel. I wrote a book called Novel Beginnings. I wrote 26 novel beginnings. And I invited people, I was gonna send it to colleges so that they can finish the novel that I began. And I said, novel beginnings written by Karl Reiner and your name here. And I was going to send it out, I didn’t ever send it up because somebody said, it’s a great idea, but the financial, not the financial. The legal questions will come out, it was too big to contemplate, so I never did it. But I have no problem starting things, so. But I. Having Mel there to throw things at him is just one of the great pleasures in life. Of course, what comes back at me is great laughter.

Robert Trachtenberg: Would you, let’s take a bit, how about if we, Justin, can you just, if you push Carl back a little, then we’ll avoid that. Okay.

Carl Reiner: Okay, here we go

Robert Trachtenberg: There you go.

Carl Reiner: And believe it or not, those little clickings, nobody’s gonna matter. They’ll know what it is. Yeah. And I’m gonna say it right now.

Robert Trachtenberg: OK.

Carl Reiner: During the course of this interview, there’s a lot of faces around here that are shaking their head and looking very sad because this is happening. So anytime you hear that, it’s not your set. Do not adjust your set, it is me and my buttons. Okay? Perfect.

Robert Trachtenberg: I took care of it. All right. So would you say that you made him feel You made him, it’s a contradictory idea, but at the same time that you were putting him in panic mode, you were also making him feel safe.

Carl Reiner: Well, you know, it’s interesting, Mel was always—there’s one very good story I write about in my book, I Remember Me, and this is absolutely true. We were offered a lot of money to go to San Francisco and do two performances, one after another, 8 o’clock and 10 o’ clock, just ad lib, and we did all ad lib. He didn’t know what I was going to ask. And I didn’t know what I was going to ask about it. He was hysterical. And the plagues came apart. They screamed. They laughed. We didn’t though we could duplicate it. We didn’t duplicate it, and we didn’t top it. We duplicated it. That’s exactly what happened. Second one, and all the way up there, on the way up there he was so mad at me. He says, I’m, what the hell? Why did I let you talk me into this? He was so made that we took this gig. I said, look at the money, come the money back, fuck the money. You know, shit, did I say fuck? I didn’t mean to say fuck. If I said fuck, cut it out. I meant to say, screw the money Screw the money Anyway, he was really upset with me. He was grousing all the way up to San Francisco on the plane. He said, I don’t ever let you talk me into this again. And I knew exactly what it was. I have no problem asking him questions. I know he’s gonna be funny, he has never failed me. Even when he’s foundering, he’s funny. And then when he foundering like a trapeze artist, I missed this three times, the third time he hits, it’s even better. So I have no, he doesn’t know what’s in his brain. I know, he is gonna be fun, but he knows that he’s going to be, have to come up with something. And he’s never sure that it’s there. It’s always there, but that doesn’t, it’s no solace to him. Anyway, we kill them, we killed them. This is exactly who he is. And I call him a real artist because of that. Mel is very good with money. He’s a very good negotiator. He negotiates the best deals for himself. And there’s all those wonderful movies that he’s made. He really knows how to negotiate. So there’s no lack there. We come back from this, we’re riding in the car in the back of a limo, and he’s very silent, very quiet. And we did get a lot, a lot of money. We’d call a hell of a lot of money for that, those two days. And I said to Mel, I said, Mel, tell me the truth. How much would you have taken knowing that you would have gotten the reaction that we got, how much would have you taken, how much money would you require? And he said $14, and he meant it. And he would have done it for nothing, in other words. It was that good. He feared the whole time that he was gonna fail because he didn’t know what’s in there. He didn’t trust, I did.

Robert Trachtenberg: Okay, we’re gonna reload. We’re good? Carl Reiner, take five. I want to ask you a couple of questions to place stuff in a bit of historical context. One question is… After all the various incarnations of Caesar’s shows, Mel’s at a bit of a loose end. You’re doing the Dick Van Dyke show. Was there ever any talk of, come write an episode, come-

Carl Reiner: When I was doing the Dick Van Dyke show, Mel was in New York, he had no interest in situation comedy. I mean, I didn’t even think of offering him a chance to write. I knew he didn’t write that kind of stuff, but that wasn’t his milieu. His milieu was big music, bruising musicals. He thought of music. He had done a few things on Broadway. He had some sketches, and he loved sketches and things, and it would never even occur to me to offer him that. But he did come out every once in a while, because at that time, Mel still wasn’t the Mel Brooks, to it. He was gonna do some of the great musicals and funny movies of all time. And so he used to come out in need of cash. And we would do the Hollywood Palace. We would do, there was a couple shows we did out here. And I remember coming up to, he used come up to my office and we used to figure out, because in those days, we had to prepare a few jokes. When you go off for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Trust that you’re going to ad-lib 15 of the best minutes in the world. So I would not, we wouldn’t rehearse it, but I would come up with a couple of lines that as soon as he, I said, I throw a line at him and as soon he started, I said okay, I know you’re gonna answer that. So I’d have him in the bank. And there were sort of half ad-lib, but he knew what was coming. But that was it. But in those days he was, he was not yet who he was going to be.

Robert Trachtenberg: It’s interesting because we talked to him yesterday, and he was talking about how you can only learn through trial and error during that period, who was, you know, in theory it was a good idea to go write with Jerry Lewis. Not a good, idea as it turned out. Maybe not such a great idea to be writing for Dinah Shore, and you don’t know until you get there, but you know he sort of figured out who, you if you wrote for Harvey Korman. Boom, Chloris Leachman, done, you know, so how do you know until you start doing that? But the question is, but would you say his comedic Minds thought he sort of came out fully formed from the womb essentially because it doesn’t seem to have I Can’t what what do you think is influenced or changed his comedy?

Carl Reiner: Everybody is influenced by their very early days. And he was the product of his very sad beginning. His father died when he was two. However, he was buoyed up by the fact he had four brothers. One of them, Irving, became his surrogate father. He had a very doting, loving mother. And because he was youngest, they felt sorry for him. They sort of carried him around like a prince. So he always felt the world was his oyster. And so he felt special, and he was special. And then he was gifted with a really very intelligent brain. And so that’s a gift to you. It’s one of those. And what you do with it is something else. But the world honed him. There was a war that went on. He became a member of the armed forces and he fought in the war. And so he went to college in, I forget where in? Virginia. Virginia, yeah, Virginia Military Academy. All those things honed them. But they were honing a very smart guy, a very smart man, and very well-read. He’s the most well- read man I know. When we were doing the show of shows, he spent all of his money, not all of this money, a lot of his money on first edition books, famous novels. Really, he was avid about it. It didn’t fit with this crazy man telling all these silly jokes. He was pushkin’ and, you know, and… And who’s his favorite one? Nicola Gogo, yeah.

Robert Trachtenberg: But you know, what you were saying about situational comedy, and you’re right, he has said he had no interest in situational comedy. And it’s interesting because his brand of comedy, he’s not interested in marriage, children, jobs. It’s a whole other vein he’s I know.

Carl Reiner: He’s more into satire. He really is a satirist, and most of his movies versus his early movies satirized other movies. I mean, he did a lot of that, but, and if you’re really a good satirists, nobody minds that you’re taking a great piece, like even when he did, he actually did one movie that existed before, like the one with Jack Benny and what was it called?

Robert Trachtenberg: To be or not to be.

Carl Reiner: To be or not to be, he actually did it almost scene by scene. With that he couldn’t satirize because it was already a satire but all of his other movies including Blazing Saddles and every one of them, there was a satirist involved. He was satirizing something that existed and he was great at that.

Robert Trachtenberg: But in all the years you’ve known him, I mean, has anything like becoming a father, has Has anything changed this time?

Carl Reiner: I saw Mel in all of his incarnations when I met him before he was anybody. My book that is called, as I said, I remember me, was called originally Is That The Man? And I met when he was 21 years old on Fire Island. He came out for a party and he had no place to stay. I knew him because he was the first year on the show of shows. I saw Mel, and he said he had no place to stay. After the party, I said, well, we have a window seat. So I’ll leave the door open. We had an $800 a season we paid for that house, dwarf petitions. In other words, there were no ceilings on the bedrooms. It was a very cheap house. And I told the kids, Robbie, who was four and Andy, who was two, I say, there’s going to be a man. Sitting and sleeping in the window seat. So if you get up in the middle of the night or in the morning and you see a Man, don’t be frightened. The man will be sitting there as a friend So they get up like six in the Morning and they go right over to Mel who’s sleeping in a window seat curled up and this is the conversation he hears he hears it right away because That’s whispering. Is that the man? That’s the man That that that demand that demand The man sleep? No, no, the man not sleep. Now the man sleep. Look, the men eye open. And Annie saw the little eye cracking. He was trying to see it. And she was about to put a finger in his eye to open the eye to see. And he’s the man is up. The man, I’m the man, I’m up, I am up. Anyway, so that was our introduction to our friendship. He was 21 years old then. 22, I guess, yeah, 21.

Robert Trachtenberg: So you were saying in all his incarnations you like like for example fatherhood for him didn’t

Carl Reiner: Oh, yeah, and I was talking about his father. Now then when he was on the show show he’s married One of the Hamilton Trio had a two wonderful girls one girl named Florence Baum who everybody loves She was a beautiful girl who had maybe nuts and citrus the best legs ever Everybody just couldn’t take it or I well when I married her he married her and he had two children with her Two three three children

Robert Trachtenberg: Yeah, but started over.

Carl Reiner: This girl, beautiful Florence Baum, so what did he do? He went up and married her and had three children with her, almost immediately. And he was, they didn’t get, for some reason the marriage didn’t work. And when they broke up, I remember this assiduously. Visited those kids every night when he’d go home from work. He visited the kids and spent two or three hours with the kids every day. He never did not spend with those kids. And here’s another indication of who Mel is. When Florence got married again, she married a guy and there was another kid that came into the family, Peter. And when Mel took his kids out every day to dinner, lunch, whatever it was, to play, he always took Peter along. And Peter was part of the family. And it was not his kid, it was his wife. So he’s very, very family-oriented. When he had his child with Anne Bankrupt, Max, he has a grandson, Henry, he visits him almost every day. He visits him and plays with Max, I mean Henry, almost every.

Robert Trachtenberg: So what I’m asking is, as you’ve seen it and you’ve worked with him professionally, you know sometimes people’s, it’s interesting to me, people’s concerns or people’s focus sort of shifts in their work because of their home situation, but he seems to be straight Just doesn’t

Carl Reiner: Mel is a parent first. He really is a parents first. He does everything else. Whatever he does, he is always aware that he has these children, he’s parenting them. He speaks to them every day. His daughter is Stephanie and Eddie and… What do I miss? Nikki? I mean, he speaks to them almost every day.

Robert Trachtenberg: So even as he became a father in the fifties or whatever, it, I guess what I’m saying, his brand of comedy didn’t, he didn’t what can I say? Professionally, he didn’t become domesticated, right?

Carl Reiner: No, it’s amazing because he knows family so much. He has been involved with them, but he’s never done domestic comedy. It’s always this satire. He really does, he sees the big picture. He sees big movies and makes fun of big movies and makes one of big things.

Robert Trachtenberg: Right, it’s not based in the everyday.

Carl Reiner: No, he can’t make fun of the little things like I used to do on officer. I didn’t make fun of little things. I just did them. I mean, the Dick Van Dyke show was just a reincarnation of my own life.

Robert Trachtenberg: If he had a mantra, what do you think it would be? Because one thing he said is laughter, and you’ve said it, he’s so much angst about death.

Carl Reiner: Give me laughs and pay me well for making you laugh. I would be as moderate. I want the most buck for my, I was looking for words for jokes that begin with a B, for my blockbuster humor.

Robert Trachtenberg: What do you make of his repeated use of Hitler?

Carl Reiner: Of Hitler. I love the fact that Mel Brooks is the only one in the world who dared to do to Hitler what Hitler did to the Jews. He decimated them by making fun of them. And to this day, when I read that in Germany, the musical went through the roof. I mean, the fact that he was able to do to Hitler what nobody else could do, make So much fun of him that the guts of doing it is amazing. Anytime I see anything with a swastika, I immediately say, Mel, we’ve got to watch this. There’s a swasta in it, or there’s a Hitler thing in it. No, it’s amazing what he did to Hitler.

Robert Trachtenberg: Well, speaking of watching stuff, what is the story that you and Mel watch movies quite a bit and what is a thing with Secure the Perimeter?

Carl Reiner: Mel and I love to watch movies and we love, we found this a little while ago we found the Bourne series, the Bourne Supremacy, the bourne ultimateum, the born-born and Matt Damon, we love Matt Damon. I love Matt Damon as an actor and as a person. He’s just a wonderful person and we loved pictures and we said, give us a picture that says there are three prerequisites to really good great picture. One is somebody in the picture says, secure the perimeter. If somebody says secure the perimiter we know it’s a good picture. Lock up all exits and secure the perimeter. The other one is get some rest. If someone says get some rest we know we’re in a good picure. It means they’re working hard to get there. And the other thing is comeuppance. We’re all big for comeuppances. The worst of villains I will, this is my favorite thing. My favorite thing is The Count of Monte Cristo because that’s the best comeuppance novel of, matter of fact, I’m writing a book called Comeuppance because I love comeuppants. The worse the villain, the better the story. Make the worst villain you can and give him the worst ending. That’s my favorite in the world. Count of Montecristo, those three guys, they got it at the end.

Robert Trachtenberg: Again, when Caesar went off the air, again this sort of odd period for Mel, why didn’t he do a nightclub act or something?

Carl Reiner: Mel never, I never heard of Mel wanting to do a nightclub act. He started in the mountains and he always did his act for us. And it was, at the drop of a hat, he was, here I am, I’m Melvin Brooks, I’ve come to start the show. You know, and he would talk about being a tomahawk, jumping into the pool with his, he played Willie Loman and jumped in the pool with his suitcases, and, he would do his act. And it would be natural for him to become a stand-up, but he never did. I think he, because I think he wanted to be a writer mainly, and he went for that, and luckily he did.

Robert Trachtenberg: When we were talking to Mel yesterday, we touched on this. Mel Tolkien essentially got everybody into individual analysis. To go into analysis, he.

Carl Reiner: Mel Tolkien was the head writer, and because he was a Russian and always feared that somebody would take him back and send him to Russia—he was from Canada, he worried about his citizenship. He was the first person in analysis, and I think it was his suggestion that analysis is good for everybody. Slowly but surely, he got Mel to go to analysis, he got Sid to go analysis, and it was… Even I, who was considered the most normal person in the room, said, maybe I’ll try it too. No, I, to this day I can still use what analysis do, what a good analyst can do.

Robert Trachtenberg: Because, you know, Mel was saying, and he said before, and I don’t know if it was, I don’t know, he has talked about, I don t know if that was true for the other writers as much as it was for him. The real anxiety working on that show, the producer was talking about puking between parked cars, jogging through the streets in New York. I mean.

Carl Reiner: Well, Meld had anxiety, which we never saw, because I always cannot, but we found out later that he was so anxious, he actually was suicidal at times. He said this to us. He was thinking of doing it. He was so upset. What upset him, we don’t know, but he’s not upset anymore, thank goodness. But he was, you know what it is, when you know you’ve got something, you don’t how to peddle it. He knew he had something, he didn’t know how to… Market it and when soon as he had learned how to market what he had he calmed down an awful lot But I think that was it a frustration of not being able to get I got all this. What do I do with it? What do we I kill myself? That’s what I do

Robert Trachtenberg: It’s just a pent up. Yeah. Yeah, a pent-up.

Carl Reiner: Pent up is your word.

Robert Trachtenberg: I have to ask, how important do you think Anne was in the formation of Mel, because we talked to Mel yesterday about how she said, watch the Dean Martin show, there’s Dom Delahue, you should know him. What’s covering it? There’s Harvey Korman, what?

Carl Reiner: I think one of the best things that ever happened to Mel, that is, he went to watch the Perry Como show once, and he saw this woman on stage, and it happened to be Anne Bancroft. She looked at him, he looked at her, and history was born. She saw somebody who looked like her father, and he so the love of his life. And very soon after, they became a couple. And he found out where she was going the next day, and accidentally showed up there, and the rest of it is history. And they were the best couple. And all I remember is, Mel, are you going to eat that butter, whatever it is. She was always his cop, the cop he needed in the places he needed the cop. And he accepted it very well. And what is very sad is that both he and I have lost our wives, and we talk about it all the time. And a lovely, interesting thing is that Mel married somebody who loved Estelle, and Estelle loved her. Estelle was sort of a mentor to everybody, but Annie would always come to her and have discussions about everything. They were the really good friends. Annie and Mel never missed one of Estelle’s performances at the Gardena for 20 years. They were there every time she sang, and they loved her singing. They told her, and as a matter of fact, Annie and Estelle, and I think it was Pat Gelbar, Larry Gelbar. They once formed the trio called the the mother sisters, and they sang with the ice cream scoops and the close harmony just at a party was really funny. But they were really very, very, very close, and to this day, Mel and I said, it’s not fair that they’re not here.

Robert Trachtenberg: Gene Wilder said something interesting also about Mel’s brand of comedy. Who did? Gene Wilde.

Carl Reiner: Oh yes, I remember him.

Robert Trachtenberg: That he never, and you tell me if you think this is true right from the beginning, he never asked for the audience’s sympathy.

Carl Reiner: You never ask the audience for sympathy.

Robert Trachtenberg: Yeah, he never pandered.

Carl Reiner: You know, I never thought of, Gene noticed that and I never noticed that, so I guess it’s true. He never asked for sympathy, I don’t think, I think it’s probably true. Does that mean anything? I don’t know, ask for sympathy. I don’t know. Well, I guess pandering would be. Yeah, no, he doesn’t. You know some comedians. No, pandering. We won’t name names. But you know what I’m talking about. No, it’s an interesting observation that I would not have made, but now I will make it.

Robert Trachtenberg: The skits on your show shows, as you said, really New York Broadway sensibility going out across the country. Was that a factor in, I mean, you made a very good point, which is the one thing you guys did stay away from, and again, to place this in historical context, it’s the height of the McCarthy era, you should say that, that you stayed away from political stuff.

Carl Reiner: Oh yeah, during the shows in Caesar’s Eye, the heart of the McCarthy era. We didn’t do politics. I think it was Max Liebman who was in charge of what material went on the show, and politics was out. We did no politics. And it’s very much unlike one of those four bears now is Saturday Night Live, which is steeped in politics, and we love that it is. We love that the country allows for it. But in those days, you wouldn’t be on the air very long if you started doing politics. I mean, that show would have been personable and ungrateful in a lot of homes.

Robert Trachtenberg: I want to talk to you, besides the 2000 year old man, I want to mention, we should talk about some of the other skits, particularly the two hour old baby. And was it Cary Grant’s idea?

Carl Reiner: The Two-Hour Old Baby was very interesting. Cary Grant, when we gave him this album, The 2,000-Year-Old Man, he came back and he says, oh, he loved it. He says, I got an idea for you. Why don’t you have a two-hour-old baby talk? And I sent it to Mel, and Mel said, it’s a great idea. And we did Two-hour Old Baby, and a baby not knowing whether it’s the boy or a girl. As a matter of fact, we used that. I think, again, for Marlo Thomas, we put it on Free Maybe you and me, you know. Just for

Robert Trachtenberg: You said he worries about life and death too much?

Carl Reiner: Oh, don’t we all? Life and death, yes. Now that I’m 90, I’m sure saying, when is it going to happen? Probably fall over, hit my head, and that’ll be it. That way, people usually break a hip and then go. But at 90, we’re very aware of where I’m walking. Look at that. I took a flop about two years ago. And as I went down and hit my head on the sidewalk in front of my house, As I’m in the air, I said, this is it, this is the way I’m going, bang. I didn’t go. But now I’m watching it, so I won’t fall again.

Robert Trachtenberg: The vulgarity issue with Mel in the movies. The thing is, is it’s not exactly, it’s a part of the plot, whether it’s the scene in With the Beans and Blazing Salads or anything, she’s not doing it just for shock’s sake.

Carl Reiner: Well, Mel does the truth, the absolute truth he does, and the absolute is that if you eat a lot of beans around a campfire, you’re gonna fart. And when he opened that up, and the sound of those, it goes on and on, and it’s hysterical. I heard it used someplace else. Somebody actually took that soundtrack and used it someplace else, and Mel, every once in a while, has little take in the back on how far things have gone. I says, Mel, don’t ever criticize anybody. You, you are the one who started all. You broke it open. Once you broke open Pandora’s box, that’s what happens. You started with the farts and everybody took over from there. You started it, so don’t complain.

Robert Trachtenberg: How would you summarize his brand of comedy?

Carl Reiner: Mel’s brand of comedy, the funniest. Just Mel’s Brand of comedy. How would I say? There’s nobody like Mel and nobody does his kind of comedy. It’s broad and it’s deep and it is also very intellectual. All a combination of things and you don’t know which is which. You can get any one of it. Sometimes it’s a mixture of all of that and sometimes he’s just juggling all those things but he’s all of the things I just said. And I’ll stand by it and you can torture me. I will never change my mind about it.

Robert Trachtenberg: Were we okay for the plane?

Carl Reiner: One thing we didn’t touch. Carl Reiner. Mouth sensitivity to smells. Take six. Really? Yes.

Robert Trachtenberg: Okay, tell me.

Carl Reiner: Mel is a very, Mel is sensitive in many ways. One annoyingly sensitive thing, he has a nose that sniffs out any odors that he finds odiferous. I’m a big fan of salmon, seared salmon. And he comes to my house and he says, oh, you’ve been eating salmon. And he yells at me for it. In my own house, he won’t let me have salmon when he’s around. I have to open all the doors and windows. He does have an acute smeller, a really acute smell. And my daughter has a similar smeller. And the two of them make it impossible for me to live in my own. House.

Robert Trachtenberg: Somebody said of you and Mel teaming up that it was a perfect combination because you drove the truck and Mel carried the explosives.

Carl Reiner: Say it again.

Robert Trachtenberg: You drove the truck and Mel carried the explosives.

Carl Reiner: No, I’ve never heard that. I drove the truck and Mel carried the explosives. That’s very cute. Yeah, that darling. And I have to be very careful not to hit any bumps so he doesn’t fall off the truck and explode before people are around to hear the explosion.