Carl Reiner and TV Comedy

80 years ago, a theatre production was held up in Rochester, New York until an actor from New York City could arrive. The big city! It all sounds very important until you realise that the actor was a teenager. His name was Carl Reiner.

You can read about it in the column to the right from the Rochester Democrat, June 20, 1940. Reiner was less than two years out of Evander Childs High School and already had a budding career as an actor/announcer on WNYC New York.

Reiner did so many things so well over his years in entertainment that it’s probably impossible to agree on what he’s best known for. His two years in stock in Rochester have faded into obscurity. Television truly made him famous. While he hosted a couple of network shows in the late ‘40s (one was basically a fashion show), it wasn’t until he hooked up with Sid Caesar that a national audience got to know him.

Here’s a short career summary from Sid Shalit’s column in the New York Daily News of October 23, 1951.

Ssergorp—Progress Spelled Backward . . . Anyone who feels aggressive about the high wages being dragged down by some TV performers better not run across Carl Reiner, one of the important comedy props in NBC's Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca setup.
Reiner made it the hard way. In order to pay his way through dramatic school, he worked for $12-a-week as a shipping clerk in New York's garment center. Through his own ingenuity, hard work and perseverance, Carl explains, his next job, as a machinist's helper, paid $8 a week.
After eight months of drama school, at the age of 17, he played in a little theatre group opposite Virginia Gilmore. It was terrific experience, he admits, both at acting and going hungry—seemingly two basic requisites for stardom. He performed every night but didn't get a dime for this work. Nor did anybody else in the company. But flushed with success and youth, Carl got uppity one day and demanded a salary. He snapped up the first offer of a $1 per performance. He was the top salaried actor in the troupe.

This was only the beginning of the Carl Reiner saga. From $1 with Miss Gilmore, Reiner aspired to greater and dramatic heights—and snagged a summer stock job in Rochester. This one made him the envy of theatre people—room and board. Then followed success. He was re-signed for the following season for room and board—PLUS $1 a week. Practically lolling in the lap of luxury. Carl's days were happy ones indeed. Nights he took strenuous walks so that Morpheus could overcome the pangs of hunger.
At the age of 20, Carl joined the Army in 1942 and was assigned to Hawaii as a teletype operator. When Maj. Maurice Evans arrived there with his GI version of "Hamlet," Reiner auditioned for him, using routines he had perfected at recreation halls. Carl then toured the South Pacific for a year and a half in revues which he wrote—room and board and $21 a month.
Financially on the upgrade, Reiner's Army experience landed him the road company lead in “Call Me Mister.” He was all of 23, and then came two lush jobs in “Inside, U. S. A.,” and “Alive and Kicking,” in which he met Max Liebman, producer-director of the Caesar-Coca TVer. Reiner signed with Liebman last year and gave up all outside pursuits to concentrate on video. As Arnold Stang would say, “What's to envy?”

Reiner is arguably better known (thanks to reruns) for creating The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I’ve always considered a breakthrough for television. Beloved as 1950s sitcoms are amongst many people, they always seem steeped somewhere in network radio. Precocious kids, somewhat ditzy dads, boy-crazed teenagers, mom-as-the-reality-anchor. It had all been done and done again. Van Dyke had a well-balanced cast with stories that were (for the most part) pretty plausible.

But Reiner wanted comedy that was even more true-to-life. He referred to one show in this interview published January 21, 1968. In a remarkable coincidence, the show was turned into an American series that was also a landmark of television—and co-starred Reiner’s son.

Carl Reiner Might Start New Trend
By HAL HUMPHREY
Television loves to wallow in its trends. This season it's the longer shows like old movies that have been getting the higher ratings, so for next season everyone in the industry is talking about what someone has dubbed the "long form."
Half-hour shows are a thing of the past, say the experts. It's the 90-minute and two-hour shows the public wants, and the planning boards are full of such projects.
"Someday, though," says writer-producer-comedian Carl Reiner, "somebody will do a new half-hour situation comedy he's been dying to do, and it will be a hit and there'll be nothing but talk about the trend toward half-hour situation comedy."
Carl, by the way, believes the half-hour comedy shows have done themselves in and that the long-form shows had nothing to do with it.
"I'd rather watch the Merv Griffin Show than any of the situation comedies on TV today," says Carl. "These talk shows like Griffin's are more honest, and exposing the viewer to them has made him see how unreal the half-hour comedies are. We've got to get back to more honesty in our situation comedy. I felt we even strayed away from it in the Dick Van Dyke series later."
Carl was the creator of the Dick Van Dyke Show, produced it and wrote many of the scripts until the last of its five years on the air. This season he and Sheldon Leonard are executive producers of the comedy series Good Morning World, a show which Carl says he would rather not talk about at this time.
"Did you know that in England the BBC has a situation comedy series about a bigot?" asks Carl. "That's the kind of thing I mean when I mention honesty."
The series Carl refers to is called "Till Death Us Do Part" in which a liberal long-haired son-in-law of the Garnetts fights constantly with Alf Garnett (the father) over such subjects as premarital sex and the race problem. It has kicked up quite a bit of pro and con reaction among British viewers and critics.
Meanwhile, as Carl points out, our situation comedies are mostly hewed from the old boy-meets-girl formula of early Hollywood, and the situations resulting are just as tired and impossible.
"The best shows we did on the Van Dyke series," says Carl, "were those I got by asking myself, 'What's happened to me lately?' or getting the writers to ask themselves the same thing. One of our writers stuck his toe in the bathtub faucet and got it caught there. The plumber had to be called. It was a wild thing and turned into one of the best shows ever done in the series.
Carl's inspiration for the Van Dyke show came from his own years of working with Sid Caesar on the old "Show of Shows." He says the writers on that hour series had so much fun that it was a pleasure to get up and go to work every morning, so Carl decided to do a series about comedy writers, although most of his colleagues thought he was nuts.
Carl might even be the one who winds up with another inspiration for that half-hour comedy mentioned here earlier which would set off the trend toward the "short form."

“I’ll certainly be doing something for TV again. It’s the biggest force in the entertainment business, so one doesn’t decide not to do TV.”
At present Carl is busy preparing a movie called "Baggy Pants," which is about an old-time comic, and Dick Van Dyke will play the role. Next month (Feb. 11) Carl hosts an NBC-TV special, The Fabulous Funnies, a tribute to the comic strips.
"In one part I sing the Little Orphan Annie song. I used to love Orphan Annie in the funnies, but I didn't know then,” says Carl, laughing, “that she was a fascist.”

What else did Reiner do? So much. We haven’t even talked about his “2000 Year Old Man” routines with Mel Brooks. Or “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” and his other films. There were minor accomplishments, such as his voice work on Linus, the Lion Hearted, his appearances with (and scripts for) Dinah Shore in the late ‘50s. His game show work as a panelist (The Name’s the Same) and a host (Celebrity Game). His surprise turn as Gepetto in a TV adaptation of “Pinocchio.” Oh, and he wrote books, too.

Then there were all those Emmys. Reiner was a big winner. And so were we, thanks to what he created for our entertainment.