The Funny Man

Carl Reiner, who died this week at the age of 98, was a major innovator in comedy.  He began in the 1950s as a cast member on Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" and later wrote for Sid's "Caesar's Hour," helping to create the standard for comedy in the then-new medium of television.  He turned the experience he got with Sid Caesar into a vehicle for himself and Dick Van Dyke - "The Dick Van Dyke Show" - which was the first TV sitcom about TV.  Van Dyke played a screenwriter for Reiner's temperamental TV star character Alan Brady.

His other work included his famous "The 2,000 Year Old Man" TV sketch with Mel Brooks, which helped establish Brooks as a performer in his own right.  But it was Reiner's work as a movie director that broadened his appeal, particularly with politically incorrect and admittedly bold comedies, such as Where's Poppa?, about a single New Yorker oppressed by his senile mother, and Oh, God!, which tried to offer a hopeful message from the Almighty Himself - played by George Burns -  into a lightly humorous yet bitingly satirical tale.  (Not everyone was amused.  James Howard Kunstler later used Oh, God! as an example of the plight of American culture having gone astray, lamenting that it led Americans to "perceive God as an elderly comedian" to complement their "spectacle of a clown civilization.)"  And the ribald nature of The Jerk, Steve Martin's first major movie, made it clear that Reiner, like his friend Brooks, didn't care whom he offended, so long as he made people laugh.  (Told by his black mother that he was adopted, Martin's character in The Jerk replied, "You mean I'm going to stay this color?")

Carl Reiner's influence can be seen in the work of generations of comedians who followed him, as well as in his son Rob's work as a writer and a director, and I'm certain that a lot of great comic performers and writes have been influenced by him even if they didn't know it.  Reiner didn't go by the book of modern comedy; he helped write it. RIP.