Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks - Biography
By Tony Goldmark
Even if Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks had never released a single vinyl album, their names would still rank highly in the pantheons of comedy history, Reiner for creating The Dick Van Dyke Show and directing movies like The Jerk (not to mention father of acclaimed actor/director Rob Reiner), and Brooks for directing such indelible classics as The Producers, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, making his name virtually synonymous with the cream of the crop in the much-maligned genre of the spoof film (not to mention being one of only nine performers in history to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy AND a Tony Award). The fact that they also released five comedy albums together, and created “The 2000 Year-Old Man,” perhaps the most revered and fruitfully bottomless comedy routine of all time, is just icing on the cake. But what a sweet cake it is.
Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx, New York, on March 20, 1922, and Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on June 28, 1926. Before reaching age thirty, they each had a wealth of experience performing on the stage – Reiner in such Broadway productions as Call Me Mister and Alive and Kicking, and Brooks as a “Tummler” (Yiddish for, basically, “entertainer”) at several Catskills resorts in the Borscht Belt. In 1950, they were both hired to work on the groundbreaking television series Your Show Of Shows, a weekly NBC sketch series hosted by the equally legendary Sid Caesar – Brooks as a writer and Reiner as a writer/performer. Television proved to be a chaotic and demanding enterprise – 90 minutes of new material needed to be written every week, nobody really knew exactly what they were doing yet, and constant humorous topical riffing was necessary just to stay above water.
As the legend goes, one day while working on the show, Reiner was intrigued by a televised interview with a man who’d claimed to have been in Stalin’s toilet and overheard Stalin say “We’re going to blow up the world on Thursday!” Inspired by such a ridiculous claim, Reiner turned to Brooks in the writers’ room and said “We have here in the studio a man who claims to have witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus two thousand years ago! Is that true, sir?” Without missing a beat, Brooks imitated an elderly groan and improvised a cock-and-bull story. The sketch was considered too potentially blasphemous to get on the air in those conservative early days, but Reiner and Brooks held onto the idea, and pulled it out to perform at cocktail parties over the next ten years as the muse struck them.
In 1960, Steve Allen attended one of these parties, and was so impressed by the chemistry of Reiner, as interviewer, and Brooks, as a man who had lived to see two thousand years of human history, that he booked them to do the act on his TV show, and convinced them to go into a recording studio and commit the bit to vinyl. They recorded two hours’ worth of improvised material in front of a small, select audience of friends and colleagues, edited the best of it down to 36 minutes, and released the results as 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks in early 1961. The album contained a half-dozen routines, each involving Reiner as a hapless, put-upon interviewer charged with the daunting task of making some sort of sense out of the lunacy being spewed forth by a zany character of Brooks’ design, including an astronaut giving away incredible military secrets, a Peruvian plantation owner who acts suspiciously like Hitler, and a variety of nuts that populate a coffeehouse, like a folksinger who can only play one chord while singing about knee injuries, and an indeterminately foreign painter who tries to pass off his lunch as a work of art. But a full third of the LP’s running length is given over, naturally, to “The 2000 Year-Old Man,” who is introduced by Reiner asking Brooks “Sir, is it true that you are two thousand years old?” and Brooks responding with an exhausted-yet-affirmative “Oh, BOY.” He proceeds to explain the reasons he’s survived so long – he’s never eaten fried food, and never runs for a bus because “there’ll always be another” – and discusses some of the famous historical figures he’s known (Robin Hood “stole from everyone and kept everything”) and in the case of Joan of Arc, “went with.” He also considers Saran Wrap the greatest invention in human history – after Reiner mentions the discovery of space he simply says “That was good…” – and complains that out of his over forty-two thousand children, none ever come to visit him.
The album was an immediate smash hit, and a follow-up LP, entitled (naturally) 2000 And One Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, was commissioned straight away, and released later the same year. It followed essentially the same formula, with such new characters as a poet trying in vain to change the dictionary (strawberries, he says, should be renamed “pleeps”), a tax expert who claims the country of Romania as a dependent and otherwise only answers questions with “no comment” or “comment,” and, in a flip on the 2000 year-old man, an interview with a two hour-old baby with the ability to speak. But as before, the “2000 And Six Month Old Man” is the main attraction – Reiner and Brooks clearly understood that since history itself is a bottomless well of information, the 2000 Year-Old Man could be a bottomless well for humorous twists therein. This time, the unnamed super-geriatric explains how almost every human endeavor, from singing to dancing to handshaking to love, was brought about by fear, of some sort, that animals or other humans were out to kill you. He also recounts unwisely investing in Shakespeare’s lost thirty-eighth play, Queen Alexandra and Murray, which was so bad it “closed in Egypt.” And in perhaps the 2000 Year-Old Man’s most simultaneously funny and poignant moment, he recalls the “national anthem” of the first cave he lived in – a cheerily upbeat little number that went, “Let ‘em all go to hell / Except Cave Seventy-Siiiiiiiix!”
And in 1962, they released their third LP, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival, named for the album’s lead bit, in which they interviewed various kooks at Cannes. They also mocked duplicitous ad agencies and quack doctors, but as always, the “2000 And Two Year Old Man” was the highlight. Here, Brooks’ homemade Methuselah explained that garlic helped him stay alive by warding off the kiss of the grim reaper, explained how one became a doctor in the caveman days (“You stuck your finger up a guy’s nose, and if he didn’t yell, ‘hey get your finger outta my nose’ you knew he was dead”), and imparted to the audience a valuably poignant observation about the difference between tragedy and comedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger…comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”
At this point, Reiner and Brooks decided the joke had been exhausted, and moved on to bigger projects in TV and film. Reiner created the seminal sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show, about a frenetic TV comedy writer, based in part on his experience on Your Show of Shows, and wrote the part of Buddy Sorrell with Brooks in mind, but CBS insisted on Morey Amsterdam instead. Brooks, meanwhile, wrote and starred in the Oscar-winning animated short film The Critic, about a typical moviegoer who rants against the nonsensical avant-garde images onscreen. He then teamed up with Buck Henry to create a seminal TV series of his own, Get Smart!, a James Bond/spy genre parody about an inept secret agent. And in 1968, he directed the classic film The Producers, about a pair of unscrupulous Broadway producers (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who try to make fraudulent profits off of a surefire flop of a musical called Springtime For Hitler! Meanwhile, the original albums started inspiring such future comedy stars as Billy Crystal, who said the 2000 Year-Old Man “changed his life,” and Bill Cosby, who credits their particular form of humorous storytelling for helping influence his own.
In 1973, Reiner and Brooks teamed up again for a fourth album, 2000 and Thirteen. This time, the 2000 Year-Old Man character took up the entire album, telling such stories as that of the “anti-Semitic bastard” Paul Revere, who he misheard saying “The Yiddish are coming!” He explains that every disease in the known world can be cured by eating some sort of fruit – even diarrhea can be cured by eating “cling peaches.” He explains the origins of religion, that in the early days they worshipped a big guy named Phil, before he was struck by lightning, which made them realize “There’s something bigger than Phil!” And he reveals that, even after living for two thousand years, there’s still one incredible mystery that plagues him to this day – “after I eat asparagus…”
Shortly after releasing that album, Mel Brooks became a comedy blockbuster superstar with the one-two punch of 1974’s Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The seemingly overnight success of these movies prompted a 1975 2000 Year-Old Man half-hour animated TV special to be produced, most of the audio of which was taken from the first three albums. Brooks directed more comedy spoof films, including Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I (which, many critics astutely noted, recycled quite a bit of material from the 2000 Year-Old Man), Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men In Tights. He also starred in the movie To Be Or Not To Be, which produced Brooks’ only musical hit record: “Hitler Rap,” a enthusiastically ridiculous account of the Third Reich set to early hip-hop (“Heil, Heil, Zeigitty Heil!”) The single was (rather understandably) banned in Germany, but thanks in part to a music video which was as aggressively silly as it was provocative (as was Brooks’ wont), “Hitler Rap” became an MTV favorite and rose to #12 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart in February 1984.
After decades away from the 2000 Year-Old Man character, inspired by the success of Rhino’s The Complete 2000 Year-Old Man CD box set, in 1997 Brooks and Reiner re-teamed for The 2000 Year-Old Man In The Year 2000, which was released as both a book and a CD. Highlights included Brooks’ declaration that Planet Hollywood is the eighth wonder of the world; his complaint, with examples, that all French music is repetitive; his recollection of the world’s first infomercials; his accounts of the various diseases he’s had (“In a doctor’s office, when they give you that list of diseases to check off, I get a big marker and I write ‘YES!’”) and most memorably, his account of how he weaseled his way out of persecution in the Spanish Inquisition by acting like a complete lunatic, and making the inquisitors think “this is one crazy Jew…if we convert him he’ll be a crazy Christian!” Granted, Brooks wasn’t quite as funny or sharp this time around (by this point, he looked the part for the first time ever) but as a capsule of Brooks’ nimble, improvisatory comedic mind, and a testament to his everlasting influence on the world of comedy, it wasn’t half bad.
