”I’m a ham,” said legendary actor-writer-director Carl Reiner.
“When you’re a showoff, you’ve gotta get on that platform.”
Which is why 80-year-old Reiner is eager to regale theaudience with tales of his life in a speaking engagement at the Orange CountyPerforming Arts Center on Dec. 9. He’ll cover everything from working on SidCaesar’s TV shows to playing straight man to Mel Brooks’ 2,000-Year-Old Man towriting semi-autobiographical novels such as “Enter Laughing.”
“The only thing I’m an expert on is me,” he said of hischoice of a lecture topic. “And I’m a fairly good interviewer from myexperience with the 2,000-Year-Old Man. I know what I’m curious about, so I’llask questions of myself and give all the answers.”
Expect to enter — and exit — laughing.
Bronx-bred Reiner, whom Brooks calls the “tall, bald Jew,”has been funny practically since birth. “As a kid, I could always make peoplelaugh, and I could perfectly tell and retell jokes I heard at the movies,”Reiner said.
His first performance occurred when he put one leg behindhis head and hopped on the other in front of his rapt kindergarten teachers andclassmates. A smaller crowd watched his Orthodox bar mitzvah, which he saystook place “on a Thursday morning before mincha, with just a minyan of old Jews.”
By 1950, Reiner was writing and performing on Caesar’s “YourShow of Shows,” where he met a short, outrageous fellow writer named MelBrooks. “Mel Yiddishized everything,” Reiner says. “I’ll never forget he usedto do this character called The Jewish Pirate. Instead of a Jolly Roger, he hada Jolly Magen David.”
While hanging out in the writers’ room one day, Reiner madehistory when he turned to Brooks and ad-libbed, “Here is a man who was at thescene of the crucifixion 2,000 years ago. Did you know Jesus?” Brooks instantlylapsed into a thick, Yiddish accent and replied, “Thin lad, wore sandals, cameinto my store, but he never bought a thing.”
Over the next 10 years, Reiner shlepped a tape recorder toparties to capture their 2,000-Year-Old Man shtick, although he says he andBrooks refused to cut a record because “we were afraid the accent would playinto anti-Semitic stereotypes.” It wasn’t until after they had recorded thealbum in 1961 that Reiner received the penultimate confirmation that the 2,000-Year-OldMan was universal.
His notoriously cheap neighbor, Cary Grant, had shnorred adozen copies of the album to take along on a trip to England; when he returned,he knocked on Reiner’s door. “She loved it,” Grant gushed. “Who?” Reiner asked.”The Queen Mother,” Grant replied.
“The biggest gentile in the world,” marveled Reiner, whobecame a founding father of the TV sitcom when he created “The Dick Van DykeShow,” based on his home life during “Your Show of Shows.”
In 1979, Reiner again made history by directing “The Jerk,”the movie that catapulted Steve Martin to superstardom. He went on to directthree more films with the Texas-born comic (“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” “TheMan With Two Brains” and “All of Me”), who proved to be a very different kind ofcollaborator than Brooks. “Mel is loud, abrasive and hilarious, while Steve isquiet and hilarious,” Reiner said. “But funny is funny.”
The octogenarian could say the same of himself. Last year,he elicited yuks with his hilarious turn as a grumpy, Rolaids-popping, has-beencrook in Steven Soderberg’s heist flick “Ocean’s 11.” Recently, he signed withLittle, Brown and Company to write a children’s book, “Tell Me a Scary Story,But Not Too Scary!” prompted by a request from his grandson, Nicky (the middlechild of Reiner’s director son, Rob Reiner). Now he’s finishing anautobiography, “My Anecdotal Life,” spurred by fellow comedy writers at TheFriars Club.
“We have this alter-kacker lunch — we calls ourselvesROMEOS, Retired Old Men Eating Out — where everyone kept telling me to writedown my stories,” Reiner said. “I started and pretty soon I was adding andadding to the list.”
He’ll tell a number of those stories in Orange County, wherehe hopes to elicit more yuks. “Although I’m older now, I still have the need toget up in front of people and make them laugh,” he said. “That’s what I like tohear.” Â
