Carl Reiner (1922 - 2020)

Betty and Dick Dixon would put their three sons to bed by nine o’clock at night in 1962, then settle in for a little TV viewing before turning in themselves.

Betty would fold laundry or do some sewing sitting on the couch while Dick, not much of a TV viewer unless it was sports or news, would read the paper for ten to fifteen minutes before dozing off in his big green overstuffed armchair.

Rikk and Robert Dixon may very well have been asleep along with their dad come nine-thirty, but on Wednesday nights little Buzzy boy lay awake and alert in bed, listening to the faint TV sounds in the living room, waiting for a familiar theme to start playing.

When it did, he carefully crept out of bed, down the hall, and into the living room, crouching behind his father’s chair while Dick Dixon snoozed away, peering over the top like Kilroy in the old WWII graffiti.

He was there to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show, and today, sadly, he’s here to commemorate the incredible genius behind it and to acknowledge a debt that can never be repaid.

I’ve posted elsewhere about how I gravitated to the art of story telling at an early age, already analyzing and dissecting the way stories were told even before I knew what I was doing.  The Dick Van Dyke Show was tailor made for me, even at the age of eight.

Seriously, what’s not to love?

It was a series about a lucky guy with a happy home and a wonderful wife and the greatest job in the world:  Hanging out all day with two great and funny friends, doing nothing but coming up with ideas and skits and stories, all of which end up being broadcast on a popular TV show.

For 90% of the writers of my generation, The Dick Van Dyke Show proved to be the single greatest career inspiration.

And we can all thank Carl Reiner for that.

. . .

Go ahead and Google him; you’ll find more info than I can pack into this wholly inadequate obituary. 

The man was a creative genius with no misplaced ego.  Whatever worked, as long as it made the final project better.

Reiner was hilarious in person, but he also knew when to let someone else shine.  He and Mel Brooks performed a long running free-form improvisational routine called “The 2,000 Year Old Man” in which Reiner would play a reporter interviewing Brooks, the aforementioned 2,000 year old man.

The secret to a good comedy team is the straight man.  It’s the straight man’s job to guide the performance of the comic, to steer them away from failing ideas and back towards laugh getters.  When comedy teams split up it’s typically because either the straight man wants to be recognized as equally funny, or (more commonly) because the comic thinks they can do it on their own.

Reiner and Brooks revived the 2,000 Year Old Man again and again and again, never running out of material.  Never once did Reiner try to one-up Brooks -- and never once did Brooks think he could do the routine all on his lonesome.

It takes supreme self-confidence to step back and let somebody else get the spotlight, but Reiner could do that.

The Dick Van Dyke Show wasn’t supposed to be a show about Dick Van Dyke.

It started life as a pilot called The Head Of The Family and other than living in a New York brownstone instead of a ranch house in New Rochelle, it was pretty much the same show that became one of television’s all time classic sit-coms.

Only it starred Carl Reiner.

For reasons best known to CBS, the suits decided they wanted Van Dyke, then an up and coming stage actor, to carry a show based on Reiner’s personal life experiences.

Reiner graciously ceded the point and stepped back.

Would The Head Of The Family have been the big hit The Dick Van Dyke Show was?

Maybe; maybe not.

Casting chemistry has a lot to do with the success of any production.

But it sure would have been just as funny.

. . .

Another aspect of Reiner’s comedy sensibilities is that his work never felt meanspirited.

Oh, he could skewer inflated egos with the best of ‘em, but he never belittled or demeaned his characters.

The Comic is a sadly underrated drama he made with Dick Van Dyke about a has-been silent movie comedian.  We find ourselves laughing at first, but by the end of the picture we come to realize it’s not a comedy but rather a tragedy with some grimly comic bits.

Where’s Poppa? is another underrated film, bypassed by most audiences as a morbidly comic film, but again, it’s not.

Rather, it’s a sad yet humorous story about an adult child desperately trying to cope with a parent sliding deeper and deeper into dementia with each passing day.

Reiner’s writing always showed he wanted good things to happen to his characters -- all his characters.

He wanted them to learn, he wanted them to rise above themselves, he wanted them to be better people than they thought they were.

And the humor came in their failings, true, but the failings were never the climax of the story, just act two.

And while Reiner could be passionate in striving for things he believed right, and strenuous in his opposition to those whom he felt inflicted harm, at every step of the way one could sense he hoped the other side would have a flash of insight, a moment of awakening when they’d recognize what they were doing and turn away from it.

Carl Reiner knew the difference between justice and retribution.

. . .

I met Carl Reiner briefly once at Howie Morris’ funeral (see what he and Carl and Sid Caesar could do together here).  I exchanged a few Tweets with him; he was kind enough to respond to a few comments I posted.

I did get to tell him how much The Dick Van Dyke Show influenced me, not just professionally but personally, and while I think he heard that a lot from many, many other writers, I think he appreciated it every time.

Not bask, not preen, not strut in pride, but appreciate that something he did made such an impact on literally thousands of other people that it changed their lives.

No, we didn’t all go on to be big time TV writers -- let’s be brutally honest, I’m a piddlin’ size fish in the tiny pond of TV animation -- but it gave us something to aim for, something to aspire to.

Even those who never made it in show biz gained something from that show, and I’ve never heard anyone regret any decision they made based on it.

So again, thank you, Carl.

You made a huge impact.

The world is not just a different place because you were in it, it’s a better place.

© Buzz Dixon