(Photo: Wikipedia)
CINCINNATI, Ohio — Comedy Legend Carl Reiner has died of natural causes at the age of 98. Reiner was one of the few entertainers who kept himself in the game by adapting to the sea changes in entertainment during the 20th and early 21st centuries. He wrote and acted in comedy skits for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows alongside Neil Simon and Mel Brooks. Carl Reiner had a particular repartee with Mel Brooks, improvising interviews with The 2,000 Year Old Man. This started as a gag for friends at parties. But the more they did it, the more they realized they really had something, recording five comedy albums and winning a Grammy.
With all of the obituaries about Carl Reiner’s life and career, I would like to write about what he meant to me personally. In 1994, after a disastrous year with a fledgling theatre company, I was a college graduate working as a waiter in Cincinnati trying to figure my life out. There was a casting call for community theatre at the Jewish Community Center. Why not?
I auditioned for Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon and Enter Laughing, a stage adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by Carl Reiner. I was in the Yonkers audition room for almost an hour and the second for just a few minutes. The clearly exhausted director of Enter Laughing said curtly, “Thank you. You were very good. Now I gotta get the hell out of here. We’ll be in touch.” As I was walking down the hall, the Yonkers director called out to me enthusiastically, “Thank you, Eric! You gave a wonderful reading.”
I didn’t get a part in Yonkers, but I was cast as the lead in Enter Laughing.
If you’re not familiar with the story, David Kolowitz is a nice Jewish boy in the Bronx during the Depression. He desperately wants to break into show business, but he’s stuck in a dead-end job and his parents are pushing him to follow a more stable career. How could I possibly identify with this character? The biggest difference between us was that on stage, I had a girlfriend.
A funny mimic, David is always doing impressions of famous actors of his day like James Cagney and Ron Coleman. These references were pretty dated. Thank goodness for VCRs, video stores and the public library because I had to watch old movies to know who I was even doing impressions of.
One scene has an argument between David and his mother that could have been transcribed from my own family’s kitchen. The story climaxes with a play within the play. David looks at the audience and freezes with stage fright. Then he snaps out of it and carries on with the show. Arnie, the director told me that I was too good. “You look like a polished actor up there when you’re supposed to be an inexperienced kid.” I argued, “Yes, but that kid is Carl Reiner. He’s got to show that he really has some chops up there.” I won the argument and Arnie let me do it my way.
I shall always be thankful for that show. When my family saw not only me but themselves in that story, a light came on. They were much more supportive after that.
So God bless you, Carl Reiner. You entered laughing and gave us jokes that will keep us laughing for years to come.
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Eric George Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. San Diego based he is now visiting family in Cincinnati preparatory to relocating to that city.