By Christopher Bonanos
A week ago on Twitter, Carl Reiner remarked that he was proudest of two pieces of his work: the 2000-Year-Old Man sketches he’d recorded with Mel Brooks, and creating The Dick Van Dyke Show. They seem only nominally related: One was a recurring improv bit in which Reiner was the ostensibly colorless straight-man interviewer, and the other was a slick CBS sitcom in which Reiner played a splenetic character named Alan Brady. But what they have in common is the writers’ room, that mythic place in the making of comedy where the funny comes from. Reiner and Brooks had met on Your Show of Shows, the Sid Caesar–Imogene Coca sketch show of the early 1950s, where Reiner wrote and performed, and Brooks got started as a writer; they’d worked out the 2000-Year-Old Man there. And The Dick Van Dyke Show was set backstage at a show very much like Caesar’s, in which Morey Amsterdam played a version of Mel Brooks, and Reiner played a hectoring star who seemed quite a bit like his old boss. Until Reiner came along, nobody outside the business knew about the writers’ room; today we all do. It’s a straight line from there to the behind-the-scenes scenes of…
