TV
1:42 PM PDT 06/30/2020
by
Mike Schur
Schur pays tribute to the comedy legend, who appeared in an episode of ‘Parks and Recreation’ alongside Amy Poehler. “For 98 years, comedy flowed through and radiated from Carl Reiner, following him like an obedient hunting dog, ready to follow his orders.”
In the fourth season of Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is running for city hall. In our research, we discovered that in cities like Pawnee Indiana, older people represent a large percentage of the total votes in local elections. We designed an episode in which Leslie had to win over a kind of “Godfather” figure: a man whose charisma and power over the other retirees was so complete that the entire choice could be based on his support. We wrote it for Carl Reiner.
Carl saying “yes” made us feel as if we had been knights, or something like that, as if the emperor of comedy had decreed that we deserved his attention. I’m not sure if he understood the power it did have, although we certainly told him when he appeared on set. We bowed, scraped and genuflected, and in my memory he was charming and unassuming and thought we were being a bit silly. But we didn’t mind. Adam Scott brought a movie poster of The lout for him to sign. I asked him to tell me stories about The Dick Van Dyke show, that as a child he taught me what a writers’ room was and how to make it fun. He also introduced me to Mary Tyler Moore, a crush that I never really got over. He told me that she was one of the most talented people I had ever met, privately I noticed that he did not say “women” but “people”, and he told me that he had chosen wisely.
Carl was 90 years old and we were a little unsure what the actual shooting would be like. But he knew all of his lines, of course, and did a million takes, fun on all of them. Always funny. We had a line where he told Leslie that she reminded him of his brother, also named Leslie, that she took as a good sign … and then said, “He lost a third of his body in a motorcycle accident.” The point was just that she would be a little lopsided, not knowing how to take it. Dan Goor, who was directing, asked him if he wanted to improvise a little. Her eyes lit up. Dan gave her the joke: “She lost a third of her body in a motorcycle accident, the middle third.” The absurdity of this made him laugh out loud. I am infinitely jealous, eight years later, that Dan made him laugh and I don’t.
He added the joke and then continued: “He lost a third of his body in a motorcycle accident. The middle third. But they stitched him up to hell. It’s … it’s fine now. Much shorter. But a handsome, young and flat man. Everything about it is wonderful. “They stitched him up to hell.” What 90-year-old man pulls that sequence of words out of thin air? And the way it hits the flat man in the end is like Simone Biles nailing a balance beam teardown. We use it all, naturally, though only after editing both Adam and one of our camera operators laughing at the screen. It’s just a small moment in his play, a couple of scenes in one episode of a show, 70 years of career depth, but good salsa was fun.
For 98 years, comedy flowed through and radiated from Carl Reiner, following him like an obedient hunting dog, ready to follow his orders. It stirred around him, like the butterflies and blue birds that dress Cinderella. And never abandoned him, never. The Dick Van Dyke Show It debuted 59 years ago and is still fun. Impossible: a magic trick. He was the best and most original heterosexual man ever born, in The man of two thousand years, and somehow he beat George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Oceans 11. In the span of five years (1979-1984) he directed The Jerk, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, The Man with Two Brain, and All of Me, and everyone is still fun He kept being fun, over and over again, throughout his century-long life
You are not supposed to be fun for so long, in so many different ways. That’s all about comedy: it’s transient, fleeting, and gossamer. The comedy of ten years ago often seems terribly outdated, and the comedy of 20 years ago is often embarrassing, and the comedy of 30 years ago doesn’t even make sense. (All parents have had the miserable experience of showing our children formative comedies from our youth, only to see them stare at the screen, bored to tears.) That, they are lucky if people remember them with affection, or sentimentally, or with nostalgia. No one really is still fun after 75 years in show business. Except, it turns out, Carl Reiner.
