you knew you were going to see a crazy play

"I'd learned to type on a teletype in the army," Reiner explains, "so I used to go to that office, just to see if I could still type.  And I found out that I could."
[excerpt, Dick Van Dyke Show Book]----------

In no time at all, Carl Reiner had graduated from simple typing exercises to composing short humorous pieces for his own amusement.  For his earliest exercises, Reiner would frequently contrive to create the cast, characters, and setting for short comic plays that he had absolutely no intention of ever writing. 

"I would write a little one-page cast of characters for a play," he recalls, "that's all.   Just the cast of characters -- what they do, where the play is set.  A lot of them were satires of some play that already existed."  Then, having created the characters and setting for an imaginary play of his own design, Reiner would simply move on to the next. 

"You knew from the description alone that you were going to see a crazy play," he explains. 

"That was all you needed.  I thought they were hilarious.  I wrote dozens of them.  I think I might still have them someplace."

As his confidence grew, the writer soon moved from one-page play descriptions to three-page character studies. 
---------------- [end excerpt]

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{The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, by Vince Waldron.  Copyright, 1994.  Hyperion, NY, NY.}

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