the kibitzing didn't stop

-------------------- [excerpt]-------- Your Show of Shows provided Carl Reiner and his fellow second banana Howard Morris with more than ample opportunity to add their own comic contributions to a weekly format that somehow managed to embrace the disparate styles of silent comedy, rollicking musical numbers, and exacting social parody with equal fervor.  The show's brash, rapid-fire, musical comedy approach seemed ideally suited to the talents of Carl Reiner....

But despite the acclaim that Reiner derived from his work as a performer on Your Show of Shows, it wasn't long before he began to grow impatient with his somewhat limited role as a supporting actor on the show.  "Even though I acted once a week on Saturday and rehearsed all week, I didn't feel like an actor."

Finally, to break the monotony of his long rehearsals as a performer, Reiner cautiously poked his head into the show's noisy writers' room, where the roster on any given day might include Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Mel Tolkin, Tony Webster, and on occasion Neil Simon and his brother Danny. 

Naturally, with some of the sharpest comic minds in America stuck in a single room for as many as eight or ten hours a day, the actor soon discovered that things were rarely dull in the writers' office, and within a matter of weeks, Reiner himself became a fixture at the show's daily writing sessions, where his keen wit and gregarious nature soon earned him the respect of the show's writers. 

Before long, Carl Reiner found himself functioning as an active participant in the show's writing sessions -- though it was clearly understood that his contributions were to be made strictly without attribution.

"I was a writer without portfolio," explains Reiner.  "I was in on all the sessions, and I contributed as a writer.  But I didn't get my name in the credits, because actors didn't do that in those days.  The writers were very solicitous of their credits."  And with good reason, as he explains.  "I didn't blame them, because as actors, we got all the credit anyway.  Everybody thought we made the lines up."  And, as Reiner soon discovered, this tendency -- coupled with the writers' own naturally aggressive personalities -- often made for an intensely competitive environment in the writers' room. 

"If you got your joke in -- fine," says Reiner.  "But you knew somebody was always gonna try to improve it."

He recalls a particularly vexing session at which one of the show's writers managed to blurt out no more than the first three words of a comic premise before his idea was seized upon by his colleagues and offered up for extended comic debate.  "The guy started out saying, 'So, it's Thursday--'" recalls Reiner.  But then, before the hapless scribe could even stammer out the rest of his sentence, one of the show's other writers had already decided that the idea was ripe for improvement. 

"Somebody else said, 'Not Thursday--make it Friday!  Friday's funnier.'" 

And, of course, the kibitzing didn't stop there.  "Then somebody else says, 'why not make it a Saturday?  Isn't Saturday funnier?"  And, as Reiner quickly discovered, as a lowly performer he was at a decided disadvantage during such debates.  "When they'd fight you for a joke," he recalls, "some writer would always say, 'What the fuck do you know?  You're an actor!'"

Though his colleagues' frequent putdowns were invariably offered as good-natured jibes, Reiner finally came to view their barbed accusations of his own lack of writerly credentials as a challenge.  And he was determined to meet that challenge head-on. 

After a time, whenever things got hot in the writers' office, Reiner would slip out of the room and retire to a vacant office down the hall -- a quiet sanctuary that just happened to come equipped with an old manual typewriter.  And it was there, in the relative solitude of this unclaimed office, that the novice scribe began to practice his craft in earnest. 

"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."
------------------------ [end excerpt]

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

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