CARL REINER: THE ELDER STATESMAN OF COMEDY

It’s a pity that Carl Reiner, who hosts “Carl Reiner’s the Light Stuff” Saturday on KCET Channel 28, does so little performing anymore. In effect, he’s kicked himself upstairs as writer-producer-director (or combinations thereof) of comedy films. (He’s done most of the Steve Martin movies, culminating in “All of Me” with Martin and Lily Tomlin, and “Summer Rental” with John Candy.)

When the now-defunct Arts Channel taped the reunion of Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks in their first public appearance together since their glory days of “Your Show of Shows,” he was invited to sit in. If at first we thought it was merely to help along with fond reminiscences about the greatest comedy variety show in the history of television, we were soon set straight.

In one impromptu passage designed to show Caesar’s genius at mimicking languages, he and Reiner held furiously nonsensical arguments in German, Italian and French, at the conclusion of which Reiner unfurled a gesture of classic Gallic imperiousness. If you never realized it before, you knew then that you were looking at one of history’s brilliant straight men. “Your Show of Shows” would never have worked so well without him.

Reiner’s training was in the theater, which means he has an actor’s full-bodied sense about how to shade an expression. But his greatest skill is in using just enough one-upmanship to make the people around him play their best (what would “The 2000-Year-Old Man” series be if Reiner’s interviewer hadn’t pushed Mel Brooks to the wall?)

“Carl Reiner’s the Light Stuff” is a program in which Reiner interviews six comedians, Albert Brooks, David Brenner, Phyllis Diller, Whoopi Goldberg, Paul Rodriguez and Jerry Seinfeld, and has them tell us what shaped them. If he enjoys his role as elder statesman (“I like being on call to do things like this”), he’s a little dubious about discussing comedy.

“I’m basically a hired hand for this program, which has been produced and written by Martin Kent and Julian Fowles,” Reiner said recently.

“Personally, I’d rather do comedy than comment on it, which isn’t my nature, except if I’m talking to young people. You can only recount how you got to where you are, which doesn’t mean anyone else is going to get there the same way. We all know failure and disappointment. We all inhabit a different ground, with different perspectives. I’ve enjoyed this, though. KCET is always worth doing something for, and the field of comedy is so huge that this could be ‘Right You Are If You Think You Are.’ You could do 100 shows with the same premise.”

Reiner also has the actor’s sense of playing to an occasion, even if the audience consists of a single interviewer, which is another way of saying he measures himself out. He’s an affable, layered man whose genial surface occasionally yields a glimpse of the solitary man watching from the shadows.

For example: Of his son, actor Rob Reiner, he said, “He’s such an emotionally honest person that he doesn’t conceal his feelings. If he’s up, he’s high. If he’s down, you see it. When he was a kid, people would say, ‘Why don’t you smile?’ ‘Why?’ he’d say. ‘Why?’ ”

Reiner smiled, savoring his son’s expression. “Me, I put on the face for people. I give them the smile. They don’t have to know what I’m feeling. I like to make people happy.”