Focus : Carl Reiner’s Second Shelf Life : SEQUEL TO HIS ‘ENTER LAUGHING’ CONTINUES ESCAPADES OF HIS SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CHARACTER

Carl Reiner’s first novel, the semiautobiographical “Enter Laughing,” created an unsophisticated young Brooklynite named David who dreamed only of being an actor.

It ended with David in an amateur troupe, with a girlfriend and a day job. “Continue Laughing,” Reiner’s sequel, takes David through his first professional acting job, World War II service and--well, that would be telling.

“I’ve always written by the seat of my pants,” says Reiner, an actor-writer-producer-director with seven Emmy Awards as creator-producer of “The Dick Van Dyke Show” (and the occasional cameo as top banana Alan Brady) and director of such film comedies as “The Jerk” and “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “All of Me.”

At 73, an age when most men are well into their retirement, Reiner is going strong. “One thing you won’t get me to do is slow down, because that way leads to no fun!”he says.

“When you’re sitting and writing a novel it’s very lonely, but you can actually tickle yourself, arouse yourself, make yourself laugh, feel sad.”

There’s another advantage to writing novels: Fewer co-stars.

“When you’re writing television, motion pictures, or anything that’s going to be produced on stage, you have collaborators,” Reiner says.

“You can’t take credit for the acting ability of a character you’ve written when the actor’s either twice as good or twice as bad as you imagined. As in the case of Dick Van Dyke, I never dreamed that my material would turn out as good as he made it.

“You also don’t need a lighting man, a location manager, a cinematographer. You’re talking directly, one-to-one, with an audience,” he says. “You’re talking into somebody’s brain, into their ear, very quietly.”

The downside, of course, he notes, is that you don’t know whether you’re getting over until your book jumps off the shelves.

Reiner still gets approached by fans who loved his work for Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” or “Dick Van Dyke” or “The Man with Two Brains.”

“The longer you stay around and don’t toxify the world with your product, somebody is going to give you these nice moments. They’re fleeting, but it sort of underlines the fact that you haven’t loused up somebody’s air space.”

Reiner emphasizes that his novel is a roman a clef:

“My acquaintances who are schmucks ... I wanted to write them fully, so I changed their names,” he says. “I invented people because some of my friends were not interesting; they’re not schmucks. They’re very nice people but they’re boring. So I invented other people and put them in the book.”

Reiner enjoyed projecting himself back in time, remembering himself as a hot-to-trot 19-year-old with girlfriends, hormones and lots of energy.

“I combined four different people to get one character,” he says. “Otherwise, it would be a sprawling book about my life and my life is not that important. It’s not the life of Freud.”

Estelle, his wife of 52 years, can read “Continue Laughing” without seeing herself, Reiner says. “She knows that all the feelings are about her, but it’s not her,” he says.

“You have a license to lie.”

It’s the end of the half-hour interview, and Reiner walks out with the reporter, heading for another interview across the river and under the trees. Time for one more question.

Do “Enter Laughing” and “Continue Laughing” mean we can look forward to a third volume, say, “Exit Laughing”?

Reiner’s eyes twinkle. “It’ll probably be called, ‘What the Hell Were You Guys Laughing About?’ ”