2,037--and Counting

Before embarking on their prodigious careers as writer-producer-directors of trailblazing comedy on TV and film, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner entered the crowded scene of recorded humor circa 1960 with an album of improvised skits titled “2,000 Years With Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.” It included a crotchety sage called the 2,000-Year-Old Man.

With many of the comedians of that era now forgotten or having changed with the times (George Carlin soon traded his natty suits for a ponytail and scathing Nixon bellicosity), the old codger remains a cult favorite through four widely spaced recordings, the last released in 1973.

The originals, recently reissued by Rhino Records, retain their snap and spontaneity. It’s one of the reasons Brooks, 70 (creator of “Get Smart,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein”), and Reiner, 75 (“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Where’s Poppa?,” “All of Me”), reentered the studio this month to record a new CD, tentatively titled “The Wit and Wisdom of the 2,000-Year-Old Man (for the Millennium).” A companion book from HarperCollins is also due out this fall.

The two first collided in that TV hothouse of perdurable writing talent, Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s, working alongside the likes of Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. Though both men have spent the better part of their recent careers creating and coaxing performances from others, the presence of any appreciative audience--no matter how small--quickly sparks the performance instinct, and the shtick starts to fly.

The setting is Reiner’s Beverly Hills home one recent afternoon. Slipping into the distinctive growling and whining of an old Russian Jew, supposedly borrowed from his grandfather, Brooks alternates between hectoring the hapless interviewer--Reiner--and making fun of his own human foibles through the ages. History is mangled, the English language and other cultural targets ravaged.

Question: How did the 2,000-Year-Old Man come to be?

Reiner: It was 1950, in the writers offices of “Your Show of Shows.” Mel would entertain us by getting up and doing things that made us laugh. I came in upset about something I’d heard on television--talking about an eyewitness that couldn’t have been there. I said, “Here’s a man who was actually at the scene of the crucifixion 2,000 years ago.” And he went, “Ahh, boy. . . .”

From that moment on, I kept asking him questions. “Did you know Jesus?” He said, “A thin lad. He always came into the store. He never bought anything. . . .” The less he had time to think, the more amazing his brain would react. For 10 years, we did it at parties.

Brooks: But we did a myriad number of characters.

Reiner: I always asked him about psychiatry--he’d be a Greek psychiatrist, Jewish, English, and always have a different thing to say--never at a loss.

Brooks: That’s because I was always in analysis.

Reiner: He is a doctor in some states.

Brooks: In four of the lesser-known states, I am an accredited doctor. I can practice medicine.

Q: How is that?

Brooks: These states don’t require a degree. If you’re ever sick in Alabama, give me a ring.

Q: Why did you make the record?

Reiner: We started giving command performances. We went to a class-A party. Everybody was there. After we’d finished it, Steve Allen, whom we credit with making us do this, said, “You have to put this on tape.” George Burns said, “If you don’t put this on a record, I’ll steal it.” Edward G. Robinson said, “Make a play; I want to play the 2,000-Year-Old Man.”

Q: What was the state of comedy albums at that time?

Reiner: It was great. Bob Newhart had an album, Shelley Berman, Stan Freberg.

Q: Was anyone doing anything comparable to what you were doing? Mike Nichols and Elaine May?

Reiner: They came out at about the same time.

Brooks: Their record was fabulous. Still good. Then Cosby.

Reiner: Two or three years later.

Q: Did you have an influence on them?

Brooks: Oh, sure, we all influenced each other. When we heard the first Shelley Berman album, I said, “My God, they make comedy records. We’ve been doing it for free all these years.”

Reiner: We got a studio and made the record in one session. Two hours.

Brooks: Very little preparation. None, actually. I played more than one character.

Reiner: The wonderful thing is I used to ask him his name at the beginning of any of these, and after we’d go 10 minutes. . .

Brooks: I’d forget.

Reiner: The best part was when he was 12 psychiatrists around a table and he forgot his name. He said, “Just a moment,” and took out his wallet. He said, “I have it here written.” He got the name right but then said, “I don’t think that’s me, I think I’ve got the wrong wallet,” and went for 10 minutes trying to find the name. I was hysterical.

Brooks: We were concerned this might be construed as anti-Semitic because of the accent.

Reiner: But nothing true is ever “anti-” anything, and he was speaking from his heart.

Brooks: That record was an underground hit. A little more of the 2,000-Year-Old Man crept into the next one [titled “2,000 and One Years With Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks”].

Reiner: At that second recording we had Brendan Behan, the famous Irish playwright, and Mel didn’t know he was there. I’ll never forget this. I’d asked Mel, “Did you have a national anthem?” He said, “Yeah, every cave had a national anthem”--he didn’t know I was going to ask him that, and he sang . . .

Brooks: [Sings] “Let them all go to hell, except Cave 17.”

Reiner: And Behan came up after the session and said, “You know, I’ve got a new motto now,” and he said something to me in Gaelic. I asked, “What does that mean?” He’d translated Mel’s anthem. Now, that is exactly what flags, what nationalism does. Everybody should go to hell as long as we’re OK. That’s what I mean--Mel hits the absolute truths.

Brooks: The third record was called “The Cannes Film Festival.” Then we stopped for quite a while.

Reiner: Ten years. There was a bit of a demand. [Then-Capitol Records President] Joe Smith said, “People are asking me for records and they’re not in the stores anymore. We’ll make another one [titled “2,000 and 13”], like a party, a living room. Like you used to do it.” His living room was a studio--the Warner Bros. Studio. He put 200 couches in it, on a stage.

Brooks: He got about 200 different couches.

Reiner: And it was so wonderful, because everybody there was a fan. Everybody stood up and cheered when the 2,000-Year-Old Man came out. But we were frightened.

Brooks: We didn’t know whether we could do it.

Reiner: A couple of hours before, upstairs, I had little cards and I’d ask him a question. And if the question was good, I’d put it down and say OK. He’d say, “Those are no good, don’t ask that,” and I threw those into my valise.

At least he knew what the question was--I didn’t know what the answer was, nor did he. But I could see his eyes flashing something would come. At the end of an hour, they were roaring, and I said, “Let’s try some of this garbage.” All the garbage turned out great, because his mind was clicking. I knew Mel could do it. We go to dinner together. There’s always four or five things he says that nobody else would.

Brooks: I go to dinner, I’m half-plotzed on a bottle of Chanel Blanc ’79 . . .

Reiner: His problem of having to dig into himself again, like he did 15 years ago, to find that guy--because he’s now [the production entity] Brooksfilms, he’s the father of four kids, he’s a different guy. There’s many more things in his brain than being a funster.

Brooks: The only thing in our favor is that as Jews get older, they do slip into that accent, whether or not they’ve ever heard it before. It’s genetically mandated.

Reiner: It’s a good theory, but this Jew here lost his accent. In the first session there were a lot of very good jokes we couldn’t put in because he lost his accent. He assimilated.

Brooks: Carl’s son Robbie [director Rob Reiner] got very excited when we said we were going to do another record and he sat down right in the front, and I was scared. I didn’t think I had the rhythm, the thoughts, the sound, the wisdom for this. But the minute he started laughing, I was off and running.

Reiner: We knew we were going to have to do two sessions. It was like spring training, you’re rusty. The second session, it was like back 20 years. This guy was wailing. It was just wonderful.

Q: You had a full audience.

Brooks: They came because we said there would be sandwiches, cheese and beer.

Reiner: A lot of them came because they were fans.

Brooks: Yeah, but that helped. It was star-studded--Dick Van Dyke, [Carl’s] leading man.

Reiner: Alan Alda, Robbie and [producer] Danny Melnick have such laughs. They’re sitting in the first few rows, you hear them.

Brooks: Our batting average--we used to bat around .350, which was damn good. In the first session, we were batting about .300.

Reiner: .275.

Brooks: .275, not so bad. There are some people that never laugh out loud and I was cursing them. Like Doc [playwright Neil] Simon. He’s sitting in the front row. He’s crying. He’s using a box of Kleenex, but he doesn’t make a sound. He thinks he’s gonna interfere. I wanted to smack him on the head and say, “Laugh.”

Reiner: Every time Mel makes a record, there’s something very quotable, and you never know what it’s going to be. On the first record, Cary Grant was a big fan, and every week I’d have to send him another dozen. He’d give them out, he was very cheap. You couldn’t say hello to Cary Grant and ask him, “How are you, Cary?” He’d say, “Jaunty jolly,” because that was from the record.

Brooks: A lot of young ladies told me they auditioned their husbands-to-be with the record. If they really enjoyed the record and really laughed, he was a real prospect. But if he didn’t understand it, that was it.

Q: What are some of the topics you cover in the new recording?

Brooks: I talk about the eighth wonder of the world, Planet Hollywood. The 2,000-Year-Old Man cannot get over Planet Hollywood. [With accent] There’s movies on every wall, you get a hamburger the size of your head for $9.95. You’re liable to see Sly Stallone in the corner somewhere.

Reiner: [As interviewer] And what about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

Brooks: What? You wouldn’t find Demi and Bruce hanging around the Hanging Gardens. . . .

Little mistakes between us turn out to be very funny. I say, “I was in Vienna in 1905 and was lucky enough to find a doctor crossing over from the medical to the mental profession.”

Reiner: [As interviewer] You mean Sigmund Freud.

Brooks: [With accent] Oh, my God, you’re smart as a ship.

Reiner: I think you’ll find that’s “smart as a whip.”

Brooks: What the hell’s so smart about a whip? A whip is laying in the corner, all curled up and does nothing. A ship, turned out smart, sails. If people call you smart as a whip, correct it.

Reiner: [Still going] You were married to a lot of famous people.

Brooks: One I was engaged to, a gorgeous beauty, Salome. But it didn’t work out; I couldn’t have children with her.

Reiner: Were you impotent?

Brooks: Au contraire, I was opulent. She had seven veils, but by the time she got to the fourth veil, I became premature.

Q: The 2,000-Year-Old Man had a sense of propriety in the early days.

Brooks: That’s changed now.

Reiner: This section we can’t talk about.

Brooks: Just say this: “Martin Scorsese liberated.”

Q: How do you go about the process of improvisation?

Reiner: The first two records were all improvised; the last ones, we discussed subjects beforehand. We talk about the Bible.

Brooks: I knew the head writer of the Bible. There’s a lot of arcane stuff about biblical days that he knows nothing about that I just make up because--what the hell, he wasn’t there. It’s like when I was a kid in the mountains, I used to do impressions of Thomas Jefferson. Who’s gonna criticize me? How do they know whether I got it right or wrong? I’d do Cagney, Bogart, then Thomas Jefferson, and I’d tell them, “That Jefferson is perfect.”

Reiner: All of his characters sound a little Jewish.

Brooks: Thomas Jefferson had a thick Bronx accent. I’m not sure if this is apocryphal or if it’s true, but Robbie and [filmmaker-actor] Albert Brooks were a team many years ago, and they once got booked as Reiner and Brooks, and the guy expected to see Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. He saw them and said, “Who the hell are these guys? Get out of here.”

Reiner: Albert Brooks--his real name is Einstein--loved Mel so much, I think he decided his name on that.