Carl Reiner’s comedic instincts, appreciation for collective talent and abilities in a writers’ room made him a legend, says Gene Seymour, and Reiner never stopped showing up to live what he described as the “best life possible.”
Gene Seymour is a film critic who has written about music, movies and culture for The New York Times, Newsday, Entertainment Weekly and The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @GeneSeymour. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. View more opinion at CNN.
Ninety-eight?
Too soon.
Way too soon.
Gene Seymour
Come on, now. You know that’s funny. Carl Reiner would have known that was funny. He’d back me up on it — except that he’s the one who died at age 98.
He’d also know why it’s funny. “The absolute truth,” Reiner said, “is the thing that makes people laugh.”
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And Reiner, even though he was at the age when, to paraphrase Casey Stengel, most other people are dead, was still an active, sharp-witted presence on the pop-cultural scene along with his lifelong pal and frequent foil Mel Brooks. Both of them, just this past weekend, were photographed celebrating Brooks’ 94th (!) birthday wearing “Black Lives Matter” shirts.
And now he’s dead? Already? The way Reiner was going, we all thought he’d have 98 more years. At least.
Carl Reiner, left, with star Dick Van Dyke appear in a scene from “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
It’s also funny, just as an aside, because Reiner appreciated funny numbers. And 98 happens to be one of those numbers that, for whatever mysterious reason, is a funny number. Like 32. or 63. Or 2,000, which was the number of years assigned to Brooks’ alter ego, “The 2,000-year-old man,” to whom Reiner played straight man and interlocutor on several comedy albums and hundreds of TV and stage shows.
