* * *
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In a strange way, I always felt that Carl was the unsung hero of our 2000 Year Old Man act. He took me to places I never imagined. He had a genius for asking questions that were unanswerable, and I was always delighted to reward him with a crazy answer that he never saw coming.
Many years later one of the last things I got to do with Carl was a voiceover for Pixar’s Toy Story 4 （2019）。 I have a suspicion that they designed the characters for us, because their names were “Melephant Brooks” and “Carl Reinerocerous.” Once again just like way back then, when we were recording The 2000 Year Old Man, we sat next to each other in front of microphones and worked hard to break each other up.
I really enjoy doing voiceovers for animated projects. In 2003 I was offered a voiceover part playing a funny sheep in a really creative animated children’s series called Jakers! on PBS. I took the job because I realized it would be a while before my grandchildren could see all of my movies, but I knew they would enjoy hearing Grandpa’s voice as Wiley, the adorable wiseacre sheep. It turned out I had a natural talent for voiceover acting, something I hadn’t explored that much earlier in my career. Doing voiceovers was so much fun that it led to me helping create several other animated characters in the years that followed Jakers! I voiced Bigweld, the idolized famous inventor and owner of Bigweld Industries in Robots （2005）。 That movie also featured the voices of such talents as Robin Williams, Ewan McGregor, and Halle Berry. The very funny Adam Sandler asked me to play his character Dracula’s vampire father, Vlad, in the Hotel Transylvania movies, which were a lot of fun to record. Vlad is over a thousand years old and pretty disappointed with his son Dracula’s chosen career, so he has cute lines like: “So you run a hotel now? From prince of darkness to king of room service…”
One of my most famous voiceover roles was actually not in an animated movie at all, but as “Mr. Toilet Man” in my friend Amy Heckerling’s comedy Look Who’s Talking Too （1990）。 I would only play a part with a name like that for a truly dear friend!
But Carl Reiner was a lot more to me than just my straight man and partner on the 2000 Year Old Man. He was my best friend in the world, and I loved him. We spent many years and had many great times together.
He also went on to become a wonderful movie director. When I asked him what prompted him to direct, he said that he’d written a movie that wasn’t directed to his liking. When two actors have a scene together and one hits the joke, you don’t cut to the guy who’s said the joke. It was cut up so badly that he said, “I’m going to have to protect my movies by directing my own!”
And that’s when he directed his first movie: Enter Laughing. Many iconic comedy classics followed, like The Jerk, Where’s Poppa?, and All of Me. Whatever Carl turned his hand to was always top-drawer.
I’ve worked with many great people in my life, but there will never be another Carl Reiner.
Chapter 6
Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show
Getting back to 1960, my only income was from the 2000 Year Old Man record and a couple of TV appearances. One of those appearances was actually historic. I was on the very first Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on October 1, 1962, along with Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Rudy Vallee, and Tony Bennett. It was the first appearance in a long association with Johnny Carson that really helped me to become a famous comedy name.
In the various decades since I appeared on that night, I tried unsuccessfully to find that very first Carson show. I’ve been told that it was either lost somewhere or got taped over. Maybe at that time, nobody expected the show to be as important and memorable as it later became? So perhaps, as they used to often do on live TV at the time, they reused the tape and something else was taped over it? Another explanation was a suggestion from a studio engineer who told me that he thought the first show was in black and white, and after that all the others were in color. So maybe they just discarded that one episode because of the black-and-white issue? Who knows? I really never got a definitive explanation for it being missing, however it seems someone in the control room or maybe even the audience had an audio copy of the show, so at least I was able to listen to it again.
Johnny Carson was a great audience for me. He loved my comic inventions, and sometimes would literally fall off his desk chair while laughing uncontrollably. I once told Johnny that I collected wines and had a wonderful wine cellar, which led him to suggest one of the funniest things I ever did on his show—a wine-tasting bit.