Carl Reiner

Mr. Reiner contributed behind the scenes as well. He took part in the frenzied writing sessions that shaped the show, bouncing jokes off the walls of the writers’ room with the likes of Mr. Brooks and Neil Simon.

“I became a writer because of that room,” he recalled. “I’d say something and somebody would yell: ‘What do you know? You’re not a writer.’ So I became a writer.”

He characterized his later career moves with similar self-effacing humor in an NPR interview: “I acted like a director. I acted like a producer. I sat in front of a typewriter and acted like a novelist.”

Mr. Brooks was the star of the largely improvised routines, reflecting on what it was like to be two millenniums old (none of his thousands of children ever visited) and reminiscing about historical figures like Sigmund Freud (“He was a good basketball player; very few people know that”) and Shakespeare (“He had the worst penmanship I ever saw in my life”). But it was Mr. Reiner who came up with the questions that lit Mr. Brooks’s comedic fuse.

Indeed, it was Mr. Reiner who spontaneously started the ball rolling one day during a quiet moment in the Caesar writers’ room. “I turned to Mel and I said, ‘Here’s a man who was actually seen at the crucifixion 2,000 years ago,’” he told The New York Times in 2009, “and his first words were ‘Oh, boy.’”

“I always knew if I threw a question to Mel he could come up with something,” Mr. Reiner said. “I learned a long time ago that if you can corner a genius comedy brain in panic, you’re going to get something extraordinary.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/arts/television/carl-reiner-dead.html