From Publishers Weekly
Reiner (Enter Laughing), creator and co-star of the Dick Van Dyke Show as well as the director of many film comedies, has collected here some memories of his long career. In short takes, he revisits his first jobs running entertainment programs at senior camps, his first breaks into show business, his favorite dinner parties, his most memorable faux pas and his great times with other grand old men of comedy, from George Jessel to Mel Brooks. He intersperses career tales with family vignettes: short but touching accounts of his father's inventions, his mother's illiteracy and his brother's final illness. While most of Reiner's ventures were, by his account, smash successes, he includes a few mishaps-like the time he arrived a day early for his high school's Hall of Fame ceremony-in keeping with his epigraph, "Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be the fool but you're the fool in charge." Hearing a story about something that people found funny, however, is not the same as hearing a funny story. Reiner, who's now 81, spends most of this book patting himself on the back for all the things that went so well in his life. Fans will enjoy it, although for real laughs they'll do better renting Where's Poppa? at the video store.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Venerable actor, stand-up, second banana, producer, director, and author (How Paul Robeson Saved My Life, 1999, etc.) presents additional autobiography--now, he assures us, with more fact than ever before. Reiner reveals much of his home life, and particularly his life in showbiz, in chapters that resemble sitcom premises and blackout sketches. These disconnected episodes are, he asserts, '96 percent . . . absolutely true.' Tummeling in the Catskills or double-talking on Caesar's Hour, from the small screen to the big one, he offers an archetypal theatrical memoir, ever benign, complete with rimshot gags, tales of 'shmuckery,' and discrete references to flatulence. (To add some class to the proceedings, Reiner employs new orthography to describe the 'pharts'.) Many supporting players make appearances; the cast of dozens includes Georgie Jessel, Mickey Rooney, Howie Morris, Dick (not 'Dickey') Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Max Liebman, 2,000-year-old Mel Brooks, and cherished family members, each acting with style and grace under the author's direction. From youth in the Bronx to playing the White House, his story has few vicissitudes; Reiner seems to have progressed from 'Call Me Mister' to 'Call Me Mister Show Biz' with little hesitation. He's kept the same wife, kids, and forebears he started with, and, he tells us, he's never sued anyone or been sued, surely a record in his line of work. His father was an inventive watchmaker, he recalls, and clearly our good-natured author has inherited a nice sense of timing. Something sweet, with a little spice and a lot of schmaltz: maybe not haute cuisine, but served warm it's a good recipe for palatable recollections."
- Kirkus Reviews
"Aren't we lucky that Carl Reiner's memory is still intact. He has given us a veritable treasure trove of wonderful recollections, some side-splittingly funny and a few that are really touching. The best one is about me."
- Mel Brooks
"You can't define genius, but it stands up and shouts from the pages of Carl Reiner's My Anecdotal Life."
- Mary Tyler Moore
"After reading this book, you'll know why Carl Reiner was one of my all-time favorite guests on The Tonight Show. He's bright, a brilliant storyteller, self-effacing, and funny as hell. Besides, he is, as we say in the Midwest, a good egg (the gentile counterpart of mensch)."
- Johnny Carson
"Mr. Reiner's stories allow us to have his whole life flash before our eyes. Happily, he is a delightful storyteller and a very gifted flasher."
- Larry Gelbart
"This book offers the absolutely incomparable experience of knowing what it would be like to have Carl Reiner as a friend and without the exorbitant costs of trying to book him on a regular basis."
- Jerry Seinfeld
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