Despite coming from the same time and place as Jesus Christ, the 2000 Year Old Man talked an awful lot like a Jewish guy from 1950s Brooklyn: “I have over 42,000 children and not one of them ever visit me!” was a typical kvetch from Brooks. The 2000 Year Old Man is the revered comedy sketch Reiner and Brooks coined in the 1950s, in which Reiner – always playing the straight man – would interview Brooks, the titular old man, about his life. (Robbie is better known to those outside the inner Reiner circle as the film director Rob Reiner, Carl’s oldest child and still a baby at 72.)
I’d say, ‘You should be sleeping!’ but he’d just sit there,” says Brooks. “Robbie used to sit on the stairs, looking through the banisters, watching us do the 2000 Year Old Man. Brooks – a mere whippersnapper of 93 – remembers when Reiner moved in because their friendship predates the house: they have been best friends for 70 years. Gene Kelly used to be his neighbour Kirk Douglas, 103, until last month, lived close by. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS via Getty Imagesīrooks knows this home well because Reiner, 97, has lived in it for 60 years. Carl Reiner, left, and Mel Brooks on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961.
