The 2000 Year Old Man and the People of the Book

The November 23 release by Shout! Factory of “The 2000 Year Old Man: The Complete History,” a 3-CD and 1-DVD set, exuberantly celebrates Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s classic comic shtik. Alongside all the beloved old albums, starting in 1961, and even an animated film, is an interview filmed in August 2009.
In the latter, the ever-raucous Brooks shows unexpected delicacy, explaining that the duo first devised the comic routine of an interviewer (Reiner) and an ancient man with a quintessential Jewish accent back in 1950. Only five years after the war, the Holocaust was a fresh memory, and comics generally felt it was too soon to record Jewish jokes for a general public which might contain antisemites.
Instead, Brooks and Reiner let loose at private parties and other showbiz occasions where in-the-know (and mainly Jewish) audiences were guaranteed to greet them with a sympathetic, instead of derisive, ear. After 1960, when other comedians insisted, Reiner and Brooks finally recorded the 2000 Year Old Man routine, alongside other comic bits, and even then Brooks seems to have shown a certain diffidence, preferring to omit the mention of purported love affair between the 2000 Year Old Man and Joan of Arc for fear of offending Catholic listeners (“She’s a Saint, after all”).
In these releases, Brooks and Reiner reveal themselves to be not just articulate, but also highly literate (Brooks is well known as a learned devotee of the Russian novel), and “The 2000 Year Old Man” benefits from this depth of shared bookish culture, and snazzy vocabulary. Some of the early routines on psychiatry fascinatingly foreshadow later Brooks achievements like the film “High Anxiety” while his faux-impresario garb in one filmed sketch from the early sixties seems to lead directly to the immortal Max Bialystok in “The Producers.”
Watch the 2008 interview below in which the genial Carl Reiner discusses his family roots in Chernivtsi.
Here he discusses his first encounter with the “very young, obstreperous” Mel Brooks, among other memories.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 3
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 4
Culture How two Jewish names — Kohen and Mira — are dividing red and blue states
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward ‘Another Jewish warrior’: Fine wins special election for U.S. House seat
-
Fast Forward A Chicagoan wanted to protest Elon Musk — and put a swastika sticker on a Jewish man’s Tesla
-
Fast Forward NY attorney general orders car wash to stop ripping off Jews with antisemitic ‘Passover special’
-
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.