The One Question Carl Reiner Asked ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ Writers That Changed Sitcoms Forever
“It was kind of a breakthrough,” according to Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond. He told NBC News’ My Generation, per People, that Carl Reiner innovated a storytelling technique that he instilled in the writers for The Dick Van Dyke Show. “Carl Reiner’s whole modus operandi was he would say to his writers, every week, ‘What happened at your house this week?’”
Sounds simple enough. But that was a big change from the plots of, say, I Love Lucy, where writers would try to imagine wacky situations for Lucille Ball. Lucy goes to work in a chocolate factory. Lucy stomps grapes in Italy. Lucy gets tipsy filming a vitamin commercial.
Reiner didn’t come from that kind of writing background. In fact, he had no idea how to write a sitcom when his wife suggested he try to script one. “I said, “What piece of ground do you stand on that nobody else stands on?” And the answer was, ‘Well, I live in New Rochelle, I have a wife and two kids, I work on a variety show in New York, I commute every day.’ And so, that was the genesis of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It’s about a writer who lives in New Rochelle with one kid — I had two kids at the time. And he writes on a show, although I was actually a writer/actor on that show,” he said in the book Sitcom Writers Talk Shop.
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Reiner ended up writing 13 episodes right off the bat and 40 episodes during the first couple of seasons. Out of necessity since he wrote so many of the Dick Van Dyke scripts himself, he constantly borrowed plots from his everyday life. Reiner’s wife hated his habit of always offering to pick up dinner tabs, for example. Her annoyance became the episode, “My Husband Is A Check Grabber.”
Most comedy writers — and sitcom viewers — have never battled a haywire conveyor belt at a chocolate factory. So neither would Rob Petrie nor anyone else on the show. “Carl Reiner said those characters wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t do. And so that was the core of it all,” says Dick Van Dyke Show writer Bill Persky. “Everybody could identify with the people in it and find a piece of themselves. I mean, we were crazy maybe, but there was a recognizable human behavior in everything that happened. And then Dick would make it funnier. The stories were never outlandish, and the laughter came from situations and not from jokes. We never wrote jokes.”
Wacky went by the wayside, and the “What happened at your house this week?” question has continued to drive sitcom plots ever since — from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Everybody Loves Raymond. “You have to imagine yourself as not somebody very special but somebody very ordinary,” Reiner said in Carl Reiner: An American Film Institute Seminar on His Work. “If you imagine yourself as somebody really normal, and if it makes you laugh, it’s going to make everybody laugh.”
