Trivia: Carl Reiner knew he wanted to be an actor -- preferably a Shakespearean actor -- from the time he was wearing knee pants. Trained in New York's Works Progress Administration Dramatic Workshop, he spent the war years touring with Maurice Evans' G.I. Hamlet, appearing with another young hopeful, Howard Morris. After the war he accumulated scores of stock company and Broadway credits, then in 1948 made his television debut in the short-lived series Fashion Story. While starring in NBC's 54th Street Revue, he was hired as one of the regulars on Your Show of Shows, appearing on a weekly basis with Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and old pal Howie Morris. During the scripting sessions for Show of Shows, Reiner became friends with a bombastic staff writer named Mel Brooks, with whom he improvised a number of wild stream-of-consciousness comedy bits which would eventually crystallize as the classic "2000 Year Old Man" routines. An Emmy winner for his work on the various Sid Caesar programs, he entered films as a character actor in 1959. That same year, he wrote, produced, and starred in the pilot episode for a proposed series about a comedy writer named Rob Petrie, titled Head of the Family. The network executives liked the concept, but vetoed Reiner as the star; swallowing his pride, he retooled the property with another leading man, and that's how the Emmy-winning Dick Van Dyke Show was born. During the series' five-year run, Reiner made innumerable cameo appearances on the program, most memorably as Rob Petrie's mercurial TV-comedian boss Alan Brady. In 1967 he made his film directorial debut with Enter Laughing, an adaptation of his own semi-autobiographical 1958 novel (the book had already been transformed into a Broadway play with Alan Arkin as star). Reiner's later directing assignments included The Comic (1967), a bittersweet farce based on the lives of Stan Laurel, Harry Langdon, and Buster Keaton; the black comedy cult favorite Where's Poppa? (1970); the whimsical fantasy Oh, God (1977); and a popular series of Steve Martin vehicles, among them The Jerk (1978) and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982). His film output decreased in number and quality in the l980s and 1990s, though critics enjoyed his offbeat 1989 working-class comedy Bert Rigby, You're a Fool and his 1997 Bette Midler starrer That Old Feeling. In 1995, he earned yet another Emmy award for his revival of the Alan Brady character on a memorable episode of TV's Mad About You. And though Reiner appeared to retire from directing following That Old Feeling, he still maintained a notable presence in film and television with roles in Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven and it's two sequels, House M.D., Hot in Cleveland, and Parks and Rec.Carl Reiner is the father of directors Rob Reiner and Lucas Reiner; his wife Estelle has enjoyed a latter-day career as a night club singer and as a cameo performer in her son Rob's films (she's the lady who says, "I'll have what she's having!" in When Harry Met Sally).

Trivia: Diminutive (5'7") comic actor Howard Morris was in his teens when, while attending the National Youth Administration's radio workshop in New York City, he befriended another aspiring actor named Carl Reiner. The two were reunited in Honolulu during World War II, when Morris was Reiner's sergeant in an entertainment unit. Both Morris and Reiner played supporting roles in Maurice Evans' army-camp tour of Hamlet and MacBeth; after the war, the two performers toured in the musical Call Me Mister before joining the cast of Sid Caesar's TV comedy-variety series. Only after finishing nine seasons with Caesar were Morris and Reiner able to establish their own individual showbiz identities: Reiner as a novelist, film supporting actor, director and creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and Morris as one of the most prolific TV guest stars and directors of the 1960s. Relocating from New York to LA in 1961, Morris played the recurring role of goonish, rock-throwing Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show, and a whole slew of one-shot assignments on series ranging from The Danny Thomas Show to The Twilight Zone. Morris forever shed the "third banana" status he'd had during his Sid Caesar days by directing episodes of such TV weeklies as Andy Griffith, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Gomer Pyle USMC, and the unforgettable black-and-white pilot for Get Smart. He also served as producer of the 1972-73 sitcom The Corner Bar. In films, Morris sparkled in such supporting parts as Jerry Lewis' browbeaten father in The Nutty Professor and German psychiatrist Dr. Lilloman in Mel Brooks' High Anxiety (1977). His theatrical-film directorial credits include the all-star comedy Who's Minding the Mint (1967), Doris Day's swan song With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), a very WASP-ish adaptation of Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water (1969), and the Donny & Marie Osmond opus Goin' Coconuts (1978). Howard Morris is also a fixture of the animated cartoon voice-over world, supplying voices and directing recording sessions for many a Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and Walt Disney production: If you can't place the voice, think of Morris as Atom Ant, Beetle Bailey, Jughead Jones, and futuristic rock star Jet Screamer ("Eep, opp, ork, ah-ah") on The Jetsons.

Trivia: The son of a Yonkers restaurant owner, Sid Caesar first discovered he could get laughs by imitating the colorful dialects of his multinational classmates. But Caesar actually wanted to be a musician and to that end studied diligently at Juilliard. He paid for his education by working in various Catskills resorts as a saxophone player, dancer, and comedian. While serving in WWII, Caesar was engaged to perform in a touring musical revue staged by Coast Guard personnel called Tars and Spars. When the show was transformed into a motion picture by Columbia Pictures, Caesar went along for the ride, performing his classic war film monologue intact before the cameras. This led to a brief Columbia contract, which came to an end with Caesar's three-minute cameo appearance in The Guilt of Janet Ames (1947). While appearing in the Broadway revue Make Mine Manhattan in 1949, he was hired to co-star with Imogene Coca in a weekly TV variety series, The Admiral Broadway Revue. This in turn led to Your Show of Shows, one of the true landmarks of television's Golden Age. For five inspired seasons, Caesar and his cohorts Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris kept America laughing with an unending stream of brilliant monologues, movie parodies, and various sundry other sketches. Throughout the '50s and early '60s Caesar continued to star on TV in several Show of Shows spinoffs, and in 1963 returned to Broadway in the musical comedy Little Me, playing no fewer than eight roles within the play's two-hour running time. During this period he also returned to films, first as a member of the all-star ensemble in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963), then as star of The Busy Body (1967) and The Spirit is Willing (1968). Unfortunately, the pressures of show business, combined with an overabundance of personal problems, led to a dangerous dependency upon alcohol and prescription drugs. So far gone was Caesar during the 1960s and 1970s that, according to his 1982 autobiography Where Have I Been?, there were times that he'd wander on-stage or before the cameras with no idea where he was or what he was saying. He hit rock bottom in 1978, suffering a total nervous breakdown while appearing in a Toronto dinner theater production of The Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Slowly and painfully, Caesar overcame his addictions and a multitude of psychological difficulties and made a near-complete recovery. Modern audiences, to whom Your Show of Shows is but a dim and distant memory, remember Sid Caesar best for his supporting appearances in such films as Silent Movie (1976) (directed by Caesar's onetime gag writer Mel Brooks), Fire Sale (1978), Grease (1982), and National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation (1997). Caesar died in 2014 at age 91.

Trivia: Louis (pronounced Louie) Nye was an American comic actor equally at home in theatre, movies or television. His basic characterization as a somewhat fey country-club bon vivant was established when he was a regular on the various '50s TV programs starring Steve Allen. Nye's chipper "Hi, ho, Steverino" became a national catchphrase, and his ability to reduce Allen to helpless giggles with in-joke adlibs remains among the treasured memories of TV's golden age. At the height of his popularity, Nye recorded a few comedy LPs, in which he essayed a variety of characterizations (he was just as persuasive at playing tough hoodlums and peppery senior citizens as he was portraying effeminate swingers). Movies seldom utilized Nye for more than a few minutes at a time, reasoning perhaps that a little of him went a long way; still, he had some prime vignettes in The Facts of Life (1960), The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961), and especially Good Neighbor Sam (1963), in which he played a gadget-laden private eye. Outside of his extensive work with Steve Allen, Nye had regular TV stints on The Ann Sothern Show (1958-61) as dentist Delbert Gray; on Happy Days (1970), not the famous Fonzie-ized sitcom but a summer variety series spoofing the '30s; and on Needles and Pins (1973), as the intrusive brother-in-law of series star Norman Fell. In 1985, Louis Nye popped up as The Carpenter (as in "The Walrus and...") in the all-star TV movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.