The Godfather of American Comedy
Somewhere in the hills above Malibu, drenched in California sunshine and sitting side by side in a used white Volkswagen bug, two teenage boys realized they were lost. They’d been looping their way along an open road, past shady groves and canyons, and in doing so they’d gotten turned around. This was the early 1960s, and the boy driving the car was Albert Einstein—yes, this really was his given name, years before he changed it to Albert Brooks. Riding shotgun was his best friend and classmate from Beverly Hills High School, Rob Reiner.
Brooks had inherited the car from one of his older brothers, and he’d made it his own by removing the handle of the stick shift and replacing it with a smooth brass doorknob. After several failed attempts to find the Pacific Coast Highway, which would take them home, Brooks and Reiner came upon a long fence surrounding a field where a single cow was grazing. Albert “stopped the car and he leaned out the window and he said, ‘Excuse me, sir! Sir?’ and the cow just looked up,” Reiner told me. “And he said, ‘How do you get back to the PCH?’ And the cow just did a little flick of his head, like he was flicking a fly away, and went back to eating.” Without missing a beat, Albert called out, “Thank you!” and confidently zoomed away. “I said, ‘Albert, you just took directions from a cow!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, but he lives around here. He knows the area.’ ”
Reiner is telling me this story, dissolving into laughter as he does, to make two points. The first point is that Albert Brooks has impeccable comic timing, a quality that, among other talents, has made him a hero to multiple generations of comedians, actors, and directors who are themselves legends. The second point is that Brooks has always been this way.
Reiner remembers exactly his first impression of Brooks (Wow, this guy is arrogant ) and also his immediate second impression (This arrogant guy is mortified ). They both did high-school theater, and got to talking after their first class together. Brooks began to casually brag about the famous people he had met—they were Beverly Hills kids, after all. “He comes up to me, and in his cocky kind of way he says, ‘I know Carl Reiner,’ ” Rob Reiner told me. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I know him too. He’s my father.’ Oh my God, he was so embarrassed.” They instantly became friends, and have been close ever since—even living together for a stretch. One acquaintance described them to me as more like twins than brothers.
[Read: Adrienne LaFrance interviews Albert Brooks]
But although Brooks and Reiner pursued careers in the same industry, and both found great success, they didn’t choose the same path—personally or professionally. Brooks’s decisions over the years occasionally confounded his oldest friend, and worried him. Looking back now, however, something has become startlingly clear. If it is the case that by high school a person is already on some fundamental level the person they are destined to become—and Reiner believes this to be “totally true” of Brooks—then Brooks was fated to be not just the godfather of American comedy but also a man who would prove that humor in the face of catastrophe can sometimes save your life.
One thing you notice if you spend any amount of time with Brooks is that his manner of speaking—in musical swells that rise and fall—is not just something that his characters do, but something that he does. Think of Brooks in Broadcast News, the pitch of his voice going higher for emphasis as his character tries to persuade the woman he’s crazy about not to go out with another man: “I’ve never seen you like this with ANYbody. And so DON’T get me wrong when I tell you that TOM, while being a very NICE guy, is”—here he shifts into a whisper-shout—“THE DEVIL.” Off camera, this way of speaking, depending on the topic at hand, comes off as relieved, annoyed, insistent, or pleading. When you agree with him, he will often respond, “This is what I’m SAYing.” And when he disagrees with you, it’s “no NO,” always no twice, always with the emphasis on the second no.
The director and co-creator James L. Brooks (no relation) spent part of this past winter directing Albert in the forthcoming , a political comedy set in the recent past. James told me that he knew he had to cast Albert based on just two words in the script: . “Which to me is very Albert,” James said. “It’s just the most Albert line.” The scene involves a classically Brooksian mode of imploring condescension—a quality deployed perfectly, for example, in the opening scene of , when Brooks’s character is dumping his girlfriend: “You’ve heard of a no-win situation, haven’t you? … Vietnam? ”
