He has a birth certificate from the land of Og, but he can’t carry it around because the certificate is inscribed on a boulder. He grew up before the nation-state, but he grew up singing a national anthem that ran, in its entirety, “Let ’em all go to hell — except Cave 76!” He has over 42,000 children, but not one comes to visit him.
He knew the great and the near-great, including Robin Hood, a lovely man who ran around a forest stealing from everybody and keeping everything. It was Robin’s assistant, Marty the Press Agent, who devised the spin that Robin robbed from the rich and gave to the poor; and since Robin gave you such a clop on the head when he stole from you, you couldn’t remember what had happened anyway. And speaking of Medieval England, it was only when King Arthur ate with his family that the round table was round; when the knights came over, they had to put in the leaves. It should have been “King Arthur and the Oval Table.”
He dated Joan of Arc, but the relationship didn’t go anywhere, and he felt just terrible when she was burned at the stake. He lived next door to Paul Revere, who he insists was an anti-Semite bastard. Why? Because Revere rode around shouting, “They’re coming, they’re coming, the Yiddish are coming!” Upon being told that Revere said “the British,” not “the Yiddish,” he promises to drop Revere’s wife an apologetic note.
He knows about the origins of customs and of words. All words, he says, are onomatopoetic, even the word “shower.” How so? Well, when the water starts, it goes “shh” but then you add the hot water, and you say “ow!” so together you get “shower.” (And what about the word “nose”? “What are you gonna blow, your eyes?” he says.)
Of all the inventions and wonders in world history, from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus to the polio vaccine, he has two favorites: Saran Wrap and Planet Hollywood. Saran Wrap amazes him because you can take three olives and make a little Saran Wrap, or you can take ten sandwiches and make a big Saran Wrap. How could he prefer Saran Wrap to a life-saving device like the heart- lung machine? “That was a good thing,” he allows.
And Planet Hollywood? “Oh, what they’re doing there!” he says. “Every wall is a movie! And the motorcycle from Easy Rider? In the window!” How could he possibly compare Planet Hollywood to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Well, are Bruce and Demi hanging around the Hanging Gardens? No, they’re hanging around Planet Hollywood.
He has had a lifelong love affair with show business. He invested in one Shakespeare play called Queen Alexandra and Murray, which closed out of town (in Egypt). He quotes one passage from memory:
QUEEN ALEXANDRA: What ho, Murray? What could it have been that I have seen? Is it not in our marrow? Are we not one in ourselves?
MURRAY: What are you hollering? You’ll wake up the whole castle.
He is the 2,000 Year Old Man, the comic character created by Mel Brooks on the spur of the moment in 1950 and featured in three legendary recordings released in the early 1960s. A fourth came out in 1973, and last month marks the unexpected release of a new CD featuring Brooks and his straight man, Carl Reiner, called The 2,000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000. (There’s also a book of the same name that is largely a transcription of the new recording.)
The 2,000 Year Old Man is now 2,037, but he still has the same Yiddish accent, and the same jaunty perspective. He has agreed to sit with Carl Reiner once again because he’s on a book tour; among his works, we learn, is a book about how to respond when somebody in a bar says to you menacingly, ” What are you looking at?” The answer is, “I’m looking at you, s–head,” because when you say that, the other guy thinks you’re crazier than he is and he leaves you alone.
As the use of profanity shows, he has changed some in the 24 years since we last visited with him. Where once he nearly had a heart attack when Reiner used the word “masturbation” — “Hey, what’s the matter with you? Teenagers are gonna hear this. You don’t have to use that word! Be oblique! Be smart!” – – this time the 2,000 Year Old Man even confesses to a homosexual experience. He tells Reiner he was married once to a great kisser named Bernice Zolotow, but the marriage lasted only three days because he discovered on the wedding night that Bernice was actually . . . Bernie. (And, we learn not on the CD but in the book, when Bernie got entirely naked, it turned out he wasn’t even Jewish.)
But he still has some of the same old stories to tell– about his upbringing (he learned to read from a book in ancient Hebrew called Zechem Mochem Ruchem, which translates as “See Moses Run”) and about ancient medicine (there was a doctor named Poultice who made you forget you had a pain in your chest by dropping a rock on your foot, and made you forget the pain in your foot by sticking a twig in your eye).
The 2,000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 is pretty good — nowhere near as good as the earlier 2,000 Year Old Man material, it’s true, but then again, what is? The original routines constitute one of the high points of American humor in this century. You can get them in a four-CD set on Rhino Records. Get them. Don’t be a shmuck.
John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD and the incoming editor of the New York Post’s editorial pages.
