2000 Years in the National Recording Registry

The Library of Congress has just announced this year's twenty-five new additions to the National Recording Registry, and the list includes a Comedy Palace favorite, the seminal 1961 album 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.

The Registry now contains 276 recordings, thirteen of which belong to the category of comedy. Many of these are early artifacts from the dawn of recorded sound, featuring legendary vaudeville pioneers like Cal Stewart, Nat M. Wills, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, and the team of Bert Williams and George Walker. Comedy's golden age is represented by the 1938 Kate Smith Radio Hour recording of Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First," a 1942 Command Performance with Bob Hope, a 1945 Fred Allen Show, and the 1948 Jack Benny Radio Program featuring the immortal "Your money or your life" bit (which was featured here at the Comedy Palace last week). The Registry also includes the first broadcast of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion (1974). Until 2000 Years, there have been only two items in the Registry which could be called "comedy albums": Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953) and The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart (1960).

2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks was the first of the duo's four albums, and it was not devoted entirely to the title character. The first side of the record consisted of the original 2000 Year Old Man recording (which has already been featured here); the second side had five Brooks/Reiner improvisations, pitting different Brooks subjects against Reiner's interviewer character. Although none of their other routines are as brilliantly conceived as the 2000 Year Old Man, they are often just as funny, and sometimes these other characters give the astonishing comic mind of Mel Brooks even more freedom to run.

In "New Technique Psychiatric Society," which takes place at a convention of shrinks, Reiner calls upon Brooks to embody not one but three fully-realized characters. As in the 2000 Year Old Man routines, there are two remarkable acts of comic genius on display: Brooks' flair for spontaneous comedy is truly dazzling, and so is Reiner's ability to write the act as he goes along, asking questions which he knows will force Brooks over the edge. "I'd pick a character from him to play," Reiner later explained. "I never told him what it was going to be, but I always tried for something that would force him to go into panic, because a brilliant mind in panic is a wonderful thing to see."

NEW TECHNIQUE PSYCHIATRIC SOCIETY


This routine, "The Third Best Poet," is from their second album, 2000 and One Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. This time, Reiner casts Brooks as the third best poet in America (after Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg). Most comedians would have used the premise as an opportunity to concoct some improvisational, satirical poetry. Brooks does a little bit of that, but as always, it's his sense of character, and his ability to score while going to deranged extremes, that carry the comedy. His invented vocabulary is funny, but the adamant manner in which he explains it is hilarious.

THE THIRD BEST POET

Other recordings inducted into the National Registry this year include violin performances (1917-1924) by the young Jascha Heifetz, the Andrews Sisters' "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" (1938), Dylan Thomas' recording of "A Child's Christmas in Wales" (1952), the Who's first album The Who Sings My Generation (1966), and the 1946 speech in which Winston Churchill coined the phrase "iron curtain."

The entire list of recordings in the Registry can be found here.