Way back in 1968, 20-year-old Rob Reiner started his first job in television, on a show that was to lay the foundations for Saturday Night Live. Fresh from UCLA Film School’s theater program, Reiner went straight into writing for episodes of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, at the height of the American countercultural movement.
Following the tragic death of Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer, it’s worth reflecting on how his career in Hollywood began, with scripts that made people laugh while challenging the status quo. These features would become hallmarks of his later work, on both the big and the small screen.
It’s no coincidence Reiner’s writing partner on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour would go down in history as SNL’s most celebrated guest host of all time. His work with Steve Martin prefigured the kind of zany humor and sharp-edged political satire that would soon come to define Saturday Night Live.
The Smothers Brothers also showcased glimpses of the comedy we see in some of Rob Reiner’s best movies, from This Is Spinal Tap to When Harry Met Sally… It was the gig that demonstrated to industry insiders that he was more than just Carl Reiner’s son. He had immense comedic talent of his own.
Rob Reiner’s First Job In TV Was Writing For The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
Prior to his big break at the end of the 1960s, Reiner’s family background meant that he served as an extra or bit-part player in various CBS TV shows, while his father oversaw The Dick Van Dyke Show. By the end of his teens, he was training to become an actor. Yet, it was as a comedy writer that he first made a name for himself.
Reiner was hired for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour at almost exactly the same time as a 21-year-old Steve Martin. The two quickly struck up a writing partnership, and set the tone for sketch on primetime American television for the next half-century. It was this partnership that led Martin to make the movies with Carl Reiner that launched him as a global comedy superstar.
Reiner & Steve Martin’s Writing On The Show Laid The Blueprint For SNL
Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels would be the first to admit that The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was his biggest influence on American television in the era immediately prior to his own sketch show’s launch. Michaels told Rolling Stone in 1979:
“The Smothers Brothers broke through, I thought, to some degree… I was very envious of the people who worked on the Smothers Brothers’ show because they were people of my generation who were working in television.”
He even got one of SNL’s first cast members from the Smothers Brothers. Chevy Chase was a writer for their Comedy Hour alongside Rob Reiner and Steve Martin. More than its personnel, though, this late-’60s variety show was the prototype for the style and register of comedy that Saturday Night Live would normalize for the American public in the mid-1970s.
The Smother Brothers unapologetically embraced the counterculture, and punched upwards at major politicians and establishment figures, in ways that had never been done before on American network television. Rob Reiner was one of the main wellsprings of this pioneering brand of humor.
Saturday Night Live’s 3rd Episode Was Hosted By Rob Reiner
By the time Saturday Night Live launched in 1975, Rob Reiner was at the height of his career as a sitcom actor, playing Archie Bunker’s son-in-law Mike “Meathead” Stivic in All in the Family. Yet, he was a natural choice to host one of the legendary sketch show’s first episodes, as one of the comedy writers who inspired it.
Reiner hosted the third episode in SNL history on October 25, 1975. In addition to hosting duties, he starred in a sketch with his then-wife, Happy Days actor Penny Marshall. In it, he and John Belushi famously broke the fourth wall to take the sting out of the show’s recurring visual gag about bees.
It was the only time that Rob Reiner appeared on Saturday Night Live, but it will forever owe him a debt of gratitude for the formative influence he had on its development. In the 1980s, performances by SNL cast members in some of Reiner’s greatest comedy movies would complete the cyclical relationship between the show and this Hollywood legend.
