Carol Arthur was an American actress and wife of Dom DeLuise (1933-2009). She played bit parts in the films of Mel Brooks. I think I was 12 years old when I insisted on seeing Brooks’s Silent Movie (1976).

Silent Movie. Smart slapstick. A film about film. What’s not to love?

In that film she played an “extremely pregnant woman”. Was it perhaps she who completely tilted Brooks’ sports car nose in the air due to a heavy weight in the back seat? I cannot remember.

Later I saw Brooks Blazing Saddles (1974), the Western parody with the many and loud farts around the campfire. Beans and cowboys, you know how that works out.

In Blazing Saddles, Carol plays a schoolteacher who first speaks very shyly at a city meeting, then is told that she speaks too quietly, and then she announces in a loud and not at all shy voice to the governor that he is the “leading asshole of the state”.

Carl Reiner was an American comedian, actor, director, screenwriter, and publisher.

I have fond memories of the highly enjoyable films he directed starring Steve Martin in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I think of The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and The Man with Two Brains (1983).