Dick Van Dyke Names His Favorite Episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show

Dick Van Dyke knew he wanted to make people laugh from a young age.

Van Dyke, 99, and his wife Arlene took part in a Q&A about his life during the Dick & Arlene Van Dyke Present Vandy Camp event at Aviator Nation Dreamland in Malibu, Calif., last month. 

Addressing the crowd, the actor said he was “doing a Christmas pageant at church and I was the baby Jesus. And I don’t know what I did, but I got laughs. I did something funny,” he recalled.

“And I said, ‘I like this.’ And I was in all the plays in high school of course and I was the class clown, as you would imagine, but making people laugh was a lot of fun. It is.”

Though the actor has made fans laugh in a whole host of films and series through the years, his eponymous Dick Van Dyke Show of the 1960s stands out as a comedic highlight. And it’s two episodes in particular that are memorable to the star.

“All of my favorite shows were the very shows we had to fight the network for,” he said, recalling moments execs would say “you can’t do that.”

Season 2, episode 20, “It May Look Like a Walnut,” was one. “That was my favorite,” he admitted. “But we all got a little tied up. We all ate way too many walnuts.”

In the episode, Van Dyke’s Rob Petrie watches a scary TV show before bed. He and wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) wake up the next morning, and certain parts of the show have seemingly become real — including an abundance of walnuts in their home.

However, Van Dyke added, every episode “was fun. It was such a great group to work with. We just looked forward to coming to work every day. There wasn’t a star in the bunch — everybody just enjoyed.”

The live studio audience made a difference, too.

“The shows that do comedy without an audience, I don’t understand those people,” Van Dyke said. “How do you do it? I need an audience. And we had a great audience every week to play to.”

He recalled one particular episode, the season 3 premiere “That’s My Boy??”, that had the audience in stitches.

“We fought the network tooth and nail,” he said. “They just didn’t want us to do it.”

The plot centered on Van Dyke’s Rob retelling the story of the days he and Laura brought their son Ritchie (eventually played by Larry Matthews) home from the hospital. Convinced the hospital had swapped babies with a neighboring set of new parents, the Peters family, the moms and dads met — only to discover the Peterses were Black, a rarity in the show’s very White world.

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“When the audience saw that couple walking in the door,” Van Dyke recalled, “they started to laugh and we had to cut the camera and just sit there. It was the longest laugh I have ever experienced in my life — and the network didn’t like it,” he added.

But for Van Dyke, “It was just great,” he said. “Boy that was fun.”

According to a 2013 lookback of the episode in the New York Times, actor Greg Morris, who played Mr. Peters, started laughing, too. (Mimi Dillard played Mrs. Peters.)

And despite the network reservations, series creator Carl Reiner was thrilled.

“I was so happy with this script I couldn’t wait to get it on,” he told the Times. “I knew it was something very, very special.”