‘New Girl’ Stars Remember Rob Reiner in Story About Failed ‘All in the Family’ Joke (VIDEO)

New Girl‘s stars Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone are remembering Rob Reiner in a recently resurfaced clip from their rewatch podcast The Mess Around.

In the clip from one of their episodes, Morris remembers cracking an All in the Family joke while in character as Winston, quickly discovering that Reiner, who played in the Norman Lear comedy in the ’70s, was unfazed by his clever reference. “That’s when I got that courage to call him Meathead in a scene,” Morris remembered. “And it didn’t go the way I thought.”

“Even his character on All in the Family was a very liberal kind of… he would protest things on the show. And his character would contrast with his [father-in-law’s] point of view,” Morris pointed out, recalling Reiner’s role in the former comedy and how he earned the nickname “Meathead” in his role as Mike.

As fans of New Girl know, Reiner played Bob, the father to Zooey Deschanel‘s Jess, while Morris played her roommate Winston, and Simone’s Cece was her best friend. While Morris carried on the clip from the podcast, he recounted one of his first days working with Reiner on Fox’s former series.

 

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“It was a moment we had a little bit together. I was eating cake or something like that. And he said, he’s like, ‘You really think you should be eating that with your body?’ And I get up, and I throw the fork down,” Morris described the moment from Season 2’s episode, “Winston’s Birthday.”

“I remember during that time, I said, ‘I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna call him a Meathead in response. I just have to do it.’ And here I was thinking like, this is about to be something that he has never heard before,” Morris continued, to which Simone laughed. “I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, ya Meathead,’ and he didn’t blink… In fact, when they called cut, he goes, ‘Let me ask you, do you think that’s the first time I’ve heard that?'”

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While Morris remembered saying he knew he wasn’t the first to make such a joke, it was his first and only chance to do it to Reiner, who, according to Morris, said, “That’s fair.”

The awkward joke, which didn’t ultimately make the cut, led to a little callout of Morris by one of his costars as he remembered, “I want to say Jake — I don’t know who was there, but somebody said, ‘pile of ashes,’ they called me, like I got burned.”

See the full segment in which Morris shares the hilarious tale above, and let us know your favorite Rob Reiner moment from New Girl in the comments section.

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