Jerry Stiller’s comedy with Anne Meara deserves to be remembered just as much as Frank Costanza

Jerry Stiller died this week and mourners are celebrating the comedian’s life by bellowing mispronunciations of “Del Boca Vista” in their homes. But, as much fun as it is to revisit Stiller’s role as the irascible Frank Costanza, there’s another era of his career that also deserves a revisitation.

Stiller’s career began way back in the ‘50s when he and his wife, Anne Meara—who died in 2015—mined comedy from their mismatched backgrounds in clubs around the country. The tall Irish-American Catholic and the short Eastern European Jew found ample success as a comedic duo, going on to appear in a number of ‘60s and ‘70s variety shows where they canoodled, bickered, and imploded. Between 1963 and 1971, they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show more than 30 times.

While some of their appearances have inevitably been lost to time, others have been preserved. Their combustive chemistry and dovetailing punchlines are timeless, but the content was, too. In some cases, like the below clip in which the duo (accurately) predict the awkwardness and inherent distrust bred by online dating, they were downright prescient.

Their insight into relationship dynamics is also on display in this Ed Sullivan clip from 1964, in which a man tries to bypass his girlfriend’s desire to break up by escalating their relationship in the opposite direction.