Having recently written about the new Mel Brooks documentary, it’s fitting to now be reviewing a book on Sid Caesar. As Brooks has repeatedly noted throughout his lengthy career, “No Sid Caesar, No Mel Brooks” (or Carl Reiner, Lenny Bruce, Carol Burnett, Richard Pryor, Conan O’Brien, and countless others who either worked for, or were massively influenced by Caesar).
In When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy, biographer David Margolick (The Promise And The Dream) takes a deep dive into the life of Caesar, an early television superstar beloved by viewers, incredibly successful for nearly a decade (earning more per episode of Your Show Of Shows – $25,000 per week in the 1950s – than the head of the network) and who helped launch many comedians, actors and writers.
As an artist, he is far less known and lauded than Brooks, Reiner and other television pioneers. To the people who worked alongside him and spent innumerable hours with him, Caesar was a cipher. Forty-three years after Caesar’s memoir, and with people only able to see clips and a handful of episodes of Your Show Of Shows and Caesar’s Hour via YouTube, Margolick brings his journalist eye to this thoroughly researched, fast-paced portrait. It will give new generations the opportunity to discover Caesar’s original, distinctive comedy genius, and how he and his murder’s row of a writer’s room and their neurotic, rage-fueled, antic world views has shaped television, theatre and movies for the last 70 years.
There’s a certain Freudian symmetry to Caesar’s journey from neglected, lonely son of Eastern European immigrants who ran an eatery, to performer. Raised in Yonkers, NY, Caesar was 10 and 15 years younger, respectively, than his brothers, who worked in the family business. Like their parents (his mother, the kinder of two, sang to him in Yiddish), his brothers were either working and not around, taking their resentments out on him or abusive. It’s a small wonder then that Caesar didn’t talk until he was three and rarely spoke up anyway, landing him in a class for “slow” students and earning the nickname “dopey” by the other kids. Having learned in his house that it was better to keep quiet – “I didn’t know what would happen if I let loose” – he nursed a growing knot of isolation and anger, and instead studied people, like the many international cafe customers and listened to their accents.
Caesar found and honed his craft while working at one of the Jewish resorts in New York, Vacationland, though he’d initially gone there as a musician, having taking up the tenor sax after one was left by a boarder in the rooming house his parents also ran. Caesar watched the comedians and started doing routines, earning extra money and realizing he might be able to make something of his creative pursuits. During World War II, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and started putting shows on at the base in Brooklyn. He met the “Ziegfeld Of The Poconos”, Max Liebman, who brought him to the small screen in 1949 and transformed him into a television phenom.
Imogene Coca and Caesar in Your Show of Shows (1952). Photo: WikiMedia
Doing Your Show Of Shows every week, 100% live, he was Mr. Saturday Night for East Coast audiences (the people who initially were the only ones able to afford television sets) who didn’t go out to the theatre or movies, instead staying in to see the high energy routines of Caesar and the incomparable Company. The show was suffused with Jewishness – by virtue of who was in the writers’ room and on stage – without being explicitly so, at a time when the Red Scare was ruining the careers of innocent people, and there were still Jewish quotas at universities, exclusions at clubs, and talk of concentration camps and extermination campaigns actively discouraged and suppressed. And in fact when the show expanded to a national audience, viewers in Middle America wrote in with coded or open anti-Semitic complaints, saying he came off as superior, and wanted him off the air.
Despite his masterful ability to make people laugh, the armor Caesar had to put up as a kid didn’t come down for the people who he spent all his time with. His long-time staff of writers like playwright Neil Simon described him as “completely inarticulate”, or as having a “zero” for a personality, according to M*A*S*H co-creator Larry Gelbart). Writer and on-screen partner Imogene Coco (Caesar and Coco were wildly popular together) recalled traveling by train with Caesar and not a word passed between them over eight hours. Though he never got further than high school, audiences and his colleagues saw the innate curiosity, intelligence and sophisticated, skilled improvisational talents he delivered through the screen. Using the accents he’d heard as a boy, Caesar became famous for his foreign language double speak, which was largely gibberish, with a few actual words, including Yiddish, thrown in. Of this gift, Brooks said “Sid was a great mimic, but he didn’t do Humphrey Bogart. He simply mimicked humanity” and had his writers pen “mini-plays about mankind.”
But before the 50s were over, Caesar’s weekly appearances in peoples’ living rooms were also done. His follow up, Caesar’s Hour, was canceled when the less urban audiences, turned to the coma inducements of Laurence Welk and his tiny bubbles instead. Caesar worked on Broadway, television and movies, but was derailed by alcohol, pills, and bitterness for years, loathing SNL, for instance, for what he considered theft of his work. And while he was off the scene, fans and those who might have wanted to watch YSOS, weren’t able to. Unlike The Honeymooners, which lasted a single season but has been running in perpetuity almost since it went off the air, you couldn’t come home from school and turn on Your Show Of Shows in the afternoon alongside Leave It To Beaver and The Brady Bunch. So far the 21st Century really hasn’t changed that much: There aren’t any boxed sets of episodes and you won’t see either program on one of the plethora of nostalgia channels.
That lack of access and the fact that most people outside of comedy circles are not really familiar with what he did for the form, is simply criminal. Caesar wasn’t precious about it: he wanted the shows to be seen and in the 90s, packaged some episodes together. Those efforts didn’t generate the new interest they should have. Reading Margolick’s illuminating and engrossing book prompted me to go down a rabbit hole and it will get others to do the same, fulfilling at least part of Margolick’s purpose in writing the biography. It was a lot of fun seeing Caesar, Reiner and Brooks on Larry King and to watch sketches, like the legendary “This Is Your Story”, where Caesar’s gifts for physical comedy, pantomime and mimicry are on full display. I think When Caesar Was King will lead to a justly deserved Caesaraissance.