Sid Caesar, 1922–2014

In the 1950s, Sid Caesar was the undisputed champion of television comedy. Albert Einstein adored his routines. Alfred Hitchcock praised him as the greatest performer since Charlie Chaplin. And so many Americans stayed in to watch his Saturday-night extravaganza, Your Show of Shows, that several Broadway producers asked NBC to switch the live program to the middle of the week because it was killing their weekend business. The comedy-variety show was unlike anything else on the air. At the time, TV was dominated by vaudeville and radio veterans who specialized in broad slapstick and silly one-liners. But Caesar offered a more intimate kind of humor, based on absurd characters and situations. “If you want to find the urtexts of The Producers and Blazing Saddles, of Sleeper and Annie Hall,” wrote former New York Times theater critic Frank Rich, “check out the old kinescopes of Sid Caesar.”

Caesar was born in Yonkers, N.Y., where his Polish-born father ran a 24-hour diner. By the time he was in elementary school, he’d learned to mimic the chatter of the Russian, French, and Spanish immigrants who ate at the restaurant. When he showed off his foreign double talk—gibberish that sounded like the real thing—“to the immigrant groups seated at various tables, he had the whole room breaking up,” said the Los Angeles Times. Caesar liked the laughs, but didn’t plan on becoming a professional comic. A talented saxophone player, he moved to New York after graduating from high school to pursue a career in music. He was performing with a World War II entertainment troupe “when producer Max Liebman heard him cracking up the band and moved him to an onstage comedy spot,” said USA Today. After the war, Liebman took Caesar to Broadway and in 1950 made him the star of TV’s Your Show of Shows.

The show became the proving ground for a new generation of comedy talent. Caesar’s writers included future directors Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and playwright Neil Simon, as well as Carl Reiner, who went on to create the sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show. The team wrote parodies of Hollywood blockbusters and came up with sketches that poked fun at married life. They also crafted Caesar’s famously warped characters, including the pretentious jazz saxophonist Progress Hornsby; Somerset Winterset, a nonsensical storyteller modeled on Somerset Maugham; and the Professor, a German-accented know-it-all who in fact knows nothing. “With a rubbery face and the body of a linebacker, Caesar could get laughs without saying a word,” said The New York Times. In one memorable sketch, Caesar and his co-stars silently played the figures on a town clock that become increasingly frantic as each hour strikes.

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The “energy that existed inside the walls of the writers’ room as we created was palpable,” said Caesar. “It was a combination of euphoria and terror.” Caesar, who turned to alcohol and pills to help him cope with the pressures of creating a weekly 90-minute show, was often the cause of that terror. “He reputedly once dangled Brooks out a window,” said The Wall Street Journal, “and another time punched a horse after it threw his wife”—an incident Brooks echoed in Blazing Saddles.

By the late 1950s, “viewers’ tastes had changed,” and Caesar’s show was taken off the air, said The Guardian (U.K.). “I had no experience in failure,” he said. “And then, when failure comes, oh, boy, it comes in lumps.” He spent much of the next two decades at home in a fog of alcohol, pills, and self-loathing. After blacking out during a 1978 theater performance of Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers, he decided to get clean, and his return to sobriety ushered in a career revival. He appeared in Broadway productions, hosted TV’s Saturday Night Live, played a caveman in Brooks’s 1981 film History of the World: Part I, and even starred as Frosch, the drunken jailer, in a 1987 production of Die Fledermaus at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. After experiencing success and failure, he said he finally understood what was important in the world. “Everybody wants to have a goal,” he explained in 1987. “Then you get to that goal, and then you gotta get to another goal. But in between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived—and if you don’t, you’re a fool.”