Episode 390- When Caesar Was King

Caesar reinvented American comedy. David, Welcome to Forgotten Hollywood.

So he was really the first true television comic and a man of astonishing gifts and diverse talents who attracted really the best comedy writers of his generation to work with him and to help him shape his famous programs, most notably Your Show of Shows, which a lot of people will have heard of there ran from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty four, and then Caesar's Hour which ran from nineteen fifty four to nineteen fifty seven, and then followed by a couple of years when he was on

and off TV. And in that in that time, he had, you know, his famous writers room that was depicted in My in the movie My Favorite Year and the Broadway play Laughter on the twenty third Floor. And his writers included not all at the same time, but mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Woody Allen. I mean, he had this incredible lineup of writers. And so when you talk about Sid Caesar, you talk about his own comedy, which

was very unusual and brilliant in many different ways. And then you talk about all of the comedy that his disciples went on to write, and and you know, it's absolutely everywhere. It's on TV, it's in the movies. It's me, you know, mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles. It's TV with the Dick Van Dyke Show and and all of its progeny Saturday Night Live, It's Broadway with the shows of Neil Simon. You know, it's disciples like Johnny Carson and

Carol Burnett and Billy Crystal and Conan O'Brien. All of them have talked about the influence that Sid Caesar had on them. So he was really he was sort of the prime mover in American comedy in the nineteen fifties and then beyond, and even as he faded, and the story about his fall is really as dramatic as his rise. Even after he faded from the scene, you know, his disciples were out creating, you know, lavish comedy and all of these different realms. So his fingerprints are everywhere.

about not you know, comedy, the show about nothing. In a way, Caesar was a student of human nature and human nature is a series of nothings in a way. I mean, you can you can poke fun at anything having to do with human beings. And this was the kind of thing that Sid Caesar did in a variety of ways on his shows. And so in a way, I think the Seinfeld has a debt to Caesar. And then you know, all these different sitcoms, the Andy Griffith Show, I mean all of them, I think they were all

done by Caesar alum or influenced by Caesar himself. So he's an unusual character. He's an interesting character from a biographer's standpoint, because there you have the two great prongs of storytelling you have the story of his rise, which, as I say, was dramatic, meteoric, and then you have the story of his fall, which was also very dramatic and very quick actually, And so it's not a My book is not a conventional biography. It's malaportioned in a way.

Most of it has to do with his early life, because arguably he was over the hill by the time he was forty, and you know, the last fifty or sixty years of his life. I deal within a couple of chapters. I mean, they're also they're dramatic, and they're poignant, but one can get through them a bit. You know, one can get through them quickly because there's less to write per year at that part, you know, over that period of his life.

myself a break and write about a comedy figure. And I was intrigued by Sid Caesar because I had gone to a testimonial dinner for him in the year two thousand where mel Brooks was the featured speaker, And there were a lot of intriguing things that night, I mean, but the most intriguing thing was here was this kind of almost wreck of a guy, I mean, very fragile looking, you know, already already very aged, almost prematurely aged, and

dysfunctional in a way, fragile, halting, and yet everybody was saying such wonderful things about him, including mel Brooks. I mean, mel you could see was profoundly moved to be in Sid Caesar's presence again. And that may have been one of the nights where mel Brooks said, if you didn't say it explicitly, he said it effectively that he said, you know, mel Brooks was fond of saying no, Sid Caesar,

no mel Brooks. That Sid was the one who discovered mel Brooks and developed him and gave him a chance and tolerated him because mel was a high maintenance character and hard to work with and one had one had to put up with a lot to have him on board.

The producer, Sid, Caesar's producer on your show of show is a guy named Max Leidman, wanted only to get rid of mel Brooks because he was just such an annoyance, you know, sort of hectoring them and you know, just you know, always badgering them and trying to get his stuff in and driving everybody crazy with his high energy and his pushiness. And Sid protected him, even paid him out of his own pocket and kept him around because he made Sid laugh and Sid didn't laugh very easily.

Sid was a complicated guy, and they developed this very kind of love hate sato masochistic relationship over the next ten years. And ever since then, Mel has been talking about Sid and the debt that he the debt that he owes to Sid. One of really one of my rewarding interviews was with Mel, and you know, Mel just couldn't stop talking about Sid's rise and fall and the impact that Sid had had on him. And Mel has spent you know, the last fifty years thanking Sid Caesar

and acknowledging how important Sid was in his life. So anyway, I went to this testimonial and it raised the question everybody was thanking Sid and honoring him, and he was a shell of a man, And you know, the two questions were obvious. I mean, why are they all in such awe of him? And what was it that he did? And then what happened to him? Right? And so that I think kind of wetted my appetite for doing a book.

And when the opportunity arose several years later and the editor of the book series asked me which figure I wanted to write about, I suggested Sid Caesar. And I think, you know, I made a lot of mistakes, but I think this was a good decision because his story needed to be written. And I think that people like Mel and Woody Allen when I interviewed him, and all all of these people, Conan O'Brien, as I mentioned, Billy Crystal, lots of younger comics, they all knew that Sid was

in the pantheon. Sid was at the top of Mount Olympus, and they were eager to talk about him because they wanted to restore him to his rightful place. And I think that my book does that. My book is not a hagiography. Sid was a difficult guy and kind of hard to know and in some ways hard to like. But you know, I think that, you know, I've honored him by describing just how important he was.

it was the McCarthy era. It was an era when everybody was very scared to do anything topical political in any way, and so they had to tread very carefully in that respect. It was also an era where American anti Semitism, which had you know, subsided some during the war and after the Holocaust was still ubiquitous, and you know, Sid show was of buy and in some ways for Jews at the beginning, when the television audience was very urban and Eastern, and they were very conscious of downplaying

their Jewishness. They didn't want to. You know, the word jew was never uttered on any Sid Caesar show. Yiddish words were very scarce. So you have to look for other other elements of their comedy that are that that reflected Jewish sensibility, you know, the certain sense of irony and a sense of detachment and a sympathy for the underdog, and skepticism of authority. And there are lots of them. But and one of them, and one of the most

blatant and conspicuous ones is food. They're always eating, and they're always talking about eating, and all there are lots of great Caesar sketches that revolve around eating and uh and so that you know, it just it, just it. It became an important It was an important lightmotif in Caesar's comedy and therefore becomes an important theme in my book. You know, the book is filled with anecdotes about food, and it's something that's dear to my heart too. And

I actually I had an interesting conversation. Some of your listeners will remember me, Me Sheridan, who is the restaurant critic for the New York Times where I worked for a long time and instead of an observer of the food scene, and I asked her once about this thing about Jews and food. She was Jewish. I'm Jewish, but I needed somebody to explain it to me. And I said, you know, food is obviously a central part of life

and a central part of every tradition. And you know, all you had to do was look at the Sopranos, which was on then, and you know they're always eating too. And I said, like, what's the difference between the Jews and the Italians when it comes to you know, how are the Jews different, if at all? She said, the Italians are just like the Jews, but without the panic. And I thought that was really a brilliant line, because you know, there's a kind of insecurity around food. In

Caesar's sketches. I have a passage in the book where I describe it. You know, Sid is going to a health food restaurant Imogene Coca, his co star, is bringing him to a health food restaurant and all Sid wants, he's a nineteen fifties guy. All he wants is a steak, you know, a traditional steak, and all of these plants are coming out and you know, all of these you know. It really is a forerunner of the scene where Woody Allen is stricken when he goes to a health food

restaurant with Diane Keaton. You know, here's the same thing twenty years earlier. And so Sid's not getting enough food, or he's not getting the right kind of food, you know, or you know, somebody else is getting more of it, you know, or he's getting sick from it, you know. Anyway, it's just, you know, it's absolutely all over the show. Sid was a great respector of food in his heyday. He always insisted also, I think because he wanted real food,

that real food was used in all the sketches. I mean, they're not faking it. You know, if you watch The Honeymooners, you can see that Alice is stirring a pot with nothing in it, you know, in all the you know, in Sid's stuff, there there's always real food. And maybe because of the tradition of the history of privation and not having enough. There were no food fights on any

Sid Caesar show. They're not the Three Stooges. I mean, the comedy is more elevated than that anyway, but food was too important to throw around.

and the Ricardos came along. And you know, Sid's producer was Jewish his co stars were Jewish Howard Morris and Carl Reiner, Carl Reiner being the second banana on the show. The cover of my book shows Sid and Carl together. Carl is absolutely a crucial part of the Sid Caesar story. And then when Caesar started his own show, as I said, Caesar's Hour in nineteen fifty four, at one point all

seven of his writers were Jewish. But this was, as I say in the book, this was something that neither Philo Semites nor anti Semites talked about, nor the people themselves. It was just sort of a secret, that an open secret that Caesar's Show was a Jewish operation. But it wasn't the kind of thing that anybody proclaimed.

And it was something that they just they felt that they were on thin ice and that they couldn't They felt that they had to soft pedal their jewishness, you know, Carl Reiner said, and you know, Carl, it was interesting coming from him because Carl was you know, very he had He gave the image of being very sort of care free on the air, you know, always in a good mood, never heavy and crucial because he complimented Sid Caesar so well. Caesar had an element of madness to him,

and Carl Reiner was the image of stability. But in one interview Caesar, Carl Reiner said that Caesar we all felt the way that Sid that Sid did as Jews in the nineteen fifties, in the early nineteen fifties, that everything that the TV, the network people were the owners, the network people, the advertisers, you know that the advertisers, the sort of money people in America, the lawyers, they were the owners and we were just the renters. We

we as Jews were just the renters. And so they they were, you know, as brilliant as their comedy was, it was almost never edgy or risky.

another tributary therefore, of the of Caesar's show. You know, he had been a leftist activist, so had Carl Reiner, another of Caesar's writers, had been in the Communist Party. You know, they steered clear of anything political because they were afraid of being red baited. So that was another reason for them, you know, to come up with this kind of brilliant comedy that was not topical. There were no jokes about McCarthy, there were no jokes about Stalin.

There were you know, Eisenhower's name. You know, Eisenhower was president for all eight years of Caesar's reign on television and his name appeared once.

And it ate Sid Caesar alive, and it really accounted for his demise because his brain cells were consumed, you know, he was he became alic and a pill popper, and he was you know, mel Brooks said, you could basically watch him disintegrate, you know, I mean you could see the tensions eat eating away at him. And you know, the other thing that I should just mention briefly was that television was changing. Television was spreading into the countryside.

Tastes were changing. So Sid was Sid came across as high falutinant to a lot of people, you know, in the hinter lands, and in smaller towns and cities. So when Sid was knocked off the air, it was by Lawrence Welk. Lawrence Welk was on ABC and Sid was on NBC, And you know that nothing better crystallizes what did Sid caesar in apart from his own his self destructiveness, was that the television audience was changing. But I think, to answer your question, what really surprised me was the

dazzling quality of the work. I had to go out because he had forgotten, because he'd been forgotten because his stuff was never syndicated, so that it died, unlike I Love Lucy or Sergeant Bilco or Graucho Marx or or the Honeymooners. You know, it disappeared, and so I had to go out and watch it all. And while there's a lot of repetition and a lot of stuff that obviously you're doing a show every week, you know, there

was a lot of mediocre stuff. The brilliant of the great stuff is what surprised me and delightedly delighted me and and treat me, and that I wanted to proclaim to everyone in doing the book. I mean, the work is just dazzling, and it's you know, there's great variety in it. He was a pantomimist, he was a linguist. He could talk, you know, and in fake Gibberish and German or French or Italian or Russian. He could do brilliant soliloquies. I mean, the range of his work is astonishing.

But you had to go look at it all, and I did. I'm sure that I've watched more of it than probably anybody on the planet at this point. And how great is it that I had the chance to do that, you know?

pick up your copy When Caesar was King Again. David, thank you so much for coming on spending some time with us today.