[msb-alumni] Sid Caesar Broadcast Television Comedian Dies at 91
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 11:26:40 -0500
BlankSid Caesar, comic genius of 1950s television, dies at 91 By Lynn Elber
Associated Press Sid Caesar, the prodigiously talented pioneer of TV comedy
who paired with Imogene Coca in sketches that became classics and who
inspired a generation of famous writers, died Wednesday. He was 91. Family
spokesman Eddy Friedfeld said Caesar , who also played Coach Calhoun in the
1978 movie "Grease," died at his home in the Los Angeles area after a brief
illness. "He had not been well for a while. He was getting weak," said
Friedfeld, who lives in New York and last spoke to Caesar about 10 days ago.
Friedfeld, a friend of Caesar's who wrote the 2003 biography "Caesar's Hour"
learned of his death in an early morning call from Caesar's daughter, Karen.
Carl Reiner, who worked as a writer-performer with Caesar on his
breakthrough "Your Show of Shows" sketch program, said he had an ability to
"connect with an audience and make them roar with laughter. "Sid Caesar set
the template for everybody," Reiner told KNX-AM in Los Angeles. "He was
without a doubt, inarguably, the greatest sketch comedian-monologist that
television ever produced. He could adlib. He could do anything that was
necessary to make an audience laugh. In his two most important shows, "Your
Show of Shows," 1950-54, and "Caesar's Hour," 1954-57, Caesar displayed
remarkable skill in pantomime, satire, mimicry, dialect and sketch comedy.
And he gathered a stable of young writers who went on to worldwide fame in
their own right - including Neil Simon and Woody Allen. "The one great star
that television created and who created television was Sid Caesar," said
now-deceased critic Joel Siegel on the TV documentary "Hail Sid Caesar! The
Golden Age Of Comedy," which first aired in 2001. While best known for his
TV shows, which have been revived on DVD in recent years, he also had
success on Broadway and occasional film appearances, notably in "It's a Mad
Mad Mad Mad World. If the typical funnyman was tubby or short and scrawny,
Caesar was tall and powerful, with a clown's loose limbs and rubbery face,
and a trademark mole on his left cheek. But Caesar never went in for
clowning or jokes. He wasn't interested. He insisted that the laughs come
from the everyday. "Real life is the true comedy," he said in a 2001
interview with The Associated Press. "Then everybody knows what you're
talking about. Caesar brought observational comedy to TV before the term, or
such latter-day practitioners as Jerry Seinfeld, were even born. In one
celebrated routine, Caesar impersonated a gumball machine; in another, a
baby; in another, a ludicrously overemotional guest on a parody of "This Is
Your Life. He played an unsuspecting moviegoer getting caught between
feuding lovers in a theater. He dined at a health food restaurant, where the
first course was the bouquet in the vase on the table. He was interviewed as
an avant-garde jazz musician who seemed happily high on something. The son
of Jewish immigrants, Caesar was a wizard at spouting melting-pot gibberish
that parodied German, Russian, French and other languages. His Professor was
the epitome of goofy Germanic scholarship. Some compared him to Charlie
Chaplin for his success at combining humor with touches of pathos. "As wild
an idea as you get, it won't go over unless it has a believable basis to
start off with," he told The Associated Press in 1955. "The viewers have to
see you basically as a person first, and after that you can go on into left
field. Caesar performed with such talents as Howard Morris and Nanette
Fabray, but his most celebrated collaborator was the brilliant Coca, his
"Your Show of Shows" co-star. Coca and Caesar performed skits that satirized
the everyday - marital spats, inane advertising, strangers meeting and
speaking in clichés, a parody of the Western "Shane" in which the hero was
"Strange. They staged a water-logged spoof of the love scene in "From Here
to Eternity. 'The Hickenloopers" husband-and-wife skits became a staple.
"The chemistry was perfect, that's all," Coca, who died in 2001, once said.
"We never went out together; we never see each other socially. But for years
we worked together from 10 in the morning to 6 or 7 at night every day of
the week. What made it work is that we found the same things funny. Caesar
worked closely with his writing staff as they found inspiration in silent
movies, foreign films and the absurdities of '50s postwar prosperity. Among
those who wrote for Caesar: Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Simon and his brother
Danny Simon, and Allen, who was providing gags to Caesar and other
entertainers while still in his teens. Carl Reiner, who wrote in addition to
performing on the show, based his "Dick Van Dyke Show" - with its fictional
TV writers and their temperamental star - on his experiences there. Simon's
1993 "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" and the 1982 movie "My Favorite Year" also
were based on the Caesar show. A 1996 roundtable discussion among Caesar and
his writers was turned into a public television special. Said Simon, the
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright: "None of us who've gone on to do other
things could have done them without going through this show. "This was
playing for the Yankees; this was playing in Duke Ellington's band," said
Gelbart, the creator of TV's "M-A-S-H" and screenwriter of "Tootsie," who
died in 2009. Increasing ratings competition from Lawrence Welk's variety
show put "Caesar's Hour" off the air in 1957. In 1962, Caesar starred on
Broadway in the musical "Little Me," written by Simon, and was nominated for
a Tony. He played seven different roles, from a comically perfect young man
to a tyrannical movie director to a prince of an impoverished European
kingdom. "The fact that, night after night, they are also excruciatingly
funny is a tribute to the astonishing talents of their portrayer," Newsweek
magazine wrote. "In comedy, Caesar is still the best there is. His and
Coca's classic TV work captured a new audience with the 1973 theatrical
compilation film "Ten From Your Show of Shows. He was one of the galaxy of
stars who raced to find buried treasure in the 1963 comic epic "It's a Mad
Mad Mad Mad World," and in 1976 he put his pantomime skills to work in
Brooks' "Silent Movie. But he later looked back on those years as painful
ones. He said he beat a severe, decades-long barbiturate and alcohol habit
in 1978, when he was so low he considered suicide. "I had to come to terms
with myself. 'Yes or no? Do you want to live or die?' Deciding that he
wanted to live, he recalled, was "the first step on a long journey. Caesar
was born in 1922 in Yonkers, N.Y., the third son of an Austrian-born
restaurant owner and his Russian-born wife. His first dream was to become a
musician, and he played saxophone in bands in his teens. But as a youngster
waiting tables at his father's luncheonette, he liked to observe as well as
serve the diverse clientele, and recognize the humor happening before his
eyes. His talent for comedy was discovered when he was serving in the Coast
Guard during World War II and got a part in a Coast Guard musical, "Tars and
Spars. He also appeared in the movie version. Wrote famed columnist Hedda
Hopper: "I hear the picture's good, with Sid Caesar a four-way threat. He
writes, sings, dances and makes with the comedy. That led to a few other
film roles, nightclub engagements, and then his breakthrough hit, a 1948
Broadway revue called "Make Mine Manhattan. His first TV comedy-variety
show, "The Admiral Broadway Revue," premiered in February 1949. But it was
off the air by June. Its fatal shortcoming: unimagined popularity. It was
selling more Admiral television sets than the company could make, and
Admiral, its exclusive sponsor, pulled out. But everyone was ready for
Caesar's subsequent efforts. "Your Show of Shows," which debuted in February
1950, and "Caesar's Hour" three years later reached as many as 60 million
viewers weekly and earned its star $1 million annually at a time when $5, he
later noted, bought a steak dinner for two. When "Caesar's Hour" left the
air in 1957, Caesar was only 34. But the unforgiving cycle of weekly
television had taken a toll: His reliance on booze and pills for sleep every
night so he could wake up and create more comedy. It took decades for him to
hit bottom. In 1977, he was onstage in Regina, Canada, doing Simon's "The
Last of the Red Hot Lovers" when, suddenly, his mind went blank. He walked
off stage, checked into a hospital and went cold turkey. Recovery had begun,
with the help of wife Florence Caesar, who would be by his side for more
than 60 years and helped him weather his demons. Those demons included
remorse about the flared-out superstardom of his youth - and how the
pressures nearly killed him. But over time he learned to view his life
philosophically. "You think just because something good happens, THEN
something bad has got to happen? Not necessarily," he said with a smile in
2003, pleased to share his hard-won wisdom: "Two good things have happened
in a row.
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