The most informative of all studies of humor on US television in its early golden years, this biography deserves wide reading. For readers sympathetic to today’s protests against media-created monsters it will offer reflections on what comedy can do
Photo credit: Austin Film Society, September 2015, Watch This: Sid Caesar in One of the Funniest Comedy Sketches Ever,
Successor to Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and Jack Benny among other comedic giants, Sid Caesar also symptomized a certain Jewish coming-of-age in the land of dollars and film spectaculars.
At another, more visible layer, Caesar personifies an age of cultured television. Opera singers and classical music, hour-long drama on social themes, all these challenged the audience to uplift while enjoying themselves. By the end of the 1950s, with live dramatic productions in Manhattan studios and high quality anthologies replaced by Hollywood sets and cowboy shows, social themes had to be hidden or recast within genres as unlikely as half-hour medical dramas and hip detective shows.
When Caesar Was King is above all a meticulous biography. Born in 1922 and raised in Yonkers, the son of blue collar Jewish immigrants, he began talking at age 3. Very likely for that reason, he seemed to acquire a personality by imbibing the accents of others. Also by traveling to Manhattan with his father to eat at Ratners and sweat off the calories at the famed Eight Street Baths, with ambience galore. Picking up a saxophone someone left behind, teenage Sid taught himself to play and joined a dance band touring the Catskills. He spent the War years stateside, enrolled in the Coast Guard. There, and back in wartime Brooklyn, he put together shows performed on the base. More than a few future Jewish comedians and comedy writers of note did the same, writing, singing, or acting, seizing the opportunity to try out their own material.
Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, famous for its labor/socialistic ties and Broadway connections, later lent its name to the “labor library” for Greater New York (now housed at NYU) and marquee Left history archive. There at the Camp, at any rate, Caesar found the audience he had been intuitively seeking. Sophisticates in their own way, this almost exclusively Jewish crowd fell in love with a cleverness and sophistication that set him apart from the anything-for-a- laugh standard. He famously went after the Fascists and anti-Semites, abroad and at home, but also played brilliantly upon the Jewishness of the heavily ethnic generations. Thus, for example, he staged a “Yiddish Mikado” within an imaginary Hasidic town in Japan.
By a happy coincidence, the non-Jewish Imogene Coca had actually learned some Yiddish phrases a few years earlier there, anticipating her own destiny. Caesar wrote and played in a GI play, “Tars and Spars,” performed in theaters and later made into a film of the same name. Time Magazine discovered him and the young Caesar was on his way.
From there, it was more or less straight up to a level of recognition that astounded even himself. He worked furiously in clubs and sometimes on Broadway during the post war years. A few critics complained that his material, wildly entertaining, avoided anything political. Never mind: he represented the Jewish generation that had suddenly gained legitimacy within US culture. Thanks to the Holocaust, they were also the largest, as well as the most comfortably secure, Jewish community in the world. The Jewish exoticism that remained—at least between New York and Los Angeles—had also largely lost its once-dominant religious connotations. With the arrival of television, it had entered uncharted territory.
Most of the TV-watchers of the 1950s would remember later how a generous sliver of the new entertainment mode urgently sought to uplift the sensibilities of viewers. Pat Weaver, the Czar of NBC, privately named one of his efforts “Operation Frontal Lobes.” On various shows, kids visited the Supreme Court, even met with Einstein and Toscanini, albeit in the company of stars. A midwestern viewer like me got to “visit” Washington Square Park with dancer Ray Bolger on Sunday afternoons, and this, too, seemed uplifting as well as amazingly sophisticated.
Uplift constantly hinted “New York” and “New York” meant Jewish. The audiences of early television were bicoastal without much in the middle. Jewish humor, Jewish sophistication, came through in a thousand small ways. “Your Show of Shows,” a veritable circus of entertainment, was a hit from its 1950 debut and a veritable rocket that sent Caesar, its singular star, up into the stratosphere.
Opening with a dialogue between Caesar and Coca, Your Show of Shows moved on to assorted cultural offerings, including clips from ballets and operas, then onward again to comic sketches. The Cesar and Coca, as two “out of towners” befuddled by the Big City, fairly drove home the point. Anywhere but New York (not yet Los Angeles) was “out of town.”
Caesar quickly became the opposite of rival Milton Berle, the laugh-a-minute Uncle Miltie who could wear women’s clothes or play a baby. Tall and handsome, he performed a sort of theater, entering the minds of any creature he chose. His pantomime genius had not been seen, many critics said, since silent film. Charlie Chaplin agreed. Caesar also improvised constantly. Chico Marx, the comedian as critic, observed that Caesar appeared so often on his own show, week after week, that he could not possibly memorize all those lines. This was the problem with a television genius of the medium’s early years: he would be worn down, physically and psychologically, by the sheer pace of the work.
Psychoanalysts, then in their own prime—reputedly replacing Marxist savants as prosperity but also “alienation” reached more of postwar America—dove into Caesar’s mind, and not just vicariously in the magazines and letter-columns. Caesar and his writers reputedly ALL went to psychoanalysts, on a weekly basis, some (like Caesar himself) still more often. Rising high from where they were only a few years earlier, they were never far from an equally rapid descent and they knew it. Before the end of the 1950 season, its first, “Your Show of Shows” was already described by Variety as “tired.”
Television had barely begun to expand its audience. Caesar, who knew only New York and LA, referred to the rest as “the midwest,” had unwittingly laid a trap for himself most of all. A certain type of humor became “too New York,” by the middle 1950s, when “Your Show of Shows” had been on for five years. “Too New York” inevitably signaled “too Jewish.” In a head-to-head contest that drove Caesar almost literally berserk, Lawrence Welk won the ratings game away from him, week after week. The nearly violent satires of down-home kitsch staged by Caesar and his writers probably made Welk still more popular.
In retrospect, the end was inevitable and it came down like volcanic ash, the aftermath of a popular culture explosion. But Caesar remained so beloved and admired by newspaper columnists—he appeared in clubs or other venues and chummed with them—and so popular among a slice of the audience, that even falling apart, missing lines, drinking heavily and oddly losing weight from his svelt standard in the next years, he did not disappear from the small screen. Instead, over the course of the later 1950s to the middle 1960s and intermittently later, he reappeared first in limited series, then in guest shots, and still later in films definitely not destined for screen immortality.
By his own admission, he entered a cocoon of sorts for twenty years. From Margolick’s account, it appears that smoking a lot of marijuana calmed him greatly and allowed him to feel less than totally crushed by his spectacular downfall. He could, perhaps, appreciate what a historic figure he had been in a crucial moment of popular entertainment aka television.
In passing, Margolick touches upon a political point otherwise easily missed.
Driven underground by the Blacklist of the McCarthy Era, working under assumed names, more than a handful of Lefties found a way to get their work back into public attention. The most critically admired show of the 1950s, YouAre There, and the most hilariously rebellious, The Adventures of Robin Hood - hiding their blacklisted writers under assumed names, symptomized the larger picture of the less punished “graylisted” actors, writers and directors who managed to get work under their own names and sometimes to deliver a message.
Caesar’s own writing crew memorably included Carl Reiner, who titled his first memoir, Paul Robeson Saved My Life. His guest hosts included five who had been “named” in Red Channels—Burgess Meredith, Jose Ferrer, Lena Horne, Marsha Hunt and Henry Morgan—while the Daily Worker praised the program’s “complete absence of red-baiting.” Comically, Margolick notes that “Network publicists took care to purge the paper from their mailing list.” (p.71).
Caesar died in 2014, given a Lifetime Achievement award by the Television Critics Association a year earlier and celebrated on his 90th birthday by leading comics old and young. How many could truly understand his life and work? Thanks to the YouTube availability of his television work, perhaps more might now, in the 2020s, even if in some limited and superficial sense. To understand his life and achievements more fully, the selective reader would do no better than imbibing When Caesar Was King.##
