Sid Caesar Biography

Isaac Sidney "Sid" Caesar (September 8, 1922 - February 12, 2014) was an American comic actor and writer, best known for the pioneering 1950s live television series Your Show of Shows and its successor Caesar's Hour, which influenced generations of comedians. He also acted in films, including the 1963 screwball comedy, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Caesar was considered a "sketch comic" and actor, as opposed to a stand-up comedian. He also relied more on body language, accents, and facial contortions, than simply dialog. Unlike the slapstick comedy which was standard on TV, his style was considered "avant garde" in the 1950s. He conjured up ideas and scenes, but didn't write scripts," using writers for creating the dialog. Among the writers who wrote for Caesar early in their careers, were Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Mel Tolkin and Woody Allen. "Sid's was the show to which all comedy writers aspired. It was the place to be", said Steve Allen.

Among his TV shows' subjects were satires about real life events and people, and parodies of popular film genres, theater, television shows and opera. But unlike other comedy shows at the time, the dialog was considered sharper, funnier and more adult oriented. He was "best known as one of the most intelligent and provocative innovators of television comedy", who some critics called "television's Charlie Chaplin", and the New York Times refers to as the "comedian of comedians from TV's early days".

Honored in numerous ways over sixty years, he was nominated for Emmy Awards eleven times, winning twice. He was also a saxophonist and author of several books, including two autobiographies in which he described his career and later struggle to overcome years of alcoholism and barbiturates.

Early life

Caesar was the youngest of three sons born to Jewish immigrants living in Yonkers, New York. His father, Max, had emigrated from Poland; his mother, Ida (ne Raphael), from the Russian Empire. The surname "Caesar" was supposedly given to Max, as a child, by an immigration official at Ellis Island. Max and Ida Caesar ran a restaurant, a 24-hour luncheonette. By waiting on tables, their son learned to mimic the patois, rhythm and accents of the diverse clientele, a technique he termed "double-talk," which he would famously use throughout his career. He first tried his "double-talk" with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat his native-sounding patter in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians and Bulgarians. Sid's older brother, David, was his comic mentor and "one-man cheering section." They created their earliest family sketches from movies of the day like "Test Pilot" and the 1927 silent film "Wings".

At fourteen, Caesar went to the Catskills Mountains as a saxophonist in Mike Cifichello's Swingtime Six band, and occasionally performed in sketches in the Borscht Belt.

Career

Stage and film

After graduating from Yonkers High School, Caesar left home, intent on a musical career. He arrived in New York City penniless, and failed to join the musicians' union. But he found work at the Vacationland Hotel on Swan Lake in the Catskills, as a saxophonist. Mentored by Don Appel, the resort's social director, Caesar played in the dance band and learned to perform comedy, doing three shows a week. He audited classes in clarinet and saxophone at the famed Juilliard School of Music. In 1939, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard, and was stationed in Brooklyn, New York, where he played in military revues and shows. Vernon Duke, the famous composer of "Autumn in New York", "April in Paris", and "Taking a Chance on Love", was at the same base and collaborated with Caesar on musical revues.

During the summer of 1942, Caesar met his future wife, Florence Levy, at the Avon Lodge. They were married on July 17, 1943, and had three children: Michele, Rick, and Karen. After joining the musicians' union, he briefly played with Shep Fields, Claude Thornhill, Charlie Spivak, Art Mooney and Benny Goodman. Still in the service, Caesar was ordered to Palm Beach, Florida, where Vernon Duke and Howard Dietz were putting together a service revue called Tars and Spars. There he met the civilian director of the show, Max Liebman, who later produced his first television series. When Caesar's comedy got bigger applause than the musical numbers, Liebman asked him to do stand-up bits between the songs. Tars and Spars toured nationally, and became Caesar's first major gig as a comedian. After the war, the Caesars moved to Hollywood. A film version of Tars and Spars was made by Columbia Pictures in 1946, and in it Caesar reprised his role. The next year, he acted in The Guilt of Janet Ames. But despite a few offers to play sidekick roles, he decided to return to New York, where he became the opening act for Joe E. Lewis at the Copacabana nightclub. He reunited with Max Liebman, who guided his stage material and presentation. That job led to a contract with the William Morris Agency and a nationwide tour. Caesar also performed in a Broadway revue Make Mine Manhattan, which featured "The Five Dollar Date", one of his first original pieces in which he sang, acted, double-talked, pantomimed, and wrote the music. He won a 1948 Donaldson Award for his contributions to the musical.

Television

Caesar's television career began with an appearance on Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater. In early 1949, Caesar and Max Liebman met with Pat Weaver, vice president of television at NBC, which led to Caesar's first series, Admiral Broadway Revue with Imogene Coca. The Friday show was simultaneously broadcast on NBC and the DuMont network, and was an immediate success. However, its sponsor, Admiral, an appliance company, could not keep up with the demand for its new television sets, so the show was cancelled after 26 weeks"?ironically, on account of its runaway success.

On February 25, 1950, Caesar appeared in the first episode of Your Show of Shows, a Saturday night 90-minute variety program produced by Max Liebman (who had previously produced Admiral Broadway Revue). The premiere featured Burgess Meredith as guest host, and other musical guests Gertrude Lawrence, Lily Pons, and Robert Merrill. The show was a mix of scripted and improvised comedy, movie and television satires, Caesar's monologues, musical guests, and large production numbers. Guest stars included: Jackie Cooper, Robert Preston, Rex Harrison, Eddie Albert, Michael Redgrave, Basil Rathbone, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Page, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Pearl Bailey, Fred Allen, Benny Goodman, Lena Horne and many other stars of the time. It was also responsible for bringing together the comedy team of Caesar, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Imogene Coca. Many writers also got their break creating the show's sketches, including Lucille Kallen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Michael Stewart, Mel Tolkin, Sheldon Keller and Larry Gelbart. Sid Caesar won his first Emmy in 1952. In 1951 and 1952, he was voted the United States' Best Comedian in Motion Picture Dailys TV poll. The show ended after 160 episodes on June 5, 1954.

Just a few months later, Sid Caesar returned with Caesar's Hour, a one-hour sketch/variety show with Morris, Reiner, Bea Arthur and other members of his former crew. Nanette Fabray replaced Imogene Coca who left to star in her own short-lived series. Ultimate creative and technical control was now in Caesar's hands. The show moved to the larger Century Theater and the weekly budget doubled to $125,000. The premiere on September 27, 1954, featured Gina Lollobrigida.

Everything was performed live, including the commercials, which only took up seven minutes of the one-hour show as compared to today's shows which average about 22 minutes of commercials per hour.

Caesar's Hour was followed by Sid Caesar Invites You in 1958, briefly reuniting Caesar and Coca.

In 1963, Caesar appeared on television, on stage, and in the movies. Several As Caesar Sees It specials evolved into the 1963-64 Sid Caesar Show (which alternated with Edie Adams in Here's Edie). He starred with Virginia Martin in the Broadway musical Little Me, with book by Neil Simon, choreography by Bob Fosse, and music by Cy Coleman. Playing eight parts, with 32 costume changes, he was nominated in 1963 for a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. On film, Caesar and Edie Adams played a husband and wife drawn into a mad race to find buried loot in the 1963 screwball comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Style and technique

Caesar was not a stand-up comedian, states author Gerald Nachman. He was considered a "sketch comic, and actor. He conjured up ideas and enhanced scenes, but never wrote a word," and was thereby dependent on his writers for dialog. He was "notorious" for deviating from the script and ad-libing dialog. Caesar was also skilled at mime, dialects, monologues, foreign language double-talk, and general comic acting.

His sketches were often long, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes, with numerous close-ups showing the expressions on the faces of Caesar and other actors. Caesar relied more on body language, accents, and facial contortions, than simply spoken dialog. Unlike the slapstick comedy which was standard on TV, his style was considered "avant garde." Caesar "was born with the ability write physical poetry," notes comedian Steve Allen, a technique which Nachman explains more like that of a "silent film comedian."

Writer Mel Tolkin states that Caesar "didn't like one-line jokes in sketches because he felt that if the joke was a good one, anybody could do it. One-liners would take him away from what drove his personal approach to comedy." Larry Gelbart describes Caesar's style as "theatrical," and he called him "a pure TV comedian."

Having that ability, Caesar was able to pantomime a wide variety of things: a tire, a gumball machine, a lion, a dog, a punching bag, a telephone, an infant, an elevator, a railroad train, a herd of horses, a piano, a rattlesnake, and a bottle of seltzer. He was also able to create imaginary characters. Alfred Hitchcock compared him to Charlie Chaplin, and critic John Crosby felt "he could wrench laughter out of you with the violence of his great eyes and the sheer immensity of his parody." In an article in the Saturday Evening Post from 1953, Maurice Zolotow noted that "Caesar relies upon grunts and grimaces to express a vast range of emotions."

Of his double-talk routines, Carl Reiner said, "His ability to doubletalk every language known to man was impeccable." Despite his apparent fluency in many languages, Caesar could actually speak only English and Yiddish.

Subjects

Among his primary subjects were parodies and spoofs of various film genres, including gangster films, westerns, newspaper dramas, spy movies, and other TV shows. Unlike other comedy shows at the time, the dialog on his shows were considered sharper, funnier and more adult oriented. In his sketches for Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, he would also typically "skewer the minutiae of domestic life" along with lampooning popular or classic movies.

Contemporary movies, foreign movies, theater, television shows and opera were targets of satire by the writing team. Often the publicity generated by the sketches boosted the box office of the original productions. Some notable sketches included: "From Here to Obscurity" (From Here to Eternity), "Aggravation Boulevard" (Sunset Boulevard), "Hat Basterson" (Bat Masterson), and "No West for the Wicked" (Stagecoach).

They also performed some recurring sketches. "The Hickenloopers" were television's first bickering couple, predating The Honeymooners. As "The Professor", Caesar was the daffy expert who bluffed his way through his interviews with earnest roving reporter Carl Reiner. In its various incarnations, "The Professor" could be Gut von Fraidykat (mountain-climbing expert), Ludwig von Spacebrain (space expert), or Ludwig von Henpecked (marriage expert). Later, "The Professor" was the inspiration for Mel Brooks' "The Two Thousand Year Old Man". The most prominent recurring sketch on the show was "The Commuters", featuring Caesar, Reiner and Morris involved with everyday working and suburban life situations. Years later, the sketch "Sneaking through the Sound Barrier", a parody of the British film, The Sound Barrier, was run continuously as part of a display on supersonic flight at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Working with writers

Steve Allen claimed that "Sid's was the show to which all comedy writers aspired. It was the place to be." While Caesar did not write his dialog, he made all final decisions. His writers, such as Mel Brooks, felt they "had a great instrument in Caesar that we could all play, and we played it very well." As for Caesar, Nachman describes him basically as an "inspired idea man who allowed the writers to take more risks" than other tv shows.

In many cases, sketch dialog was not even written down, but simply indicated by describing a scene, as in, "Sid does man coming home from business mad." Sometimes, says Larry Gelbart, it was like "organized chaos," and when watching the writers create from offstage, felt "it was a religious experience." To Mel Brooks, "it was a zoo. Everyone pitched lines at Sid. Jokes would be changed fifty times."

Neil Simon, after writing out a sketch and giving it to Caesar, recalls that "Sid would make it ten times funnier than what we wrote. Sid acted everything out, so the sketches we did were like little plays." Simon also remembers the impact that working for Caesar had on him: "The first time I saw Caesar it was like seeing a new country. All other comics were basically doing situations with farcical characters. Caesar was doing life."

Some of his writers, like Woody Allen, initially didn't like being among so many writers coming up with routines for Caesar, feeling it was too competitive and contributed to hostility among writers. An Allen biographer writes that Allen "chafed under the atmosphere of inspired spontaneity," although Allen did say "writing for Caesar was the highest thing you could aspire to"?at least as a TV comedy writer. Only the presidency was above that." Neil Simon noted that "we were competitive the way a family is competitive to get dad's attention. We all wanted to be Sid's favorite." As part of the competitive atmosphere in "The Writer's Room," as it was called, friendship was also critical. Larry Gelbart explains:

Impact on television

Nachman concludes that "the Caesar shows were the crme de la crme of fifties television," as they were "studded with satire, and their sketches sharper, edgier, more sophisticated than the other variety shows." Likewise, historian Susan Murray notes that Caesar was "best known as one of the most intelligent and provocative innovators of television comedy," who some critics called "television's Charlie Chaplin."

According to actress Nanette Fabray, who acted alongside Caesar, "he was the first original TV comedy creation." His early shows were the "gold standard for TV sketch comedy," adds Nachman. In 1951, Newsweek noted that according to "the opinion of lots of smart people, Caesar is the best that TV has to offer," while Zolotow, in his 1953 profile for Saturday Evening Post, writes that "in temperament, physique, and technique of operation, Caesar represents a new species of comedian."

Later years

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Caesar continued to make occasional television and night club appearances and starred in several movies including Silent Movie, History of the World, Part I, Airport 1975 and as Coach Calhoun in Grease and its sequel, Grease 2, in 1982. In 1971, he starred opposite Carol Channing and a young Tommy Lee Jones in the Broadway show Four on a Garden. In 1973, Sid and Max Liebman mined their own personal kinescopes from Your Show of Shows (NBC had 'lost' the studio copies) and they produced a feature film Ten From Your Show of Shows, a compilation of some of their best sketches. In 1974, Caesar said, "I'd like to be back every week" on TV and appeared in the NBC skit-based comedy television pilot called, Hamburgers.

In 1977, after blacking out during a stage performance of Neil Simon's The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Sid gave up alcohol 'cold turkey.' His 1983 autobiography, Where Have I Been?, and his second book, Caesar's Hours, both chronicle his struggle to overcome alcoholism and barbiturates.

In 1983, Caesar hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live, where he received a standing ovation at the start of the show and was awarded a plaque that declared him an honorary cast member at the conclusion of the show. In 1987-89, Caesar appeared as Frosch the Jailer in Die Fledermaus at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Caesar remained active by appearing in movies, television and award shows, including the movie The Great Mom Swap.

Special appearances

In 1996, the Writers Guild of America, West reunited Caesar with nine of his writers from Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour for a special two-hour panel discussion featuring head writer Mel Tolkin, Caesar, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, and Gary Belkin. The event was taped, broadcast on PBS in the United States and the BBC in the UK, and later released as a DVD titled Caesar's Writers.

In 1997, he made a guest appearance in Vegas Vacation and The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit in 1998 based on a Ray Bradbury novel. Also that year, Caesar joined fellow television icons Bob Hope and Milton Berle at the 50th anniversary of the Primetime Emmy Awards. Billy Crystal also paid tribute to Caesar that night when he won an Emmy for hosting that year's Oscar telecast, recalling seeing Caesar doing a parody of Yul Brynner in The King & I on Your Show of Shows. Caesar performed his famous double-talk in a foreign dub skit (a skit format inspired by, and paying homage to double-talk) on the November 21, 2001 episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

In 2003, he joined Edie Adams and Marvin Kaplan at a 40th anniversary celebration for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In 2004, Caesar's second autobiography, Caesar's Hours, was published, and in March 2006, Caesar was presented with the 'Pioneer Award' at the 2006 TV Land Awards. Caesar performed his famous double-talk for over five minutes.

Death

Caesar died on February 12, 2014, at his home in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 91, after a short illness.

On his death, Carl Reiner said, "He was the ultimate, he was the very best sketch artist and comedian that ever existed." Mel Brooks commented, "Sid Caesar was a giant, maybe the best comedian who ever practiced the trade. And I was privileged to be one of his writers and one of his friends."

Awards and honors

Year	Award	Result
1948	Donaldson Award for Male Debut in a Musical
1951	Emmy Award, Most Outstanding Personality
	Emmy Award, Best Actor
	Look magazine Best Comedian on TV
1952	Emmy Award, Best Actor
	Emmy Award, Best Comedian or Comedienne
1953	Emmy Award, Best Comedian
1954	Emmy Award, Best Male Star of Regular Series
1956	Emmy Award, Best Comedian
	Look magazine Best Comedian on TV
1957	Emmy Award, Best Continuing Performance by a Comedian in a Series
1958	Emmy Award, Best Continuing Performance (Male) in a Series
1960	Hollywood Walk of Fame
1963	Tony Award, Best Leading Actor in a Musical
1985	Television Academy Hall of Fame
1987	British Comedy Awards, Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy
1995	Emmy Award, Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
1997	Emmy Award, Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series
2001	Television Critics Association Career Achievement Award
2005	DVD Exclusive Award, Best Supporting Actor in a DVD Premiere Movie
2006	TV Land Pioneer Award
2011	Television Critics Association Lifetime Achievement Award

See also

• Wayne Lamb, dancer in the revue Make Mine Manhattan