There have been many TV kings and queens, but there was only one Caesar.
True, Sid Caesar, who died Wednesday at 91, was not the most popular, groundbreaking or famous of TV's pioneers. Milton Berle had higher ratings. Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton and Jack Benny had longer careers. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball did more to shape TV as we know it today.
All Caesar can lay claim to is astounding comic genius — and the proof is on those DVD packages of Your Show of Shows. A one-time-only talent, Caesar gathered the best comedy writers ever assembled in one room to produce a 90-minute, live, prime-time variety behemoth that has never been attempted since, again, let alone equaled.
His reign on TV was brief: Combined, his two 1950s series, Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, ran fewer than 10 years. Show was one of TV's original giant hits, making the Top 10 its first two seasons, though as the medium's popularity spread, Caesar's relative prominence diminished.
But look at the work, and look at the writers who helped create it: Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart and later, on Caesar's Hour, Woody Allen. In a 2000 USA TODAY interview, Caesar described his staff as "a bunch of writers, all writing on one idea. I used to say 'Drop your egos at the door, because we're not looking to make anybody famous. We want to get to funny.'"
Great performers helped him get to funny, most notably his Show co-stars Imogene Coca, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner. But the show was built around Caesar's outsized gifts — his grace, his skill as a pantomime, and his unparalleled gift for nonsensical dialect mimicry.
"By far, he was the greatest sketch performer of our time," says Reiner. "He was a pantomimist par excellence."
Once during rehearsal, says Reiner, the writers stopped a pantomime sketch in the middle, just as Caesar had mimed unscrewing a jar. As the writers spoke to him about a new idea, he re-screwed the imaginary cap onto the imaginary jar and put it down on an imaginary table, without realizing what he was doing.
"That's artistry of the first magnitude. That's internal. You can't teach that."
Though Show offered an eclectic array of entertainment, from big-name guests to the Show of Shows Ballet Company, what people remember most fondly are the sketches. The four stars miming a cuckoo clock gone cuckoo. Coca and Caesar as a bickering couple, or as illicit lovers getting drenched by the surf in the film parody From Here to Obscurity. Or just Caesar as a silent sheik, an Italian opera star or a German officer.
Though he was thin later in life, in those days Caesar's bulk was part of the comedy. Anyone who's ever seen the show's classic spoof of This Is Your Life — with a reluctant Caesar being dragged to the stage, where a howling Morris clung to his leg — knows that with Caesar, size mattered.
Oddly enough, considering his talents, Caesar never planned to be a comic. Born Sept. 8, 1922, Caesar trained at Juilliard as a musician and got his first show-business job playing the saxophone.
He was playing the sax for the World War II service show Tars and Spars when producer Max Liebman
heard him cracking up the band and moved him to an on-stage comedy spot. After the war, Liebman put him in a Broadway revue, Make Mine Manhattan. Then in 1949, Liebman hired Caesar and Coca for TV's The Admiral Broadway Revue, which he replaced a year later with the reworked, 90-minute Your Show of Shows.
Your Show of Shows ran until 1954. That same year, Caesar returned for Caesar's Hour with Morris and Reiner, but with Nanette Fabray in place of Coca. It ran three seasons, and when it ended, so did Caesar's reign as a major TV star.
Why did his star fade?
"He had a special appeal to the literate viewer," says Les Brown in his Encyclopedia of Television, "and may have been, like studio drama, a casualty of the proliferation of TV receivers into the lower-income, lesser-educated homes during the mid-1950s." That opinion was echoed by Simon in his Show-inspired play Laughter on the 23rd Floor, which blames a general perception that the show was too smart and too "New York" for the growing mass audience.
Still, even in death, few shows have ever had as long or varied an afterlife as Your Show of Shows. In addition to Laughter, it was the inspiration for the movie and musical My Favorite Year, and spun off a successful big-screen compilation, Ten From Your Show of Shows.
Despite what you may have heard, however, Reiner says the often-volatile Caesar was not the inspiration for Alan Brady, the megalomaniac character Reiner invented for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Brady, says Reiner, was actually an amalgam of Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle and Phil Silvers' character from Top Banana. "I worked nine years with Sid. You can't do that with someone you don't like."
While Caesar's star may have faded, his career did not end with the Hour. He made movies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Busy Body and Grease. He did guest spots on TV, including Saturday Night Live and Mad About You. He even starred in Little Me, a Broadway musical written by Simon, Little Me, that has proved unrevivable without him.
I remember seeing Caesar in person when he won the 2001 Television Critics Association career achievement award. In frail health at the time, Caesar had to be helped to the podium — where he proceeded to deliver his acceptance speech in five faux languages. And as the audience of critics and stars and writers roared, the years dropped away, and he was once again king.
No, Caesar. What better title could there be?
