When I wrote about Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows earlier this month in “My favorite comedy,” I hadn’t read anything about Caesar since the publication of his memoir Where Have I Been? in 1982. Caesar was the father of sketch comedy on television and a fabulously successful star who flamed out big time after his career in television ended.
In his review of Caesar’s memoir Frank Rich recalled just how successful Caesar’s shows had been. The advertiser of his first network show pulled out because it coulen’t meet demand:
Way back in the innocent year of 1949, when television ratings were still footnotes to advertisers’ all-important canvassing of radio audiences, a television variety program called “The Admiral Broadway Revue” wasn’t faring too badly. As much as anyone could estimate, the featured player on this series, a relatively unsung clown named Sid Caesar, was drawing nearly as many viewers as television’s reigning superstar, Milton Berle. Nonetheless, Admiral, the electronics manufacturer that sponsored the show, abruptly canceled it after 19 weeks. The reason? As an Admiral executive explained to Mr. Caesar, the strain was just too much for his company. So popular was ”The Admiral Broadway Revue” that consumers were lining up to buy 10,000 Admiral sets a week instead of the 500 per week of months earlier. Since Admiral needed its cash to retool its factories, the corporation’s Catch-22 logic went, it made sense to kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
“My favorite comedy,” as I called it, focused on Caesar’s writers’ room. Rich made clear why that might have been in his 1982 review as well:
Both of the most successful film humorists of the 1960’s and 70’s, Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, cut some of their first teeth writing for Mr. Caesar. So did the contemporary American theater’s most popular playwright, Neil Simon, and the authors of the 60’s’ two longestrunning Broadway musicals, Joseph Stein (“Fiddler on the Roof”) and Michael Stewart (“Hello, Dolly!”). Other Caesar colleagues – Carl Reiner, Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart – were principal creators of such landmark sitcoms as “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “All in the Family” and “M*A*S*H,” as well as the authors of their own share of hit movies and plays. Indeed, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and a just released movie backed by Mr. Brooks, “My Favorite Year,” are both thinly disguised memoirs of life with Caesar during the tumultuous, adventurous era of live television.
It turns out that David Margolick has written a new biography of Caesar that was published earlier this week under the Schocken imprint. Joseph Epstein reviews it in this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal. Epstein meditates on the evanescence of comedians, if not comedy: “How short-lived is the fame of comedians! Their time passes, and so do they.” He also observes:
Parodies of famous movies and television shows were a regular feature of his shows. After all these years, I can still recall bits from his spoof of NBC’s heart-tugging show “This Is Your Life,” which Carl Reiner thought “the greatest sketch ever done in the history of television.” Mr. Margolick describes it as “an orgy of kissing, hugging, and slobbering as Caesar’s hapless character, one Al Duncey from Darling Falls, Montana, is dragged kicking and screaming up to the stage and reunited with figures from his past.”
It helps if you can recall This Is Your Life. It was incredibly popular in its time. “Uncle Goopy” is still funny as Carl Reiner strives to maintain order. In any event, you can judge for yourself in the clip of the sketch below.
