David Margolick
The Rise, Fall, and Rediscovery of Sid Caesar
“When you do the book, David, you’re going to get this question: Who was Sid Caesar?”—Mel Brooks
By Mel Laytner
For a comedian who could speak every language by speaking none,Sid Caesar left behind a silence that has lasted far too long.
David Margolick, Silurian and author of the eloquent biography, When Caesar Was King, unravelled that silence to recall the uncanny comedic contributions of that brilliant, hungry, panic-driven force of live television at a packed Silurians luncheon on Nov. 19.
The lively conversation with veteran reporter Tony Guida felt less nostalgic than restorative, as if the audience was collectively recalling a legend time, and television, had inexplicably misplaced.
Guida opened with Mel Brooks’ warning to Margolick. “When you do the book, David, you’re going to get this question: Who was Sid Caesar?” That pretty much set the tone of the afternoon at the historic National Arts Club.
Caesar was “the unlikeliest of comics,” Margolick said, an angry kid from Yonkers, introverted and tongue-tied, whose father ran a boarding house above the family's luncheonette where Polish, Italian, and German workers sat at segregated tables.
Caesar would later say he could listen to a foreign language for 15 minutes and mimic its rhythms perfectly. He turned that skill into “double-talk,” a humor uniquely his. Though the words were gibberish, he imitated the sound of foreign languages so convincingly that Dwight Eisenhower once asked him where he had learned Russian.
His entry into performance was pure chance. A “deadbeat” skipped town without paying the boarding-house bill and left behind a saxophone. Sid picked it up. One night, performing in a junior high auditorium, the spotlight drifted; Sid moved to catch it. The audience laughed. He moved again. More laughter. He liked that feeling.
By 1950, he was helming Your Show of Shows—90 minutes of live television, 39 weeks a year. It was a grind that chewed up talent and spit out legends.
At one time or another Brooks, Rob Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Woody Allen all wrote for Caesar's shows.
Simon’s depiction of Caesar’s writers’ room in Laughter on the 23rd Floor as a paradise of creative collaboration was, Margolick said, pure mythology.
He quoted Larry Gelbart describing it as “eight or nine neurotic young Jews beating their own brains out.” Mel Brooks observed, “We could have gotten a group rate” for psychoanalysis. Caesar himself once quipped that head writer Mel Tolkin’s customary spot was “by the window contemplating suicide.”
Food was both a fixation on the show and in Caesar’s life—comedy born of hunger and anxiety. Margolick recalled food critic Mimi Sheraton explaining the difference between Italian and Jewish obsessions with food: “The Italians are just like the Jews,” she said, “but without the panic.”
Caesar had the panic—and the appetite. He told Margolick he knew he had “made it” not when he won Emmy Awards, but when he could order as much sturgeon at Barney Greengrass as he wanted, “even if it was $5 a pound.”
National tastes, however, soon shifted. The urbane, intellectual wit of Caesar was eventually steamrolled by television’s expansion across America’s heartland.
ABC put Lawrence Welk up against him, and champagne music crushed the comedy. Welk was an “unlikely assassin,” Margolick said. Carl Reiner was more succint: “He’s funnier than we are.”
After his show was canceled, Caesar spiraled into a twenty-year blackout of booze and pills. He eventually got clean in the 1980s, but sobriety came at a cost. The mania was gone. So were the laughs. He was no longer a broken man, but he remained a shadow of his past.
His legacy also suffered from technology—or the lack of it. Unlike the syndication model that kept shows like I Love Lucy alive for decades, Your Show of Shows consisted of sketches of varying lengths, impossible to package neatly into the half-hour slots needed for reruns.
While Lucille Ball’s shows were preserved on high-quality film, Caesar’s were recorded on kinescopes, essentially films of a TV monitor. Original master tapes were often physically “dismembered” in attempts to hack the long sketches down to size, ruining the archives and ensuring the shows vanished from public view.
In the end, Margolick found the old comic in his house, his mind clear but his legacy fading. There, buried under a pile of clothes at the bottom of a closet, was the saxophone the deadbeat had left behind decades earlier.
