Rest in peace, Sid Caesar

For the golden age of show business this has been a really sad past few weeks. When I wrote this column it was the day after Shirley Temple Black passed away, and then a day or two later comedy lost one of its trailblazing legends and most beloved performers, Sid Caesar.

While Caesar was not active in recent years, he was a legendary performer and pioneer in the early days of television. He also starred in stage and screen productions although his heart was always in television.

I did some research on Sid Caesar's life because although I know about him from his movie and television roles, I did not know much about his life. I first remember seeing Sid Caesar as a child when we watched television as he would guest star occasionally on some of the variety shows that were a staple of the 1970s. The first movie role I remember him in was as Coach Calhoun in the 1978 movie "Grease" and then a few years later in the Mel Brooks' hit "History of the World Part One". Some of the many other films included, "Airport 75", "Silent Movie" and "Grease 2". He appeared on Broadway as well in "Make Mine Manhattan" and "Four in a Garden."

I also remember him making a cameo appearance on "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" hosted by Drew Carey back in the early 2000s. It was on that show that Carey introduced an improvisation called "Film Dub" which featured Caesar doing what Carey called "double talk." This is a style of entertainment used by some comedians especially from the Golden Age of television in which gibberish, nonsense words and imaginary words are peppered in dialogue by the performer to make him sound intelligent or to imitate a foreign language or dialect. Caesar was an expert innovator at this craft and it showed in that appearance where he expertly created gibberish that sounded like a genuine foreign language.

Caesar learned how to perform this double talk as a child. His parents owned a restaurant in New York City and as a child he would spend a lot of time in the restaurant which was a melting pot of the various ethnicities in the city. As he listened to them speak in different languages and dialects, he learned the patterns and inflections and sounds that formed their languages and was able to synthesize them along with his masterful ability to project himself through body language and facial expressions to entertain audiences. This became one of his main tools throughout his career. He was credited by others as a master of double talk and could do it "in every known language" without using any real words in those languages and make it sound real.

Caesar was a son of Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York from Poland and Russia. When his father Max arrived at Ellis Island as a child he was given the name "Caesar" by the officials who oversaw his family's intake. The name remained with the family.

He loved to perform comic sketches in the restaurant but by the age 14, he headed to the Catskills to perform as a saxophonist in the resorts there. He fully intended to become a musician, but comedy interjected itself early on and he developed a knack for it. When World War II began in Europe, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and ended up performing in their revue shows which paved the way eventually to television.

He began his television career on Milton Berle's variety program "Texaco Star Theater" which eventually led to "Your Show of Shows" which is one of the programs for which Caesar is best known. What I found most intriguing is that while Caesar was a comedy genius when it came to performing, he really did not do much writing of his material. He would write down ideas and then flesh them out in performance. He also had a staff of writers that took his inspirations and turned them into comedy gold.

Caesar always had the final say in the materials others wrote for him, but much of the time they were able to describe the scene and he would take it from there. Caesar's writers read like a who's who of modern comedy art and included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner.

Comedy has several genres. Stand-up comedy which most people associate with comedians today is when a comic or pair stand on stage and tell stories or anecdotes that result in punch lines to an audience hopefully getting laughs in the process.

This form is almost always performed live in a theatrical or nightclub setting.

Sketch comedy is similar to stand up comedy but usually involves more than one person and requires a detailed script about a situation rather than a monologue to an audience. Sketches become more theatrical in nature.

Another genre is improvisational comedy in which the actors or comedians are furnished with a situation and perhaps some guidelines and they create a scene entirely freestyle with no script or canned dialogue.

Most of Caesar's admirers would consider him a master of sketch comedy and it has been said that he enjoyed a more sophisticated comedy aimed more at adults (not to be confused with "adult humor" which is more raw and vulgar in some cases). He was also gifted at improvisation as well.

I admired Sid Caesar's work as a consummate performer. He never broke character and once he started was fully committed to whatever role he played. He is an inspiration to many comic actors and comedians and the laughter dimmed last Wednesday when he passed from this realm. One can almost picture him reunited once again with Milton Berle, Imogene Coca and his other peers performing for the saints in heaven.

Rest in peace, Mr. Caesar. You are a true legend.

(Researched through IMDB, IBDB, Wikipedia and various news articles).

Til next time…