LOS ANGELES, (Reuters) – Comic showman Sid Caesar, a pioneer of American television sketch comedy as the star and creative force of “Your Show of Shows” during the 1950s, died today at age 91, according to his friend and former collaborator Carl Reiner.
Reiner told Reuters he learned of Caesar’s death from a mutual friend, actor and writer Rudy De Luca, who had recently visited Caesar at his Los Angeles-area home. He said the veteran entertainer had been ill for at least a year.
While he enjoyed a lengthy, if uneven, career in TV and film spanning six decades, Caesar may be best-remembered for his work with comedienne Imogene Coca on the landmark “Your Show of Shows,” which aired on NBC from February 1950 to June 1954.
One of the most ambitious and demanding of all TV enterprises, “Your Show of Shows” was 90 minutes of live, original sketch comedy airing every Saturday night, 39 weeks a year. It is widely considered the prototype for every U.S. TV sketch comedy series that followed, including “Saturday Night Live.”
“He was a unique talent, and he was a pioneer of television and entertainment when television was in its infancy,” said Eddy Friedfeld, who helped Caesar write his 2003 autobiography “Caesar’s Hours.”
“Your Show of Shows” and its successor series, “Caesar’s Hour,” became an incubator for some of the greatest comic minds in American show business, with a roster of writers that included Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Reiner (who also co-starred on the show) and Larry Gelbart.
Nominally hosted each week by a different star (much like “Saturday Night Live”), “Your Show of Shows” also featured a cadre of regular singers and dancers, as well as ballet and opera performances to lend an air of cultural refinement.
But the series became a hit for the comic chemistry between Caesar and Coca, a former vaudeville performer nearly 14 years his senior who died in 2001 at age 92.
Together they satirized historical events in a recurring bit titled “History as She Ain’t,” played marital strife for laughs in the husband-and-wife skit “The Hickenloopers” and poked fun at Hollywood with such parodies as “From Here to Obscurity” (a lampoon of the film “From Here to Eternity”).
By all accounts, the writers’ room could be a raucous place. Caesar, a tall, strapping presence, acknowledged he once was so angry at Brooks that he grabbed the diminutive writer and dangled him from a hotel window by his ankles.
Reiner later drew on his experiences with Caesar as material for the TV sitcom classic “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
Some of Caesar’s most popular bits were built around pompous or outlandish characters – such as Professor von Votsisnehm – in which he spoke in a thick accent or mimicked foreign languages in comic but convincing gibberish.
“He was the ultimate, he was the very best sketch artist and comedian that ever existed,” Reiner said of his friend. “His ability to double talk every language known to man was impeccable.”
In a 2001 interview with Reuters, Caesar said his ear for language grew from frequent boyhood visits to his father’s restaurant in a blue-collar neighborhood of Yonkers, New York.
“Men used to come in – there was a French table, a German table, a Russian table and an Italian table,” he recalled. “By taking up dishes during lunch hour, I’d pick (languages) up. You know, the first thing they teach you is the dirty words.”
