An emperor of comedy

Lenny Bruce once drew a sharp line between “true comedians” and what he called “good actors.” A true comedian, he said, creates everything they say. Those who rely on writers aren’t funny- they’re good actors.

But Bruce made an exception for Sid Caesar. The writers’ rooms he led for Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour were not only legendary but aspirational. “Creative. Genius,” Bruce called him.

Caesar, said one NBC executive, was “gifted in a way rarely seen.” With Your Show of Shows, which ran live on Saturday nights in the early 1950s, he led one of television’s all-time great ensembles- Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris- and presided over a writers’ room that would shape American comedy for generations, including brothers Neil and Danny Simon, Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, and Selma Diamond among others. Both Neil’s play Laughter on the 23rd Floor and the movie (later a musical) My Favorite Year are based on this once-in-a-millennium writers’ room.

Today, Caesar has largely faded from popular memory. David Margolick seeks to correct that with his new biography, When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy. ”

People will ask, ‘Who’s Sid Caesar?'” Brooks predicted to Margolick. This definitive book answers that question- and restores Caesar to the pantheon of comic artists where he belongs. It’s not as though Caesar went unrecognized in his lifetime. He won multiple Emmys and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Yet he never received a Kennedy Center Honor, The National Medal of Arts, or the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. What he did receive-the Alan King Award in American Jewish Humor-may be the most telling tribute of all, and is one of the more compelling aspects of Margolick’s portrait of Caesar and his times.

Caesar, with two-thirds of his costars, along with all seven of his principal writers, were Jewish. Though nothing on Your Show of Shows was explicitly Jewish. Margolick notes that, in multiple ways: “Caesar’s humor was Jewish, and Jews read it as such. Its point of view- literate, detached, irreverent, [and] skeptical of conventional wisdom, conceit, certitude, or authority of any kind, and faith in the fairness of the universe- was Jewish. In it, the privileged and stuck-up always look ridiculous, snobs get theirs, the cocksure are shaken, phonies are unmasked, the overly ambitious and pretentious ridiculed. There is resentment toward the Establishment and sympathy for the underdog.”

Jews made up a disproportionate share of the Your Show of Shows audience. Producer Mel Tolkin would prod the writing staff with the line, “Jews all over America will be watching!” But Caesar and company did not refer to theirs as Jewish humor. They termed it New York humor, which became code for “Jewish.”

Margolick compares what cartoonist Jules Feiffer called the “smartness” of Your Show of Shows to the sensibility that inspired another group of young Jewish satirists to create Mad magazine around the same time.

At an award ceremony years later, Alan King read something Woody Allen had told The New York Times: that working with Caesar remained one of his proudest credits, and that Caesar’s influence never left him. King, then, invoked a pantheon of Jewish greats- Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Vladamir Horowitz, and Leonard Bernstein-before pointing to Caesar.

“In this pantheon,” King said, “this bearded old Jew is right up there with the gods. Really.”

Do yourself a favor: Cue up Your Show of Shows sketches on YouTube and marvel at Caesar and company in such masterclasses as “This Is Your Story” and “The Bavarian Clock.” They truly don’t make ’em like that-or like Caesar-anymore. Really.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago writer who writes for VanityFair.com, The Washington Post and other outlets.