Schocken
Review by Walter Cummins
The hardest I’ve ever laughed took place more than fifty years ago. David Margolick’s book brought it all back in full hysterics, the experience of laughing so vehemently I sat stunned in a movie theater, actually laughed dry, unable to respond to the final skits. On screen was Ten from Your Show of Shows, a 1973 compilation of surviving kinescopes from TV broadcasts of the 1950s, when my teenage self first watched Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris creating an unsurpassed comedy standard for a new broadcast medium.
How could I forget my favorite skit of all time, “This Is Your Story,” a parody of a saccharine show titled “This Is Your Life”? Each week the host, Ralph Edwards, called up an unsuspecting someone—often a celebrity—from the audience to surprise with a compressed version of their history, bringing people from their past on stage to reveal something about them, often a person who hadn’t been seen in years, like an old high school teacher or a childhood playmate. The reactions were consistently sentimental.
In the parody, Caesar, who had slipped into a seat in the studio audience, heard the summoning of his fictional name—Al Duncey from Darling Falls, Montana—and after fainting began a panicked running through the theater until caught and dragged on stage, struggling to escape. The highlight of the fictional past relationships was Howard Morris as a tearful Uncle Goopy clinging to a tearful Caeser in an extended adlibbed embrace. The audience went wild. Margolick describes the scene as “an orgy of kissing, hugging, and slobbering.” Carl Reiner called it “the greatest sketch in the history of television,” and a New York Times critic called the reaction “the laughter of the gods.”
However, despite the initial emphasis on the retelling of very funny sketches and noting the exceptional affirmation of studio audiences, TV audiences, and a host of newspaper columnists and critics, When Caesar Was King ends up being a sad book as it depicts the decline of Caesar’s approach to humor and the downfall of Caesar the man.
Margolick offers several reasons for the brief ascendance of Caesar’s comedy, four stellar years of Your Show of Shows and three falling-off years of Caesar’s Hour, with a dwindling audience and worsening ratings. His audience share plunged from 62 percent to 26.
In part, Margolick attributes that loss to the growing number of TV stations and an audience spread beyond the more sophisticated cities of the medium’s initial years. Caesar and his writers refused to talk down, for example, sticking with parodies of foreign films that gave Caesar an outlet for a linguistic doubletalk that meant little to viewers in towns without theaters showing such movies. The lowest blow came when Caesar’s Hour’s audience was far smaller that that of The Lawrence Welk Show, with it’s awkward host and bland music.
An additional Margolick theory is a saturation of Caesar’s comedy with so many shows in such a relatively short time. Viewers began to experience repetition and redundancy and wanted something fresh. Your Show of Shows broadcast more than 150 episodes in four seasons, Caesar’s Hour another 73 from 1954 to 1957.
My personal addition to that theory is a comparison between Caesar and the Marx Brothers. Duck Soup had been my greatest source of laughter before the arrival of Uncle Goopy. The brothers made thirteen feature films in the twenty years between 1929 and 1949. I expect that they would have saturated their fans if they had come close to Caesar’s seven-year output. Groucho did go on to host 216 episodes of the quiz show You Bet Your Life between 1950 and 1961, sitting behind a high desk and demonstrating quick verbal wit rather than the costumed action of the movies. Caesar’s humor, in contrast, was entirely performative. He lacked a gift for clever words.
An even greater limitation for Caesar was his angry, depressive personality, with his reliance on therapists, alcohol, and drugs, along with compulsive gluttony. In rages, he pulled sinks off walls. He did not know how to interact with other people. On a multi-hour train trip with his co-star Imogene Coca he failed to exchange a word. He also appeared to have no loyalty to other people, dropping Coca when he had to shift to Caesar’s Hour, although he did bring her back when his career was grasping for appeal.
He was a mystery to others: “As intensely as he worked with his colleagues, Caesar remained an enigma to them. ‘We used to sit around and talk about what makes Caesar tick, talk about that more than anything else,’ Reiner recalled. ‘I don’t think anybody ever really figured him out.’”
Margolick in later chapters offers many details of Caesar’s inability to find an outlet during the decades of his long life after his status as a superstar ended when he was barely out of his thirties. He died at 91, and for many of those additional years people tried to find him performing projects, most of which were brief and unsuccessful. Those efforts seem to have taken place because of the man’s reputation as a legend rather than personal affection. As a king, Sid Caesar enjoyed a brief reign, then lay deposed for the majority of his life, sentenced to a figurative exile.
