El Sid!: Deceased Artiste Sid Caesar

Looking back at the pioneering comedy variety-show hosts of the Fifties, it's easy to slot them into categories: the “Vaudeo” hosts (the initial term for the variety show format – vaudeville + video), whose work is very much of its time, including Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante, and Jackie Gleason; the movie stars who moonlighted on TV (Martin and Lewis and their fellows on The Colgate Comedy Hour); the innovators, who were ahead of their time and much copied and admired by their colleagues, including Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs. And then there was Sid Caesar, perhaps the most talented character comedian of them all.

The thing that is remarkable about Caesar – besides that stunning writer's room that contained several of the most important comedy writers and filmmakers of the following twenty years – was the fact that, unlike Gleason, Sid didn't run his characters into the ground. In fact he only did two with any regularity: the Professor and the “husband” character in sitcom-esque sketches with Imogene Coca as a couple called the Hickenloopers (this later appeared in Caesar’s Hour with Nanette Fabray).

Sid's overwhelming versatility and ability to mimic a wide variety of ethnic voices, accents, and languages made him a truly unique comedian – it's hard to think of anyone with that much range until the generation of British comic actors (Guiness, Sellers) who would play several leads in the same picture. Caesar operated on a much higher level of creativity than Uncle Miltie or “The Great One” – there was indeed a skill and art that went into his comedy, and as a result he was reportedly a very emotional individual prone to crazy gestures (as in hanging the young Mel Brooks out a window when he pissed Sid off one day).

Sid was like a supernova of energy that splashed all over the Fifties, to the extent that he seemed to have exhausted his talent (more accurately, exhausted himself) in the Sixties and Seventies. The title of his autobiography reflected those years in which he was lost in addiction: “Where Have I Been?” The best thing that happened to remind us all of just *how* brilliant he had been was the release in 1973 of the wonderful compilation movie Ten From Your Show of Shows.

That film remains the single best introduction to what Caesar did in his prime: ethnic voices, exuberant and extremely-physical physical comedy, playing the sole sane person in a world full of lunatics, and acting out gorgeously detailed pantomime bits with the equally wonderful Imogene.

However, the release some years back of the VHS and DVD sets of sketches from Your Show of Shows (1950-54) and Caesar's Hour (1954-57) was another momentous occasion, since we were able to hear from the individuals involved in the shows (all the writers, Sid himself, costars Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Nanette Fabray) just how extraordinary the writing process on Sid's shows was, as well as view the full range of Caesar's talents in hours of his best sketches. Steve Allen dubbed Caesar “TV's Chaplin,” and he was entirely right.

I full recommend those boxes and will be drawing from them for forthcoming tributes to Sid on the Funhouse TV show. In the meantime I will spotlight a few personal favorites from the items available online. There were several different types of sketches that Sid and company did on his two Fifties variety series. The first were music parodies. Here is a gorgeous bit of free-form nonsense called “What Is Jazz?”:

And Sid, Carl, and Howie become “The Three Haircuts.” This is a parody of hiccup-voiced singers like Johnny Ray and the general tenor of rock lyrics (Sid and his writing staff were jazz, big-band and classical people, what can I say?):

The second kind of sketch was the “interview.” Here Sid as his professor character is interviewed by Reiner about how to get to sleep:

The third is possibly the most wonderful, since you’ll rarely (if ever) see it on current-day comedy shows. It’s pantomime, done to a fine turn by Sid and Imogene. I know that Gleason did pantomime too, but his often ventured into the cloying and sentimental. Jerry Lewis performed various mime bits to music that were terrific, but Sid and Imogene were the supreme practitioners on TV.

Here they and Reiner and Morris do their classic “Swiss clock” bit that functions – well, like clockwork. And here is their perfect routine in which they play two bored classical musicians passing time between musical solos:

The various movie parodies that were done on Caesar’s shows allowed him to show the full range of his comic acting, as well as his uncanny ear for foreign accents and singular ability to make up nonsense language (that sounded just like the real thing) on the spot. A uploader on YT called “Vintage Comedy Vault” has been uploading a number of things from the DVD boxes, including some primo examples of the movie parodies.

One of the sadder items revealed in the “Sid Vid” VHS/DVD releases, in which the writers and others reminisce in between the sketches, is that the producers of Sid’s variety series were told by NBC to stop doing their sublime foreign movie parodies as time went on because more TVs were being sold in towns across America. The people in these “new” territories were not familiar with foreign movies, so the network feared they wouldn’t “get” what Sid and company were doing, and thus would tune out.

Thankfully we do have kinescopes of the movie parodies that were done on Your Show of Shows, when the writers were unabashed about doing humor based on foreign films and cultures. Here is a wonderful French sketch called “Le Honore du Juelle”:

This sketch called “La Bicylcetta” has nothing to do with “Bicycle Thieves” plot-wise, but the very fact that the Show of Shows team saw fit to do an Italian sketch about a bicycle being stolen meant they had seen the De Sica classic (these sketches are indeed funny whether or not you’ve seen the original film, btw — that idea was lost on the NBC heads).

And a beautifully detailed bit starring Sid and Howard Morris called “The German general,” which definitely reflects Murnau’s Last Laugh. This is silly, hysterical comedy that also has a brain (and a superb source):

The fifth type of sketch was one in which an ensemble is present and each new character that is introduced is crazier than the last. There are two perfect examples of this, the very funny “At the Movies” sketch and what is arguably one of the funniest sketches to ever air on American TV, a very broad and very brilliant spoof of the emotion-wrought series This Is Your Life. This is in the very top rank of Caesar sketches:

Sid was a consistently fine guest on other peoples’ variety shows in the Sixties and Seventies, when he was often paired with other Fifties icons like Berle (the two couldn’t have been further apart in terms of talent and comic approach). Here he is doing his professor character on The Dean Martin Show. Dean made a great straight man for Sid:

Much has been made of Caesar’s super-macho VHS workout tape (done when he was over 65), but I would like to highlight the fact that whenever Sid was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award (as I noted here, the Mark Twain Prize people overlooked him entirely), he would ask the organization giving him the award to include Imogene, since he felt they had functioned so well as a team back in the early Fifties (the two reunited in 1958 for the short-lived Sid Caesar Invites You and did a short-lived British TV series in the late Fifties).

Here is a mellow and beautifully detailed piece of husband-and-wife pantomime the two did much later on (1977) on The Tonight Show:

Perhaps the most intriguing rarity for those who love comedy history is the full episode of The Admiral Broadway Revue that is available online. It’s a revelation, since this is in the very early days of TV, when “Vaudeo” was indeed the dominant style (specialty acts, including Marge and Gower Champion, are all over this show).

The three credited writers are, oddly, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and producer Max Liebman (who I didn’t know had collaborated on the writing of Sid’s shows). The Admiral Revue was only on from January to June 1949 on both the NBC and Dumont networks. Admiral reportedly pulled the show when it proved so popular they received more orders for TV sets than they could possibly fulfill.

Sid did a bunch of his solo routines on the program, as with this “Five Dollar Date”:

The episode, which is up in its entirety on YT, has only three Sid segments and two with Imogene. They are:
— As a harassed dad with an Irish brogue (Imogene is one of his daughters), at 4:45

— As a Gorgeous George-style wrestler (17:30 in). Best line: “I’m supposed to win tonight – take it easy!”

— Imogene does a comic East Indian dance number at 27:00

— Sid does a piece “in one” in which he plays the part of a samba dancer dancing through the events of his life (37:30). Sid’s oddly Yiddish Spanish patter here isn’t his most accurate language impression, but it shows his ability to craft entire monologues in a fictitious language:

Caesar was the last of the Fifties TV icons to die, and he was certainly one of the most talented. “TV’s Chaplin” indeed.

“Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear”: the Speaking of Radio website

For me, radio is a magic medium, one that is, to borrow Fred Allen’s phrase about his nemesis (television), “rarely well done” these days. The most famous radio comedians and actors were indeed larger than life and also had incredibly memorable voices, which, naturally enough, had to be serve as their signatures. The wonderful website Speaking of Radio offers literally dozens of interviews with these special (and mostly departed) entertainers.

The website is the product of several decades’ work by Chuck Schaden, a radio broadcaster (and major fanatic) in the Chicago area. Schaden hosted a radio show called “Those Were the Days” from 1970-2009 and was lucky enough to get interviews with most of the major figures from radio’s past. He nabbed a bunch of them when they were passing through Illinois doing summer stock productions, but also traveled to L.A. to speak to a number of them.

Since pretty much all of these folks are dead now, Schaden (right) has a wonderful archive of both radio and early TV history on the Speaking of Radio site. It notes on the site that he published the interviews as a book, which must’ve been a very thorough history of Thirties-Fifties media, but it’s something else entirely to hear the voices of these folks, especially when they’re talking about topics they deeply love — or are deeply bitter about.

So what does Schaden offer on the site? The audio files aren’t downloadable (that is available for a fee), but you can listen to them for free online. The guest roster, as noted, is insane. It’s easier to cite the people he *didn’t* get to interview (Orson Welles, George Burns) than it is to mention all the seminal folk he did get to talk to. I’ll give it a try, though, based on the 30 or so interviews I’ve listened to in the past month.

Even though Chuck often had a limited amount of time with the A-listers from the Golden Age of Radio (less than 20 minutes), he was able to glean ample amounts of fascinating information. For a brief sampling, I’ll quote the moments I was most impressed by:

— His confabs with radio and early TV superstars Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Alice Faye, Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Milton Berle.

— Harry Von Zell, the announcer who worked a hell of a lot on old-time radio (several shows simultaneously), describing how he delivered one of the first on-air bloopers ever, by nervously introducing President Herbert Hoover as “Hoobert Heever.”

— The people who were willing to recreate great radio intros and special moments on-air for Schaden, including Mel Blanc, Louis Nye, and Tony Randall.

— Brett Morrison, a very monotone-sounding interview subject, suddenly coming out with a terrific version of the beloved intro to The Shadow, which he played on-air for longer than any other actor. (“Who knows what evil lurks… in the hearts of men…?”)

— Vincent Price, talking about his love of the medium and also of his devotion to fine art, noting that he’s making a Dr. Phibes sequel because the first film really needed a sequel (and he’s not kidding — I love Vinnie).

— The ever-awesome writer-producer Arch Oboler describing what radio can do that other media can’t, by describing a monster (your own real-life worst enemy) creeping up behind you….

— Mike Wallace (right) discussing being the narrator for both The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger, and the ways in which actors made extra dough (by perfoming the shows three times in succession, for each U.S. time zone!).

— Mel Blanc and Jim Backus talking separately about overcoming health troubles that nearly killed them (in Blanc’s case it was a near-lethal car accident).

— Howard Duff on being blacklisted: “I wasn’t even a good liberal!”

A few riveting negative moments (proving the interviews truly were off-the-cuff):

— Sid Caesar insisting he’s “not bitter,” but going on and on about how bad TV got after the Fifties.

— Hans Conreid responding to one of Schaden’s customary last questions (“Do you ever think radio comedy and drama as we knew it could return?”) by noting that traditional radio programs are completely gone forever (for their part, Joseph Cotton and Howard Duff very much lament the loss).

— Tony Randall maintaining that he had VERY little fondness for old-time radio, as he thought it was mostly badly scripted (with the exception of a few shows — he cites Benny, Fred Allen, and the you-either-love-it-or-you-don’t Vic and Sade).

— Rudy Vallee (above) being utterly charming about his own relative lack of popularity (“My records never sold…”), and then offhandedly telling a story in which he calls comedian Pinky Lee “Jewboy”….

And my two favorites:

— One of my all-time, big-time character actor faves, Sheldon Leonard, talking about how to properly deliver Damon Runyon dialogue.

— And Edgar Bergen not only speaking in his familiar dummy voices for Schaden, but also discussing what it was like to collaborate on writing sketches with the one and only W.C. Fields.

Schaden did indeed make the most of his time with these radio legends. A few other names found in the archive: Kate Smith, Don Ameche, Agnes Moorehead, Ricardo Montalban, Morey Amsterdam, and Ginger Rogers.

I found it fascinating that he refers to what we now term “old-time radio” or “the Golden Age of Radio” as “the radio days.” This was no doubt because network radio programs really ended in the mid-Fifties, which was a mere 15 years before Schaden’s nostalgia program went on the air. It’s interesting to contrast that 20-year “jump” in comparison to our own current binges of “instant nostalgia,” where mediocre items from 5-10 years ago are already packaged in “yes, I remember it well” talking-head TV series. (And the music-video Eighties is deemed as distant as the era of silent movies.)

Sample Schaden’s chats and you’ll find yourself moving back to a simpler era when, yes, voices and imagination mattered. And, while show-biz egos were still of course *incredibly* large, there were very well-regarded nice guys like Jack Benny on the A-list, and the talent involved could justify such ego.

Thanks to Rich Brown for turning me on to the SOR site.

“Top American Humor Award” claimed by unfunny tall goof — and look at the names who were passed over

It’s interesting to see the Mark Twain Prize, which went to Will Ferrell last week, referred to as the “top American humor award” on various news websites, since, as I’ve written before, the Prize has absolutely no value by this point. Especially since the nominating committee has clearly decided that they’ve made a winning connection to Lorne Michaels and Broadway Video. Thus, they’ll keep giving the award to amiable but WILDLY unfunny middle-aged comic actors from the SNL stable, and keep passing over the oldtimers who are still with us and have contributed a major amount to American comedy, but who haven’t had bad multiplex vehicles in the past few years, so… well forget about them, will ya?

I actually can’t forget about ’em, because mainstream American comedy generally is as shitty as it is because the crap-mill run by Lorne Michaels keeps cranking out these amiable types who can act goofy (Will Ferrell) or do the snark really well (Tina Fey), and thus get the admiration of millions of morons with unadventurous senses of humor. There are older comedy “black belt” performers whose work is much funnier and more imaginative, and who definitely deserve to be honored with the *supposedly* most prestigious humor award in America.

Read my piece on the people who've been passed over here. And on behalf of American comedy fans, I hereby apologize to Sid, Mel, Woody, Phyllis, Dick, Mort, and on and on. As for humor writers descended from the late, great Mr. Clemens, well, the Mark Twain Prize says fuck alla yez.

The Mark Twain Prize to... Tina Fey?: A list of far more deserving candidates for a lifetime achievement award

[The pics used to accompany this blog post are meant to illustrate a point. A pretty obvious one.]

The American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award shows were really something to watch back in the 1970s and ’80s. The folks receiving the prize were bona fide A-list talents who were without question worthy to get a lifetime achievement award. Two-hour award presentations were made to performers and filmmakers on the order of Ford, Welles, Hitchcock, Capra, Huston, Astaire, Cagney, Gish, Davis, Stanwyck, and Fonda.

In the 1990s, as U.S. culture and entertainment took its precipitous slide toward the utter soulless crap that is extremely popular in today’s mainstream, the AFI Award began going to performers and filmmakers whose careers were still in full flourish, but who could guarantee a solid audience for the TV airing of the award show. What had been amazing about the AFI was that, even though the usual “mavericks” (Ray, Fuller, Sirk, and on and on) were going to be ignored, in the '70s and '80s you were treated to CBS (I believe that was the network) presenting a two-hour show saluting the work of Lillian Gish or John Ford or Orson or some Golden Age star who worked in the era of black and white that network television wants to stay far, far away from (the opening and closing moments of Wizard of Oz aside).

Then, with the sole exception of Robert Wise, the AFI turned to honoring only those who would attract TV ratings and a roster of current-day Hollywood names to salute him/her. Nicholson, Eastwood, Spielberg, Scorsese, Streep, and others whose careers were still moving along at a steady clip were then honored, and the result was similar to the many, many moments in the Oscar ceremony when Hollywood slaps itself on the back and reminds us all what wonderful movies used to be made, and how the pap that comes out these days is the obvious continuation of what came before. The most interesting thing about the list of winners that can be found here is that the recipients have gone from being in their 70s and 80s to 45 for the extremely charming but oh-SO-non-versatile Tom Hanks (45).

I bring up all this about the valuelessness of the AFI awards, and the shameless grab for TV ratings (or even a network to air the event — for a bit it was relegated to cable from its original network home), to bring up the subject of yet another valueless encomium, the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. The Kennedy Center presents this honor, and it has been sort of dubious since its inception — what makes the Kennedy Center board experts on humor in America? Whatever their qualifications are or aren’t, the award has followed the same trajectory as the AFI award, except it has been even more singularly pathetic in its choice of honorees, its ignoring comic legends who deserve appreciation, and its craving for viewers (especially since the show airs on PBS, and not a commercial network).

The prize jumped the shark when it made its first fourth honoree, and its first female, Whoopi Goldberg, in 2001. I’m not going to debate Goldberg’s comic pedigree — she did do great accents and voices back when she did standup, but that was a very long, long time ago. In any case, they leapfrogged over the first modern female standup, Phyllis Diller, the second, Joan Rivers, and the many women who populated variety television (never mind the women comedy writers) to move on to Whoopi, after having saluted two national treasures and comic innovators — Richard Pryor and Jonathan Winters — and one gent who had a good run in the Fifties and Sixties, Carl Reiner.

Probably the next horrific honoree was Lorne Michaels in 2004. Michaels spearheaded a show that was brave, bold, and innovative for five years, and has been a walking-dead example of everything that is dull, boring, and formulaic in TV sketch comedy since then (with the exception of the sterling 1984-85 season, which was cast almost entirely with “ringers,” meaning people who were already proven commodities as sketch/character comedians). There have been others whose contribution to American comedy is indisputable (Neil Simon, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lily Tomlin), but the obvious mandate is to interest TV viewers in the ceremony, and so this year the winner of the prize is none other than the pin-up of snarky sketch and fake-news comedy, Tina Fey.

I am not going to debate the merits of Tina Fey as a comedian here. I find her stuff pleasant but not memorable. The hubbub that surrounded her Sarah Palin imitation in 2008 was fascinating, in that there were other comic actresses on the Web doing equally good impressions of the Brainless One, and Fey’s “material” was essentially direct quotes from Palin’s own verbal missteps. Fey is a good-looking woman (never let that slip out of the equation), and she is currently a powerhouse to be reckoned with in terms of reputation, paycheck, and drawing power. But is she the 2000s equivalent of Dorothy Parker? Not on your life. Except, of course, to those who consume only contemporary mainstream culture, and are not familiar with anything old, foreign, or even slightly "alternative."

In any case, since the Mark Twain Prize has now irredeemably jumped the shark, I would like to submit for public view a list of the people they’ve forgotten to honor (in case you haven't been looking at the pics I've scattered throughout this post). Maybe they feel these people wouldn't be “ratings bait” — then again, on PBS you’d think an older name would be ratings bait, but PBS is as dull and lifeless as the rest of American broadcasting these days.

I’m leaving out the names of such folk as Professor Irwin Corey and Bob Elliott, as I think that, though they richly deserve the prize, a mainstream board like the Kennedy Center’s would never be that hip. I also leave out the solid gold name of Woody Allen (who was without doubt in the top rank of American humorists of the second half of the 20th century), since I have the feeling that he has already turned the honor down. I can’t help but feel that they’ve never asked Mel Brooks, though, since I don’t think he would turn it down (not a man who revisits an item like Spaceballs). I know that they’re probably already prepping the Twain Prizes for Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Jack Black, so let me remind everyone who is still alive and deserves the Prize. If it really had any meaning.

• SID CAESAR
  
• Mort Sahl
  
• Shelley Berman
  
• Nichols and May
  
• Dick Gregory
  
• The Smothers Brothers
  
• Mel Brooks
  
• the aforementioned grandma of women standups, Phyllis Diller
  

And after all that, I’m not even going to mention that Mark Twain was a WRITER for fuck’s sake, and that breed of humorist hasn’t even been given a second thought. Then again, when your comedy prize is little more than a joke, well… it writes itself, doesn't it?