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.

Our Man in Mexico: Graham Greene and Deceased Artiste Shirley Temple

When Joan Fontaine died recently, the discussion among movie buffs naturally turned to the question “which Golden Age Hollywood stars are still among us?” Shirley Temple’s name was rarely if ever brought up, because she exited the business in 1950 (with a handful of “comeback” projects, including a TV show in the late Fifties), and her career — although massive at its height — didn’t last as long as those of Olivia de Havilland, Kirk Douglas, and the never-gonna-quit Mickey Rooney.

Still, Temple was the biggest child star of all time in America (“adjusting for inflation,” which makes the dimes spent going to the movies in the Thirties equal to the 12-14 bucks shelled out today).

She started attracting attention in the movies in the early Thirties, but her string of vehicles from 1933-38 made her a major star (from the ages of 5-10). She was a top box-office attraction from ’35-’38. The oddest bit of trivia: at the height of her fame, Fox had a 19-person team of writers at the ready to write Shirley’s vehicles (labeled the “Shirley Temple development team”).

In the Forties she became a pleasant teen performer, but the public wasn’t interested in seeing her star in films anymore; she did have nice supporting turns in Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) with her then-husband John Agar, and with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947).

Her most notable film from that era, for movie “mythology” reasons, is That Hagen Girl (1947), a melodrama in which Shirley is believed to be the daughter of a lawyer, played by ol’ Bonzo himself, Ronald Reagan. The film ends with the two of them — father-figure and daughter-figure — going off together as a romantic couple (in real-life Temple was 19, Reagan was 36, so it’s not that unusual in a H’wood pic, but I guess the fact that their relationship changed so radically as the picture went on soured viewers and critics).

Temple liked the film, but noted that Reagan didn’t, and that prints of it seemed to “disappear” when he was president. The film came out of “hiding” in the Nineties and is now available on YT in its entirety:

Shirley distinguished herself as a diplomat from the Nixon administration through that of George H.W. Bush (she was a steadfast Republican throughout her adult years) and made an important decision to publicly discuss her bout with breast cancer in the early Seventies (she of course won, living 40 more years). She was that rarest of birds in Hollywood: a well-adjusted child actor, whose adult life may not have been spent in show business, but who made important contributions to society.

And then there’s Graham Greene… One of the most interesting things from today's perspective about the critical perception of Shirley Temple at the time of her amazing stardom was a review that the Third Man novelist wrote in October 1937 about the Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie, directed by the mighty John Ford (who did what Fox told him to do) and based on a Kipling tale. At the time Shirley was wowing Depression audiences with her moppet cuteness and chipper attitude. Greene, however, saw something else in her stardom.

In Night and Day magazine, he wrote of Temple: "Her admirers – middle-aged men and clergymen – respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire."

Greene was hit with a civil libel suit by the producer of the movie and fled to Mexico to avoid being prosecuted for criminal libel (the magazine went out of business). From January to May 1938 he stayed in Mexico writing The Power and Glory and avoiding extradition for the libel suit. Even forty years later he was not “allowed” to have the piece about Temple appear in one of his collections of articles.

The thing is, is that Greene was right. There was an odd underside to Temple's amazing success. It may not be as apparent in her squeaky-clean vehicle pictures (although author Jeanine Basinger has noted that there were weird Freudian symbols in those too), but the early series of shorts that Temple made called “Baby Burlesks” were sleazy as all get-out.

The premise is that little kids were parodying the adult movie hits of the day – quite like the “Dogville” series of shorts in which dogs acted out the hits of the day! It's not as disturbing to see dressed-up dogs pretending to be sexy and giving come-hither glances, a la Dietrich and Mae West. It is a little bizarre for kids dressed up in giant diapers to do it.

To strengthen Greene's argument, one would need only producer the short below, which is surprisingly deranged for its time (1933, still pre-Code!). Excuse the crappy colorization (it seems that most of Temple's kiddie vehicles were colorized in the Eighties). “Polly Tix in Washington” is insane:

So now that I've proven Our Man in Havana correct, I'll close out on a much sleazy note with the scene that has my vote for one of the silliest musical numbers of any Thirties musical (I'm not including Busby Berkeley items in this, as those are too bizarrely weird and kinky, and possessed of a very singular genius, to be classified as simply “silly”).

It's the moment in the 1938 Shirley Temple vehicle Little Miss Broadway in which our heroine wants to convince a judge that her adoptive father's show is a great one – so they stage a number from the damned thing IN the courtroom! (Methinks Lars von Trier was a fan, or at least had seen this moment of sheer craziness.) Here it is, again badly colorized, but you'll get the idea. RIP to the original “Little Miss Sunshine.”