NOTE: This is intended to run with attached photo of Caesar as the Professor with Imogene Coca as a box/extended cutline
MAN OF CHARACTER(S)
Sid Caesar’s “Professor” character, seen here with co-star Imogene Coca on Caesar’s breakout TV series “Your Show of Shows,” has been described as “a gibberish-spouting expert know-nothing.” He was one of many Caesar creations, including:
• Charlie Hickenlooper, half of TV’s first bickering couple.
• Gut von Fraidykat, a mountain-climbing expert.
• Ludwig von Spacebrain, a space expert.
• Ludwig von Henpecked, a marriage expert.
• Progress Hornsby, a dim-witted jazz master.
• Somerset Winterset, a nonsensical storyteller.
Caesar also brought his comedy to movies including “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” “Airport 1975,” “Silent Movie,” “Grease” and “Grease 2,” “The Cheap Detective” and “History of the World Part I.”
— ArLuther Lee
Sid Caesar, the TV comedy pioneer whose rubber-faced expressions and mimicry built on the work of his dazzling team of writers that included Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, died Wednesday. He was 91.
Family spokesman Eddy Friedfeld said Caesar, who also played Coach Calhoun in the 1978 movie “Grease,” died at his home in the Los Angeles area after a brief illness.
“He had not been well for a while. He was getting weak,” said Friedfeld, who lives in New York and last spoke to Caesar about 10 days ago.
In his two most important TV series, “Your Show of Shows,” 1950-54, and “Caesar’s Hour,” 1954-57, Caesar displayed remarkable skill in pantomime, satire, mimicry, dialect and sketch comedy. And he gathered a stable of young writers who went on to worldwide fame in their own right — including Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart (“M*A*S*H”), and Allen.
“He was one of the truly great comedians of my time and one of the finest privileges I’ve had in my entire career was that I was able to work for him,” Allen said in a statement.
Reiner, who was a writer-performer on the breakthrough “Your Show of Shows” sketch program, told KNX-AM Los Angeles that he had an ability to “connect with an audience and make them roar with laughter.”
In a statement, Reiner called Caesar “inarguably the greatest pantomimist, monologist and single sketch comedian who ever worked in television.”
Friedfeld said Caesar always shared the acclaim.
“Sid was an innovator, he and his team. He was very careful about never taking credit alone. He believed in his co-stars and his writers,” he said. “They created the amazing vehicles for him to be creative.”
Caesar was born in 1922 in Yonkers, N.Y., the third son of an Austrian-born restaurant owner and his Russian-born wife. His first dream was to become a musician, but as a youngster waiting tables at his father’s luncheonette, he liked to observe as well as serve the diverse clientele, and recognize the humor happening before his eyes.
His talent for comedy was discovered when he was serving in the Coast Guard in Palm Beach, Fla., during World War II and won a part in a Coast Guard musical, “Tars and Spars.” He also appeared in the movie version.
That led to other film roles, nightclub engagements, and then his breakthrough hit, a 1948 Broadway revue called “Make Mine Manhattan.”
His first TV comedy-variety show, “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” premiered in February 1949. But it was off the air by June. Its fatal shortcoming: It was selling more Admiral television sets than the company could make, and Admiral, its exclusive sponsor, pulled out.
But everyone was ready for Caesar’s subsequent efforts. “Your Show of Shows,” which debuted in February 1950, and “Caesar’s Hour” three years later reached as many as 60 million viewers weekly and earned its star $1 million annually.
When “Caesar’s Hour” left the air in 1957, Caesar was only 34. But the unforgiving cycle of weekly television had taken a toll: He had started relying on booze and pills for sleep every night so he could wake up and create more comedy.
It took decades for Caesar to hit bottom. In 1977, he was onstage in Regina, Canada, doing Simon’s “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers” when, suddenly, his mind went blank. He walked off stage, checked into a hospital and went cold turkey. Recovery had begun, with the help of wife Florence Caesar, who would be by his side for more than 60 years, until her death four years ago, and helped him weather his demons.
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