John Lahr, writing in the London Review of Books, offers the sharpest piece I've read on Sid Caesar — ostensibly a review of David Margolick's new biography When Caesar Was King, but really a psychological autopsy of American comedy's first TV star and the culture he shaped. Caesar's Your Show of Shows reached 50 to 60 million viewers per episode between 1950 and 1954. His salary went from $5,000 to $25,000 a week. The show's sponsor, Admiral TV, went from producing 100 sets a week to 5,000 a day — and then cancelled the show because they needed to focus on manufacturing. "We're being dropped because the show was too good?" Caesar asked.
The writers' room that Caesar presided over became the training ground for Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen. But offstage Caesar had no personality to speak of. Brooks's first wife called him "as relatable as a jellyfish." The piece tracks how a child nicknamed Silent Sidney — put on a train at age four with a sign reading ASBURY PARK and catching a glimpse of his mother on the platform of an opposite train heading back to New York — turned rage and silence into the most ambitious sketch comedy of the 1950s, then lost it entirely to drugs and drink.
