Sid Caesar Was My Father

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And Imogene Coca my mother. But only for a day or two, and not as publicly as I might have liked.

The year was probably 1958, and Sid Caesar's comedy-variety show, which first came to fame as Your Show of Shows, was back on NBC, though under a different name. With co-stars such as Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris collaborating with a writing team that featured such not-yet-famous names as Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen, Caesar was a 1950s television comedy trailblazer, and he did it with 39 live episodes a year.

As a child actor on New York City television, nine or ten years old at the time, I was cast in a sketch for the show. Not exactly a starring role: I was to play one of a dozen or so children of Caesar and Coca. All I remember was that it was a chaotic family dinner scene around a long table, and that the first rehearsal may have been the day before, more likely just the day of. Unfortunately for my bragging rights, the sketch apparently never jelled to their satisfaction and was canned hours before that week's show went on the air. Such was live television.

Mom and Dad

Sid Caesar will turn 90 this September 8th, but since I recently found myself again marveling at his old clips, I decided to jump the gun and celebrate dear old dad's birthday with a post highlighting some of his physical-ish comedy. While Coca started out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, Caesar didn't have a physical comedy background nor the movement vocabulary of a Chaplin or Keaton. However, many of his skits escalated to a level of chaos where bodies start getting flung all over the place, with hilarious results. These are all classics, but I'm sure a lot of you haven't seen them, and even if you have, well, not watching them again would be an insult to our family.

First up is This is Your Story, a parody of the This is Your Life tv show, in which raw emotion is converted into raw physical action faster than you can say "Uncle Goofy." That's Carl Reiner as the host and Howie Morris as the over-affectionate uncle.




Caesar was also an accomplished musician, having played sax with Benny Goodman before making it as a comedian. In Three Haircuts, Carl Reiner, Howie Morris, and Caesar parody the pop stars of the 50s with "You Are So Rare" and "Flippin' Over You." The second piece has some truly athletic moves.




Here he joins Nanette Fabray for an elaborate and often brilliant pantomime of a husband and wife quarreling to the score of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Slower paced was The Clock, but it provides a good lesson in building a gag.




Even when he's not at all physical, Caesar doesn't need intelligible dialogue to get a laugh. In 2007, an 85-year-old Caesar hobbled onto the stage of the tv improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? to do battle with Drew Carey in a game matching skills at foreign language "double talk," and proceeded to run gibberish circles around the younger comedian.



Just for the record, the only languages Caesar actually speaks are English and Yiddish.

Happy 89½ birthday, pops!


Some Links:
A Charlie Rose interview with Caesar.
The official Sid Caesar web site.
Caesar's Hours: My Life In Comedy, With Love and Laughter, Caesar's "artistic autbobiography."

Early Film: Slippery Jim (1909)

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Here's a curiosity for you from 1909, years before the Keystone Cops and then Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton, et. al. ushered us into the heyday of silent film comedy. Produced by Pathé in France under the title Pickpock ne Craint pas les Entraves (pickpockets fear no barriers), it was released in the U.S. under the title Slippery Jim, with English inter-titles.

The pickpocket in question is arrested by the police, handcuffed, and locked in a cell. For the next eight minutes he repeatedly and nonchalantly proves himself to be a master escape artist thanks to his talent as a contortionist and shape shifter. It's all very clever, but it's all accomplished by camera tricks, specifically stop-action substitution.

The Catalonian director, Segundo de Chomón, had worked with that pioneering French movie magician, Georges Méliès, and the film is full of the same sort of tricks of construction — bodies being assembled from component parts — that hearken back to the days of Joseph Grimaldi.

Some of Chomón's visual effects are remarkably smooth for 1909 (e.g., splitting the cop in half), others quite amateurish (e.g., the aerial bicycle). The unnamed performer seems agile enough — watch him scamper up that water pipe — but since the "physical" comedy is faked, perhaps we should just call this "visual" comedy... or live animation! Still, it's quite watchable, and amusing enough. The original music for the film was composed by Antonio Coppola in 2008.

The Steamroller Gag

At least that's what I call it: the flattening of a living, breathing human being into a pancake. Here's the segment again from Slippery Jim, though here they're flattened by a swinging door.

This was done in live performance earlier than 1909 in a pantomime by the Byrne Brothers, and later became associated with the Ringling Brothers clown, Paul Jung, whose steamroller was powered by clowns walking inside it. Here's the description from my Clowns book (glad I remembered I wrote this!): In Jung's version, the steamroller plows into a clown street cleaner, leaving behind an oilcloth silhouette of him on the ground, flat as a pancake. The cloth victim is placed on a stretcher. A clown policeman tries to arrest the reckless driver and is in turn flattened by the powerful machine. Finally, a dwarf with a false head is struck by the steamroller; his head rolls off and is also flattened.

And here's a variation on the gag from Mel Brooks' 1976 film, Silent Movie. Brooks, Marty Feldman, and Dom DeLuise hope to convince Burt Reynolds to appear in a modern silent movie they're trying to make.

Appendix: Segundo de Chomón

From the excellent Europa Film Treasures web site:
Directed by Segundo de Chomón, Catalan artist settled in France, this film renews the genre of the effect film, mixing successfully chase films and effects films. Chomón’s imagination is wilder than ever. Chomón makes the most of his rare technical skills in an interminable series of effect films with Julienne Mathieu his spouse for the company Pathé Frères. This Spanish man from Teruel leaves his office job to become a colorist for Georges Méliès. A good part of his career is spent at Pathé’s where he participates in the set up of a system of industrial coloring; the Pathécolor. In 1901, Chomón settles down in Barcelona. He directs numerous documentaries, has a go at animation and effects. Called back by Pathé to Paris, Chomón works as a camera operator on The Goose that laid golden eggs in particular. He directs all in all about forty films and makes an attempt at every genre. Action, laughter, imagination and much madness… As a Pathé advertisement of the day read: “If it’s funny, then we’re sure to go see it !”


Update (12-4-11): Here's an effusive review of the film from Matt Barry, whose Art & Culture of Movies Blog is well worth checking out.

Not Exactly Physical Comedy: The 2000-Year-Old Man

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Read the whole article here.



Update (12-2-09):
As part of the publicity tour for their new CD/DVD set The 2000 Year Old Man:The Complete History, Brooks and Reiner also did an interview with The Onion A.V. Club, which you can read here.