Sid Caesar's "Gallipacci" or the Fine Art of Gibberish

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Sid Caesar (1922–2014), who I worked with VERY briefly (full story here), was one of the truly great American comedians. He was also the King of Gibberish, fluent in faking many a foreign language. I hadn't seen Gallipacci until Riley Kellogg recently ran across it and clued me in, but it's already one of my favorite Caesar pieces. And what an ensemble! That's Nanette Fabray as Pagliacci's wife, who in fact had opera training at Juilliard (despite a serious childhood hearing problem). Carl Reiner, partner to Mel Brooks and father to Rob, is the rival. And Howard Morris is the elfish Vesuvio. The score is —shall we say?— eclectic.

Hey, there is a lot of good sketch comedy these days on TV and elsewhere, but you would be hard pressed to find anything as ambitious and accomplished and, dare I say, as feckin' brilliant as this.

Hard to believe, but...

•  In real life, Caesar spoke only English and Yiddish
• This piece is thirteen and a half minutes long, and in those days Caesar's show was on for 39 episodes a year. Compare that to today's television "seasons" and the complexity of today's sketches.
• 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.

I'm in Torino, so I showed this piece to Italian clown compatriots Angela Delfini and Giuseppi Vetti, curious as to how it would work for them, what with them actually speaking Italian and all. They laughed a lot, and it got me to thinking that I'm familiar with all sorts of non-English gibberish, but there must be gibberish versions of English that I haven't heard. And of course there are. One of the most famous of these was Prisencolinensinainciusol, an Italian version of English by Adriano Celentano. (Full history here.)

 I must say there have been actual American rock songs that I didn't understand much more of.

And of course anyone with any clown or improv training has probably played gibberish games, which can be a very funny way of animating expression without depending on actual language. You can find a list of some of these here.

UPDATE:  Kendall Cornell just reminded me of this amazing woman who does gibberish in twenty plus languages remarkably well.

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."

Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life

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Old joke:
Two professors chatting.
First Professor:  I say, Rodney, have you read Derrida's treatise on grammatology?
Second Professor:  Read it?  I haven't even taught it!

Dick Van Dyke, physical comedian and star of stage and screen, has written a new book, Dick Van Dyke: My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business. I haven't read it, but I sure am writing this blog post about it.

Well, in my defense, I did listen to a 7-minute promo interview with him two days ago on NPR, and now you can too by clicking here.






I never saw Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (I have sons, not daughters), and the only time I saw Van Dyke live was as Harold Hill in a NYC revival of The Music Man; let's just say he was not right for the part. But I did grow up watching the Dick Van Dyke Show (created by Carl Reiner), one of the best sitcoms ever if you're trolling for physical comedy gems.

Every show started with these 18 seconds:


enter01 by towsen

Unless of course he wanted to surprise us by starting with these 18 seconds:


enter02 by towsen

Not every episode was full of physical comedy, but there were indeed some gems. Here's a highlight reel that conveniently proves my point.



Hats off to YouTube member Paul Hansen for the excellent edit!  And speaking of edits, here's a YouTube remix of a Van Dyke pantomime routine.



I did an earlier post of Van Dyke doing a "fake" physical comedy lecture, the kind where his speech gets undercut by physical mishaps. You can read the whole post here, but because I don't want to tax you with the arduous task of actually having to click on a link, here's that video clip again:




Which I include because it was not his only physical comedy lecture. In another episode he visits his son's school and quickly discovers it's better to show than to tell.


atSchool--class by towsen

Finally, if you're new to the Dick Van Dyke Show, you can watch nearly all of the  episodes (with new commercials) on Hulu by clicking here or without commercials on Netflix Instant Play (if you're a member).

And if you like what you see, check out his book!

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.