Sid Caesar Was My Father

[post 249]

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."

Mime Bashing

Marcel Marceau

[post 242]

I suppose I could write a post about the virtues and limitations of mime training, but this isn't it. Sure, I took a smattering of classes, studying with Reid Gilbert, René Houtrides, Tom Leabhart, and Moni Yakim (and salivating over Children of Paradise), but I never really took to mime. (Translation: I sucked at it.) So instead of a treatise, just a few hopefully amusing snapshots of mime's public image over the years.

There was a time back in the day, following on the first wave of Marcel Marceau's popularity, that an aura of bold creativity was associated with mime.

And then there was the backlash.

Maybe it was all those white-faced pantomimists who thought being trapped inside an imaginary box was a profound statement on the human condition. Maybe it was all the Shields & Yarnell wannabees,  mimicking people on the street for cheap laughs. Or maybe it was all Woody Allen's fault.

In A Little Louder, Please, a 1966 comic piece for The New Yorker,  Allen pointed out the obvious: much of the audience just didn't get it:

The curtain-raiser was a little silent entertainment entitled Going to a Picnic. The mime... proceeded to spread a picnic blanket, and, instantly, my old confusion set in. He was either spreading a picnic blanket or milking a small goat. Next, he elaborately removed his shoes, except that I'm not positive they were his shoes, because he drank one of them and mailed the other to Pittsburgh. I say "Pittsburgh," but actually it is hard to mime the concept of Pittsburgh, and as I look back on it, I now think what he was miming was not Pittsburgh at all but a man driving a golf cart through a revolving door — or possibly two men dismantling a printing press.

And so on and so forth. You can read the whole selection here.

Not only were mimes confusing, they were annoying as hell. Before you knew it, mime bashing had become quite acceptable. If you couldn't make derogatory jokes about minorities, women, or gays, you could still put down mimes and — ha ha — not worry about them talking back.

This had been going on for a long time already when Bill Irwin was recruited to play an annoying mime ("worse than Hare Krishnas") in the 1991 movie, Scenes from a Mall, co-starring (guess who?) Woody Allen. (In fairness to Woody, he didn't direct this one, Paul Mazursky did.) Here's a compilation of the annoying mime scenes:




I hadn't thought much about mime lately, at least not about traditional illusion pantomime, until last month when I had two pantomime sightings. The first was Brooklyn clown and mime Jeff Seal, who decided to make a video based on all those Shit __ Say videos so popular on YouTube today. (Shit Girls Say; Shit Boyfriends Say; Shit Hipsters Say; etc.) You guessed it: Jeff did Shit Mimes Say. It turns out so did several other people, but I'm happy to report that his is by far the best:




So far mimes aren't looking great in this post, so let's go to my second pantomime sighting: Billy the Mime. Friends encouraged me to see his show at UCB (Upright Citizen's Brigade), a home for up-and-coming stand-up and sketch comics. How would a mime do there, especially one who wore the traditional costume and whiteface, and communicated through placards and silent illusions?

Quite well, actually. His show sold out and the audience laughed a lot; there was no mime bashing from that crowd. His technique is good, but what separates him from a lot of mime is his weighty and at times sensationalist subject matter. A lot of the content is sexual, and he does not hesitate to mime a variety of sexual acts in graphic detail. If anything, he can be faulted for sometimes being lewd and outrageous just for the shock value. Still, many of the pieces are quite good. First his publicity trailer:




And A Night at Monticello:




Somehow I can't quite imagine Marceau performing that one!

Woody Allen & the Boxing Kangaroo

[post 060]

The hardest act I ever had to follow, bar none, was the boxing kangaroo on the Hubert Castle Circus. Here's Woody Allen battling a kangaroo when he was playing ringmaster at the Hippodrome in 1966.

I've seen feistier kangaroos, but I suspect this critter was intimidated by Allen's reputation as a take-no-prisoners pugillist.




Update: That is, if you can call a film clip from 1896 an "update." I just came across this 27-second clip of a boy boxing a kangaroo, part of a 5-minute Edison film called A 1896 Fairground Programme. You can see the whole film on Europa Film Treasures.