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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SID CAESAR!  
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Paul Buhle
January 13, 2026
Portside

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_ The most informative of all studies of humor on US television in
its early golden years, this biography deserves wide reading. For
readers sympathetic to today’s protests against media-created
monsters it will offer reflections on what comedy can do _

Photo credit: Austin Film Society, September 2015, Watch This: Sid
Caesar in One of the Funniest Comedy Sketches Ever,

 

Successor to Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx and Jack Benny among other
comedic giants, Sid Caesar also symptomized a  certain Jewish
coming-of-age in the land of dollars and film spectaculars. 

When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy
[[link removed]]By
David MargolickSchocken Books / Penguin Random House; 400
pagesNovember 11, 2025Hardcover:  $35.00 

 
Schocken Books / Penguin Random House
 

 

At another, more visible layer, Caesar personifies an age of cultured
television. Opera singers and classical music, hour-long drama on
social themes, all these challenged the audience to uplift while
enjoying themselves. By the end of the 1950s, with live dramatic
productions in Manhattan studios and high quality anthologies replaced
by Hollywood sets and cowboy shows,  social themes had to be hidden
or recast within genres as unlikely as half-hour medical dramas
and  hip detective shows. 

_When Caesar Was King_ is above all a meticulous biography. Born in
1922 and raised in Yonkers, the son of  blue collar Jewish
immigrants, he began talking at age 3. Very likely for that reason, he
seemed to acquire a personality by imbibing the accents of others.
Also by traveling to Manhattan with his father to eat at Ratners and
sweat off the calories at the famed Eight Street Baths, with ambience
galore. Picking up a saxophone someone left behind, teenage Sid taught
himself to play and joined a dance band touring the Catskills. He
spent the War years stateside, enrolled in the Coast Guard. There, and
back in wartime Brooklyn, he put together shows performed on the base.
More than a few future Jewish comedians and comedy writers of note did
the same, writing, singing, or acting, seizing the opportunity to try
out their own material.

Camp Tamiment in the Poconos, famous for its labor/socialistic ties
and Broadway connections,  later lent its name to the “labor
library” for Greater New York (now housed at NYU) and marquee Left
history archive. There at the Camp, at any rate, Caesar found the
audience he had been intuitively seeking. Sophisticates in their own
way, this almost exclusively Jewish crowd fell in love with a
cleverness and sophistication that set him apart from the
anything-for-a- laugh standard. He famously went after the Fascists
and anti-Semites, abroad and at home, but also played brilliantly upon
the Jewishness of the heavily ethnic generations. Thus, for example,
he staged a “Yiddish Mikado” within an imaginary Hasidic town in
Japan. 

By a happy coincidence, the non-Jewish Imogene Coca had actually
learned some Yiddish phrases a few years earlier there, anticipating
her own destiny. Caesar wrote and played in a GI play, “Tars and
Spars,” performed in theaters and later made into a film of the same
name. _Time Magazine _discovered him and the young Caesar was on his
way.

From there, it was more or less straight up to a level of recognition
that astounded even himself. He worked furiously in clubs and
sometimes on Broadway during the post war years. A few critics
complained that his material, wildly entertaining, avoided anything
political. Never mind: he represented the Jewish generation that had
suddenly gained legitimacy within US culture. Thanks to the Holocaust,
they were also the largest, as well as the most comfortably secure,
Jewish community in the world. The Jewish exoticism that remained—at
least between New York and Los Angeles—had also largely lost
its  once-dominant religious connotations. With the arrival of
television, it had entered uncharted territory.

Most of the TV-watchers of the 1950s would remember later how a
generous sliver of the new entertainment mode urgently sought to
uplift the sensibilities of viewers. Pat Weaver, the Czar of NBC,
privately named one of his efforts “Operation Frontal Lobes.” On
various shows, kids visited the Supreme Court, even met with Einstein
and Toscanini, albeit in the company of stars. A midwestern viewer
like me got to “visit” Washington Square Park with dancer Ray
Bolger on Sunday afternoons, and this, too, seemed uplifting as well
as amazingly sophisticated. 

Uplift constantly hinted “New York” and “New York” meant
Jewish. The audiences of early television were bicoastal without much
in the middle. Jewish humor, Jewish sophistication, came through in a
thousand small ways. “Your Show of Shows,” a veritable circus of
entertainment, was a hit from its 1950 debut and a veritable rocket
that sent Caesar, its singular star, up into the stratosphere. 

Opening with a dialogue between Caesar and Coca, _Your Show of
Shows _moved on to assorted cultural offerings, including clips from
ballets and operas, then onward  again to comic sketches. The Cesar
and Coca, as two “out of towners” befuddled by the Big City,
fairly drove home the point. Anywhere but New York (not yet Los
Angeles) was “out of town.”

Caesar quickly became the opposite of rival Milton Berle, the
laugh-a-minute Uncle Miltie who could wear women’s clothes or play a
baby. Tall and handsome, he performed a sort of theater, entering the
minds of any creature he chose. His pantomime genius had not been
seen, many critics said, since silent film. Charlie Chaplin agreed.
Caesar also improvised constantly. Chico Marx, the comedian as critic,
observed that Caesar appeared so often on his own show, week after
week, that he could not possibly memorize all those lines. This was
the problem with a television genius of the medium’s early years: he
would be worn down, physically and psychologically, by the sheer pace
of the work.

Psychoanalysts, then in their own prime—reputedly replacing Marxist
savants as prosperity but also “alienation” reached more of
postwar America—dove into  Caesar’s mind, and not just
vicariously in the magazines and letter-columns. Caesar and his
writers reputedly ALL went to psychoanalysts, on a weekly basis, some
(like Caesar himself) still more often. Rising high from where they
were only a few years earlier, they were never far from an equally
rapid descent and they knew it. Before the end of the 1950 season, its
first, “Your Show of Shows” was already described
by_ Variety_ as “tired.” 

Television had barely begun to expand its audience. Caesar, who knew
only New York and LA, referred to the rest as “the midwest,” had
unwittingly laid a trap for himself most of all. A certain type of
humor became “too New York,” by the middle 1950s, when “Your
Show of Shows” had been on for five years. “Too New York”
inevitably signaled “too Jewish.” In a head-to-head contest that
drove Caesar almost literally berserk, Lawrence Welk won the ratings
game away from him, week after week. The nearly violent satires of
down-home kitsch staged by Caesar and his writers probably made Welk
still more popular.

In retrospect, the end was inevitable and it came down like volcanic
ash, the aftermath of a popular culture explosion. But Caesar remained
so beloved and admired by newspaper columnists—he appeared in clubs
or other venues and chummed with them—and so popular among a slice
of the audience, that even falling apart, missing lines, drinking
heavily and oddly losing weight from his svelt standard in the next
years, he did not disappear from the small screen. Instead, over the
course of the later 1950s to the middle 1960s and intermittently
later, he reappeared first in limited series, then in guest shots, and
still later in films definitely not destined for screen immortality. 

By his own admission, he entered a cocoon of sorts for twenty years.
From Margolick’s account, it appears that smoking a lot of marijuana
calmed him greatly and allowed him to feel less than totally crushed
by his spectacular downfall. He could, perhaps, appreciate what a
historic figure he had been in a crucial moment of popular
entertainment aka television.

In passing, Margolick touches upon a political point otherwise easily
missed.

Driven underground by the Blacklist of the McCarthy Era, working under
assumed names, more than a handful of Lefties found a way to get their
work back into public attention. The most critically admired show of
the 1950s, _You_ _Are There_, and the most hilariously
rebellious, _The Adventures of Robin Hood -_ hiding their blacklisted
writers under assumed names, symptomized the larger picture of the
less punished “graylisted” actors, writers and directors who
managed to get work under their own names and sometimes to deliver a
message. 

Caesar’s own writing crew memorably included Carl Reiner, who titled
his first memoir_, Paul Robeson Saved My Life_. His guest hosts
included five who had been “named” in Red Channels—Burgess
Meredith, Jose Ferrer, Lena Horne, Marsha Hunt and Henry
Morgan—while the _Daily Worker_ praised  the program’s
“complete absence of red-baiting.” Comically, Margolick notes that
“Network publicists took care to purge the paper from their mailing
list.” (p.71). 

Caesar died in  2014, given a Lifetime Achievement award by the
Television Critics Association a year earlier and celebrated on his
90th birthday by leading comics old and young. How many could truly
understand his life and work? Thanks to the YouTube availability of
his television work, perhaps more might now, in the 2020s, even if in
some limited and superficial sense. To understand his life and
achievements more fully, the selective reader would do no better than
imbibing _When Caesar Was King_.##

 

_[PAUL BUHLE is the editor of the authoritative, three volume
collection, __Jews and American Popular Culture_
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* Sid Caesar
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* humor
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* comedy
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* comedians
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* television
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* 1950s
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* McCarthy Period
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* McCarthy era
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* Jewish community
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* American Jewish community
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