The Last Caesar

When Sid Caesar’s death was announced last week, I was sorry to hear of the passing of a real TV pioneer – a term I reserve for a precious few. Sid Caesar and his “Your Show of Shows” was a little bit before my time. But in countless clips and  testimonials over the years I’ve become familiar with  the great contribution he made to not only the fledgling medium of television  but also to television as hardware. He was one of the few who made owning a television set as important as Steve Jobs made owning a personal computer decades later.

According to an article in the New York Times when Caesar’s show hit the airwaves in 1950 only 10 percent of the population owned a set. A decade later  that figure had swelled to 90 percent , largely to people like Caesar and the transmogrified vaudevillians who became the first TV personalities.

He was one of the first performers to introduce sketch comedy and recurring characters to the new format. He contorted his face in grotesque ways  and used other physical devices to garner huge laughs  from  live audiences, not sound tracks.  And not only that.  His eye for creative writing talent gave young writers like Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Mel  Brooks an opportunity to hone their comedic genius.

Sid Caesar was the inspiration for generations of comedians that would follow. Billy Crystal spoke reverently about Caesar and the profound effect he had  not only on him  but many of his contemporaries.  Caesar also germinated the ideas that would later  launch the  future programming formats of Carl Reiner (the Dick Van Dyke Show) and Larry Gelbart (Mash).

For me, though, my favorite remembrance of Sid Caesar is the character he played in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In the film’s  star-studded cast Caesar plays the even tempered husband of Edie Adams, who tries to find an equitable solution   for a host of treasure seekers all intent on reaching the booty first, until he too, succumbs to the avarice.

It’s too bad that his career flickered instead of flamed. For there are several generations who have grown  up not appreciating  Caesar’s significant contribution  to popular culture and TV set sales.