The Comic Genius Who Pushed Television Further Than It Could Go

"The great silent comics-Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon-were compact men, resilient and sprung-wound yet graceful as they coped with menaces like recalcitrant umbrellas, stick-wielding cops, and collapsing buildings. They made minimal demands on the world; they wanted only to survive its aggressions. Sid Caesar, who was equal to them in talent and who dominated television comedy for most of the nineteen-fifties with "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour," was large and beefy, a noisy, lunging Everyman, a tumult of dissatisfied flesh."

"Caesar did not look like a comic. As a young man, he might have passed for a macher on Queens Boulevard-a lawyer, say, or a department-store manager. But this average-looking citizen could become almost anything, throwing himself into roles with shattering power. "Every gag that can possibly be told," he once remarked, "has already been told, but there's something funny in everything, even the way a man opens a door or sits down to read a newspaper." Standup wasn't his thing."

"He could play a genteel clerk, polite but so lustful that he can't handle a cup of tea without scalding the woman he's smitten with; as he wrecks her parents' house, his manners never fail. The external world threatened Caesar less than the vexations of ordinary life. He and his performing partner, the saucer-eyed Imogene Coca, who was thirteen years older and half his size, played a married couple who'd open many episodes of the show."

Sid Caesar dominated 1950s television comedy with Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, reshaping the medium through energetic, character-driven sketches. He contrasted with compact silent-era comics by using a large, noisy physicality and explosive transformations. Caesar preferred observational character work over standup or topical hipness, finding humor in ordinary gestures and domestic vexations. He partnered with Imogene Coca for precise, sometimes unnerving skits that mined everyday frustrations for comedy. Caesar's performances treated small social and personal irritations as the chief comic threat, often converting commonplace actions into comic spectacle.

Read at The New Yorker