Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old cry.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television.
This is episode number 30, Countdown 77 gibberish for 100 weeks that started in October 2025. This podcast is going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown is pegged to culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television as we know it was first appeared on Earth.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the world's first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, Gertrude Berg pioneered the situation comedy, first on radio and then in 1949 with the television premiere of the Goldbergs. Today, Sid Caesar brings us your show of shows.
This time the Jew didn't have to change his name or conceal his ethnic heritage. His father did that for him long before he was born.
Isaac Sidney Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York on September 8, 1922.
Immigration records show that Sid's father, Selig Zeisser, was born in 1874 in Galicia in what is now southeastern Poland. Selig immigrated to the US with his mother Dora when he was about nine years old.
By the time Selig Zizer applied for citizenship in 1896, he was using the name Max Caesar.
Max and his wife Ida ran a small 24 hour diner catering to Yonkers working class immigrant clientele with a kosher style menu of sandwiches and soups like Matzo Ball.
Isaac Sidney spent many hours of his formative years behind the counter carefully observing the patron's multilingual speech patterns.
It wasn't long before he began mimicking their Polish, Russian, Italian and other European accents and developing the double talk routines that eventually became central to the act that made him famous.
Before any of that, Sid Caesar studied music at Juilliard. He played the saxophone well enough to join the Shep Fields Orchestra in the late 1930s.
During World War II, he served in the Coast Guard and was stationed at a Brooklyn training center where he began getting laughs, imitating officers and perfecting his many accents.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: Sid Caesar first came to national attention in 1946 in TARS and Spars, a Coast Guard review adapted into a feature film by Columbia Pictures with Caesar co starring with Janet Blair and Elin Joslin.
One of the Hollywood insiders who caught Caesar in tars and bars was producer Max Liebman, who produced reviews for Tamament Playhouse and the Poconos, where he worked briefly with Caesar and saw in him a one man comedy juggernaut.
In the late 1940s, Liebman was hired to produce variety programming for NBC Television.
The network was also looking for a sponsorship vehicle for Admiral Corporation, a confluence.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Which neatly illustrates this unique moment in American culture and Commerce.
Founded in 1934, Admiral was one of the big four American TV manufacturers alongside RCA, Philco and Zenith.
By 1949, they were riding the early wave of TV adoption and pouring money into advertising. To sell more sets, NBC asked Liebman to develop a variety show that Admiral could sponsor.
Liebman proposed the Admiral Broadway Revue as a showcase for both the brand and the medium.
For a headliner, Liebman suggested Sid Caesar. But it may well be his next suggestion that struck the artery of TV comedy gold.
In addition to Sid Caesar, Liebman had worked with a comedienne named Imogene Koca. By casting them opposite one another, Liebman balanced Caesar's linguistic acrobatics and explosive energy with Coca's rubbery facial comedy singing and razor sharp timing. The Admiral Broadway Revue first aired on Friday, January 28, 1949.
The show was a revelation.
Sid Caesar and Imogene Koch's chemistry set a new standard for live television comedy. And by all accounts, including Sid Caesar's own memoir, Max Liebman was the glue that brought the show together.
Not just casting it, but shaping the tone and pacing and writing many of the early sketches.
Ironically, the show's success planted the seed of its own demise. Just 19 weeks later.
According to one account in the trade, the demand for Admiral TV sets increased so dramatically that the company could no longer justify spending money on programming.
Instead, Admiral redirected its ad budget to ramp up production, choosing to sell more TVs rather than continuing to advertise them.
But the experiment proved that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca could carry a show and that live television comedy could be something more than vaudeville in a box.
Starting on February 25, 1950, NBC broadcast you show of shows live from Manhattan's International Theater.
Every Saturday night, Sid Caesar, Imogene Koca and a supporting ensemble offered 90 breakneck minutes of comedy sketches, musical performances and theatrical send ups. Your show of show's distinguishing quality was its sophistication.
Rather than relying on burlesque or slapstick, Caesar and His co conspirators created parodies of foreign films, literary classics and operas. The show recreated domestic situations and let characters unravel in real time.
Sid Caesar could play a bumbling German professor, a neurotic husband, or a pompous film director, and often did all in the same night.
Front and center was Caesar's original party trick, his virtuosic delivery of nonsensical monologues in perfect pitch, mimicry of everything from German and Italian to Russian and French.
Orations that sounded utterly fluent, though they consisted of nothing more than pure gibberish.
And week after week, it was all live.
There were no cue cards, no tape delays and no duo.
The audience wasn't just watching comedy, they were watching comic trapeze artists performing without a net.
Your show of shows, electronic immediacy was created by a cast and writers room that assembled a virtual who's who of late 20th century American comedy, including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon and his brother Danny Simon, Larry Gillibart, Lucille Cowan, Mel Token and Norman Lear.
Your show of shows ran from 1950 to 1954, when it was succeeded by Caesar's Hour, which ran until 1957.
A different format gave Caesar a bit more breathing room, though much of the team remained intact and the quality of the sketches arguably deepened.
But Caesar was not immune to the pressures of television stardom.
After Caesar's Hour ended, he never quite regained a similar stature.
Attempts at a comeback fizzled and he struggled with alcohol and prescription drugs throughout the 1960s.
After recovery, he appeared in films like Grease in 1978 and Mel Brooks History of the World Part 1 in 1981, and was rightly canonized as a pioneer of American television. He lived long enough to witness the lionization of his career before he died in 2014 at the age of 91.
The legacy of your show of shows runs deep.
Its DNA appears in successors like Saturday Night Live, sctv, the Carol Burnett Show, Key and Peele, and Inside Amy Schumer, to name just a few.
Sid Caesar, Imogene Kocca and company proved that small screen comedy could be more than pratfalls and pie fights. It could be witty, literate, musical and deeply human.
Perhaps no one captured the spirit of the show better than Carl Reiner, who based the Dick Van Dyke show on his own experiences working with Sid Caesar.
The fictional Alan Brady show was essentially your show of shows, with Reiner in the background as the show's mercurial star and Dick Van Dyke playing the exhausted head writer Mel Brooks once said of Sid Caesar.
He gave us the green light. We knew we could go wherever our brains would take us as long as it was funny.
And go they did to Broadway, to Hollywood, to sitcoms, to stand up to the very core of American humor. Carrying the torch, Sid Caesar lit along the way.
This brings us to the end of number 77 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode when Nielsen starts counting heads.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027. For more, aim your gizmo to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Shatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:11:31] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy they laughed at us and hard.
But ho ho ho, who got the last right now.
