Caesar's Hours: My Life in Comedy, with Love and Laughter
It is no exaggeration to say that without Sid Caesar, comedy in America would have been a lot less funny. He was the star and guiding force behind Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, two of the most innovative programs in the Golden Age of Television, and the writers and stars of those shows went on to create the plays, movies, and sitcoms that we now think of as classic American comedy. So many of our greatest comedy writers--Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody...
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The legendary television star tells the backstage stories of the classic comedy of Your Show of Shows, Caesar's Hour, and other landmark programs The New Yorker More than twenty years ago, Caesar delivered a memoir (“Where Have I Been?”) that detailed his rise to comic stardom in the fifties and the addiction to alcohol and tranquillizers that obliterated the next two decades. This volume revisits much of the same material, but with greater focus on the sources of Caesar’s style—for instance, he learned his trademark “double-talk,” a stream of nonsense sounding plausibly like a foreign language, from listening to the immigrant clientele at his father’s luncheonette. Some of his influences are more predictable than others. He admires the way Chaplin and Keaton worked “both sides of the street,” playing humor off against pathos. Caesar was a professional saxophone player before he moved into comedy, and he feels that that skill “was integral to my performing.”
IntroductionIXPrologue: My First LaughXIPart 1Portrait of the Comedian as a Young Man1A Yonkers Childhood32From Sax to Comedy283The Subway Commandos374Tars and Spars525A Show or a Steak64Part 2The Golden Decade6Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour817The Writers' Room1198The Hickenloopers and The Commuters1499The Art of Sketch Comedy17010The Professor19311The German General and the Music of Double-Talk20312"From Here to Obscurity," "Aggravation Boulevard," and Other Movie Satires21813Sense Memory and Silent Movies23714The Perils of Live Television246Part 3A Legacy in Comedy15Conquering Demons: Now, Was, and Gonna Be26116Ten from My Later Years, and One to Grow On274Epilogue: The Anniversary Ball291Acknowledgments295Index297
