'When Caesar Was King' review: All hail Sid Caesar

Comedian Sid Caesar was huge, in all ways. Handsome, tall and winged with linebacker shoulders, a fearless physical performer and mimic, creator of a United Nations of international characters (all fluent in gibberish), Caesar dominated television in the 1950s, helping to birth and perfect the sketch format.

"When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy," by veteran New York Times and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick, is an apt title for one of the first in-depth looks at the comedian. Caesar died in 2014, at 91, his best work decades behind him. But his legacy, Margolick persuasively argues, is everywhere. Caesar’s comedy is the wellspring of "Saturday Night Live," now in its 51st season.

"Your Show of Shows" (1950-1954) was a live 90-minute variety program with a core cast of just four inspired performers, including Caesar, and raked in more revenue in one season than the Broadway juggernaut "Oklahoma!" grossed in four years. His subsequent "Caesar’s Hour" (1954-1957) also swung for the fences. Caesar was a talent magnet, working with the great Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris, and he hired brilliant writers — among them Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen — who went on to create indelible work for television, movies and Broadway.

"No Sid Caesar, no Mel Brooks," Brooks, now 99, has said. Brooks, a frequently cited source in Margolick’s book, describes how he and Reiner hatched the character of the 2,000 Year Old Man working on "Your Show of Shows."

The writers enjoyed the freedom of getting their ideas on television first. They parodied foreign movies, classical music and great books. "There were no footprints in the snow. When we did something, we could be pretty sure that no one else had done it yet. And we were able to be urbane. We were able to be very smart," said Gelbart, who later wrote "M*A*S*H." "Nobody said, ‘Let’s dumb this down’ or ‘Who the hell is that?’ ”

Caesar was difficult, demanding, inscrutable and alcoholic, as unfunny offscreen as he was hilarious on. "He didn’t know who Sid Caesar was," recalled Reiner, who claimed that he never heard his boss tell a joke. The show was brutal, a grind. Caesar inflicted enduring emotional hangovers on his writers, creating a trove of anecdotes included here. It did him in, too. "Nobody’s talent was more used up than Sid’s," Brooks said. "But over a period of years, television ground him into sausages — one sausage a week — until, finally, there was little of the muse left." He gave everything every Saturday night.

After live television, Caesar kept working, but the results were rarely as glorious. He peaked in his 30s. Caesar was a brilliant performer who needed the support of great writers even when he was mugging or spouting blather. Today, viewers of a certain generation may know him better as Coach Calhoun in "Grease." Brooks cast him in "Silent Movie." In 1983, Caesar hosted "Saturday Night Live." He did a lot of schlock.

Margolick is an industrious researcher and skillful writer. He tends to empty his notebooks, rarely settling for one anecdote when many will do. On a single page, 13 people influenced by Caesar are name-checked, as if Margolick is campaigning for the book’s importance. He gets weighed down in detailing Caesar’s work chronologically. "When Caesar Was King" might have benefited from being shorter.

Caesar, his writers and nearly the entire casts of "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar’s Hour" were Jewish, a subject Margolick explores at length. Their New York, immigrant-influenced humor, without being identifiably Jewish (though Caesar’s accented twaddle was larded with Yiddish), triumphed in television’s early days, when there were fewer restraints and fewer concerns about appealing to all viewers and all advertisers.

Ultimately, accordionist and bandleader Lawrence Welk triumphed over Caesar on Saturday night. It was death by polka. "I play the kind of music Mother likes," Welk said, appealing to a nation "not made up of wise guys or slick sophisticates but of people who enjoy the real and simple values of life," a taste of the safer network programming to follow.

But for much of the 1950s, as this book makes clear, Caesar pleased everybody.