For many, Sid Cae­sar was America’s ulti­mate come­di­an; younger gen­er­a­tions may not even rec­og­nize his name. Some­how Mar­golick offers both the cognoscen­ti and the new­bies a sat­is­fy­ing exam­i­na­tion of the man’s life and career. 

An awk­ward, tongue-tied boy, Sid Cae­sar grew up in work­ing-class Yonkers, help­ing out in his par­ents’ lun­cheonette. Learn­ing to play a sax­o­phone left by a dead­beat renter led to him per­form­ing on the Bor­sht Belt, where he soon turned to com­e­dy. After World War II, tele­vi­sion was the big new thing, which meant that there was a huge demand for live tal­ent. Before long, peo­ple were buy­ing TVs just to watch Sid on Your Show of Shows every Sat­ur­day night. 

Sid’s com­e­dy was cere­bral and ani­mat­ed and some­times com­plete gib­ber­ish — but hilar­i­ous. It was also — to those in the know — very Jew­ish. It wasn’t that his writ­ers were all Jew­ish, although they usu­al­ly were. The jokes cer­tain­ly didn’t men­tion Jew­ish things, like bar mitz­vahs or rab­bis. No, what made this com­e­dy Jew­ish was the anger the writ­ers were hold­ing in. Whether they’d lost fam­i­ly in pogroms or the Holo­caust, or served in the armed forces in World War II, they looked at fifties Amer­i­ca and saw the anti­semitism just under the sur­face. And as Mel Tolkin, one of Sid’s writ­ers put it, ​“humor becomes anger made accept­able with a joke.”

It’s anger that’s the unex­pect­ed twist of this book. When you sit down to read about the life of the country’s great­est come­di­an, you expect fun­ny sto­ries, lots of laughs. Instead you dis­cov­er a man with two speeds — ​“coma and fren­zy.” In his peak years on tele­vi­sion, Sid Cae­sar worked at least six days a week and expect­ed his writ­ing crew to do like­wise. A huge man who waved around loaded guns and ate and drank enough for ten peo­ple, Sid was a worka­holic and an alcoholic.

On one lev­el, this the sto­ry of many per­form­ing artists: work­ing furi­ous­ly until the career peaks, then break­ing down when the audi­ences move away. But Sid’s career was shaped by tele­vi­sion. When he began, peo­ple per­formed live; shows weren’t taped and aired lat­er. There were no laugh tracks. There were few inter­nal or exter­nal cen­sors dic­tat­ing when a rou­tine ​“crossed the line.” And while their rou­tines may have looked spon­ta­neous, in fact they were argued and rehearsed over and over before they hit the stage (except Sat­ur­day Night Live, which dis­mayed Cae­sar when he host­ed it). Shaped by live tele­vi­sion, Cae­sar couldn’t eas­i­ly piv­ot into film. And in ten short years, as Mar­golick puts it, tele­vi­sion went from wild­ly inno­v­a­tive to the ​“play­ing it safe” stage. There was no room for wacky anymore.

As inevitable as Sid Caesar’s decline may have been, it still makes for wrench­ing read­ing. Before start­ing the last chap­ter of this mar­velous book, line up some Sid Cae­sar rou­tines to watch on YouTube. They’ll be your show of shows.