HOLLYWOOD — On Feb. 25, 1950, NBC premiered a 90-minute live comedy series titled "Your Show of Shows," starring a rising 27-year-old comic named Sid Caesar and produced by former Borscht Belt impresario Max Liebman. Television was never the same.
Over the next four years, half of all Americans who owned TV sets tuned in each week to watch the hysterical antics of Caesar and his cohorts-in-comedy Imogene Coca, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner. In 1954, NBC gave Caesar his own series, "Caesar's Hour," which also starred Reiner, Morris and Nanette Fabray.
The best of "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" is now available on video and DVD from Creative Light. The three-volume "The Sid Caesar Collection" features vintage sketches along with current interviews with Caesar, Fabray, Gelbart, Morris, Neil and Danny Simon, Brooks and Tolkin. The DVDs feature bonus sketches and interviews.
The multi-Emmy Award-winning Caesar, now 78, recently chatted about the golden age of television and "The Sid Caesar Collection":
Question:Did you like the live format?
Answer: When you do it live, you get a flow. You are not stopped every two minutes. They (the audience) are seeing it for the first time. They are seeing it like a Broadway show, and actually that was the way it was run. It was like doing a Broadway show, only you are doing a new one every week.
Question:Despite the fact that you had a brilliant group of writers and regulars on both "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour," wasn't it difficult to come up with sketches week in and week out?
Answer: Oh, believe me, it was not all fun and games. Saturday we did the show. Sunday we had to take off because you would have to recover, and then you would have to come back Monday morning and start right away (on the new show). You are constantly on the lookout for something you can use — like if a great movie came out, we would all go and see it and see if we could do a satire.
Question:The comedy sketches haven't dated at all.
Answer: We did what happens to you day-to-day. That was the whole thing. We showed different aspects of life, and that is where we connected to people because we weren't doing off-the-wall things.
Question:Is it true you never used cue cards?
Answer: There were no cue cards because I hated cue cards. You talk through your eyes, you act through your eyes, and if you are looking at a cue card and reading it, you are not touching the other person. You are not giving it the full performance. Everybody works off of each other.
"The Sid Caesar Collection" is in stores or by calling 1-888-292-9400 or by going to Caesar's Web site www.sidvid.com.