CAESAR'S HOUR
Weiser, Jay
Sid Caesar and his band of comic players (Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Imogene Coca, Nanette Fabray or Janet Blair) ruined Saturday-night business in theaters and movie houses. They...
...In Towers Trot, he is an Astaire-like dancer with an appetite for creativity...
...Aggravation Boulevard is perfect Caesar: language (here, Rex's voice) obscures meaning, roles are trashed, and the only way to accommodate is by giving up something of yourself...
...in Bullets over Broadway, Fabray's cheap chanteuse wins Reiner's foppish academic, leaving the viewer to imagine their life together...
...Without a word, he struts into the studio to play a love scene...
...The writers included Caesar himself, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, and Mel Tolkin (later of All in the Family...
...They burst onto TV in 1949, and continued through eight years of the Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show of Shows, and Caesar's Hour...
...In the Caesar's Hour sketches, with control of the program for the first time, Caesar changed his form...
...In Where Have I Been?, his autobiography, he says that during his heyday he believed that all the acclaim was unreal, that he would be found out as having no talent, and that his career would crash...
...He spent his youth in the multilingual environs of his parents' Yonkers cafeteria, and has always had trouble expressing himself verbally...
...Unfortunately, that translates into an appetite for food as well (as it did with Caesar, who went from 180 pounds to 240 pounds between 1949 and 1957), and he becomes a blimp unable to work...
...Of course, the couples are crazy...
...He walks into the sunset with the educated and refined Fabray...
...In A Drunk There Was, Caesar struggles back from alcoholism, only to find that because of his past, his daughter Fabray cannot marry Reiner, the man she loves...
...Your Show of Shows sketches are usually funnier than Caesar's Hour sketches, but less interesting...
...As Moose the gangster in Bullets over Broadway, Caesar can barely talk...
...In the foreign-movie parodies, the characters speak in a gibberish that sounds like a language but isn't...
...In the 1950s, for the first time, Jews asserted themselves to mainstream society...
...When Coca plays Caesar's wife, she pursues refinement with a vengeance, but can never quite prevail...
...He thinks she's left him...
...The lurking suspicion in his work is that words, and the values that are communicated with them, are meaning385 less...
...But Aggravation Boulevard also expresses the fears of his generation, living well in the American mainstream and wondering if it was real...
...she strikes terror in your heart...
...In an On the Waterfront parody, Caesar's Brando communicates mainly by shifting his weight: his brother the union racketeer has told him not to talk...
...The creators of the series, who grew up during the Depression, were tasting prosperity for the first time, less than 10 years after the Holocaust...
...By the end of the sketch, he still has trouble putting a sentence together, but he has decided to talk...
...He did extended pieces, running 20 minutes or more...
...Coca fares little better: when she is not playing angelic girls with a habit of dying at the end, she plays irredeemable vamps...
...Most of Caesar's humor was not overtly Jewish, despite occasional outbursts of Yiddish...
...Over the years, you can watch their embourgeoisement: Caesar and Fabray live better than Caesar and Coca...
...Aggravation Boulevard is an eerie reflection of Caesar's fears...
...In the silent movies, language disappears entirely, leaving melodramatic gesture...
...Caesar is Rex Handsome, king of silent films...
...As soon as she comes in, his imperturbable facade goes back up...
...Not much, in the Caesar lexicon...
...The comedy became less behavioral and more allegorical...
...ALL THE THEMES are brought together in Aggravation Boulevard, a travesty of the life of John Gilbert...
...The silent movies suggest that middle-class life is a tenuous thing, and that a single slip will send the edifice crashing down...
...In A Drunk There Was, Caesar tastes success (he gets a raise, his wife is pregnant, his canary lays eggs) until one drink turns him into an alcoholic (ironically, Caesar's own difficulties with success had already turned him into an alcoholic...
...When Fabray plays Caesar's wife, she is enraged by the norms that leave her with all the housework and no freedom...
...He gets his weight down again, but ends up as an effeminate dancer at a dime-a-dance parlor...
...Caesar's programs were part of the flowering that included Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, and the New York intellectuals...
...This was the first time that most of this material had been available to the public since its performance...
...They stay locked in their roles...
...Caesar recently selected about 50 hours of favorite sketches for a retrospective at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York...
...Caesar's shows were created mainly by firstgeneration American Jews in their 20s...
...His career is ruined, his pretensions are shattered, until he discovers that when he catches a cold, he speaks in a mellifluous bass...
...Caesar's characters act macho, but they end up as emotional wrecks or their wives rebel...
...Inarticulateness is also a metaphor for the problem of bridging two cultures...
...When she screams, "From now on, we are going to have fun...
...Their work is still funny, and sometimes amazing: Towers Trot, a musical take-off, runs 45 minutes, features nine sets, and has over 50 in its cast...
...He made his nightmare real by binging on booze and pills for 30 years, before pulling himself together in 1978...
...The only happy couples are in the contemporary movie parodies, presumably because the movies, to Caesar's generation, were dreams...
...He finally makes it back to the big time after admitting that he really isn't creative at all...
...Inarticulateness is half of Caesar's comedy...
...He can never satisfy Fabray, who wants couth...
...In a 1967 parody of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Caesar and Coca are outrageous slobs...
...They churned out a live show 39 times a year, playing anything from a Bavarian clock to an opera troupe...
...But Rex's voice, which we hear for the first time, is a falsetto...
...It more subtly explored life between two cultures through the themes of role-playing, inarticulateness, and loss...
...If the child of immigrants learns to act like an American, what has he gained...
...He struggles toward intelligibility...
...You can succeed if you're willing to go through life with a cold...
...In one monologue, Caesar gradually falls apart after coming home to find his wife gone...
...It was written, rehearsed, and performed (without cue cards) in a week...
...The only glib Caesar character is the Professor, whose field of expertise changes, but who never knows what he is talking about...
...he lows...
...she has really gone shopping...
...Caesar has to give her up...
...Talkies come in, and the scene has to be redone...
...The characters struggle with the contradictions between middle-class expectations and their lives but usually can't resolve them...
Vol. 30 • July 1983 • No. 3
