Isaac Sidney Caesar (September 8, 1922 – February 12, 2014) was an American comic actor, comedian and writer. With a career spanning 60 years, he was best known for two pioneering 1950s live television series: Your Show of Shows (1950–1954), which was a 90-minute weekly show watched by 60 million people, and its successor, Caesar's Hour (1954–1957), both of which influenced later generations of comedians. Your Show of Shows and its cast received seven Emmy nominations between the years 1953 and 1954 and tallied two wins. He also acted in films; he played Coach Calhoun in Grease (1978) and its sequel Grease 2 (1982) and appeared in the films It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Silent Movie (1976), History of the World, Part I (1981), Cannonball Run II (1984), and Vegas Vacation (1997).
Caesar was considered a "sketch comic" and actor, as opposed to a stand-up comedian. He also relied more on body language, accents, and facial contortions than simply dialogue. Unlike the slapstick comedy which was standard on TV, his style was considered "avant garde" in the 1950s. He conjured up ideas and scene and used writers to flesh out the concept and create the dialogue. Among the writers who wrote for Caesar early in their careers were Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, Selma Diamond, and Woody Allen. "Sid's was the show to which all comedy writers aspired. It was the place to be," said Steve Allen.
His TV shows' subjects included satires of real life events and people, and parodies of popular film genres, theater, television shows, and opera. But unlike other comedy shows at the time, the dialogue was considered sharper, funnier, and more adult-oriented. He was "best known as one of the most intelligent and provocative innovators of television comedy," who some critics called "television's Charlie Chaplin" and The New York Times refers to as the "comedian of comedians from TV's early days."
Honored in numerous ways over 60 years, he was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards, winning twice. He was also a saxophonist and author of several books, including two autobiographies in which he described his career and later struggle to overcome years of alcoholism and addiction to barbiturates.
Early life
Caesar was the youngest of three sons; his family was Jewish. He was born in Yonkers, New York. His father was Max Ziser (1874–1946) and his mother was Ida (née Raphael) (1887–1975). They likely were from Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Poland. Reports state that the surname "Caesar" was given to Max, as a child, by an immigration official at Ellis Island. According to Marian L. Smith, senior historian of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, there is no known case of a name changed at Ellis Island.
Max and Ida Caesar ran a restaurant, a 24-hour luncheonette. By waiting on tables, their son learned to mimic the patois, rhythm, and accents of the diverse clientele, a technique he termed double-talk, which he used throughout his career. He first tried double-talk with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat his native-sounding patter in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians. Sid Caesar's older brother, David, was his comic mentor and "one-man cheering section." They created their earliest family sketches from movies of the day like Test Pilot and the 1927 silent film Wings.
As a boy, Caesar took saxophone lessons and played in small bands to make money during the Great Depression. When he was 14, Caesar went to the Catskill Mountains as a tenor saxophonist in the Swingtime Six band with Mike Cifichello and Andrew Galos and occasionally performed in sketches in the Borscht Belt.