Vale: Sid Caesar

Legendary US comedian Sid Caesar, best known for landmark 1950s comedy Your Show of Shows, has died aged 91.

He died his home in Beverly Hills after a brief illness.

Caesar was one of the first stars created by American television with the 90-minute live program Your Show of Shows, which broke comedic ground. It didn’t rely on vaudeville or stand-up material but rather on long skits and sketches written by equally legendary comedy writers including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin.

His partner, comic actress Imogene Coca, co-starred with the two-time Emmy winner, who was hired at $4,000 a week for his services.

Carl Reiner said Caesar had an ability to “connect with an audience and make them roar with laughter.

“Sid Caesar set the template for everybody,” he said. “He was without a doubt the greatest sketch comedian-monologist that television ever produced. He could ad lib. He could do anything that was necessary to make an audience laugh.”

“Your Show of Shows was different from other programs of its time because its humor was aimed at truth,” Neil Simon once observed. “Other television shows would present situations with farcical characters; we would put real-life people into identifiable situations.”

The pressures of a live weekly TV show took its toll on Caesar, however. Success came so fast, he recalled, that “I lived in dread that some night onstage … I would be found out.”

“I know of no other comedian, including Chaplin, who could have done nearly 10 years of live television,” said Mel Brooks. “Nobody’s talent was ever more used up than Sid’s.” Over the years, “Television ground him into sausages … until finally there was little of the muse left.”

For the next few years, Caesar continued to make club appearances, starred in the Broadway musical “Little Me” and toured with Neil Simon’s“Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” His movies included It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Silent Movie, Grease, The Cheap Detective, History of the World: Part I in 1981 and he made two appearances on Love Boat.

Following a self-described “20-year blackout” involving alcoholism and barbiturates, he re-emerged in the late ’70s. In the early ’80s, he hosted Saturday Night Live and toured with Coca in a stage show recalling some of the better Show of Shows material.

Other TV credits included Love and War, Life With Louie, Mad About You, and Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

In 1985 he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. In 2011 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Television Critics Assn.

Source: Variety.