WHEN CAESAR WAS KING

Lively biography of the original king of TV comedy.

“No Sid Caesar, no Mel Brooks.” So said Brooks himself, who spent years with Caesar as both friend and writer. Caesar ruled the airwaves in the mid-1950s, earning a then-astonishing $25,000 a year (about $300,000 today) and revolutionizing comedy with deeply philosophical sketches mixed in with silliness and his patented double-talk in many an invented language. Even Albert Einstein took time out of his week to watch Caesar’s Hour—fittingly, since in high school, by journalist-turned-author Margolick’s account, Caesar excelled in science and held Einstein as a personal hero. Yet underlying his comic genius was a roiling rage, unusually pronounced even in a profession known for misfits; Neil Simon called him “extremely smart but completely inarticulate.” Joining him was a battery of “very gifted, neurotic young Jews, punching our brains out,” as Caesar scriptwriter Larry Gelbart put it, that included a young Woody Allen. Renowned for his strength and legendary appetite—he could polish off four steaks at a sitting before going home to eat his real dinner—Caesar felt the toll of success and the stress of keeping his show fresh, and in that he was a pioneer, bringing on guests and players such as the singer Lena Horne and the brilliant comic Imogene Coca. For all that, by the 1960s Caesar was effectively over, his arch comedy series replaced by “pleasant shows about pleasant people.” One of them was the meta program The Dick Van Dyke Show, with Caesar veteran Carl Reiner in the Caesar role. More anarchically fun was Saturday Night Live, which an embittered Caesar hated with a passion: “During his Dark Period,” Margolick writes, “Caesar had viewed all younger comics as enemies, stealing from him the laughs he no longer got himself.”

Both a life and a cautionary tale, of great interest to any fan of golden era television.