Make 'Em Laugh, page 9
When I die my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read “I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.”
The entire country went into mourning. Businesses were closed and NBC and CBS went off the air during the funeral services. President Roosevelt spoke directly to the nation:
He loved and was loved by the American people. His memory will ever be in benediction with the hosts of his countrymen who felt the spell of that kindly humor which, while seeing facts, could always laugh at fantasy. That is why his message went straight to the hearts of his fellow men.
WHEN YOU GET INTO TROUBLE FIVE THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME YOU’VE GOT TO HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR IT.
When Florenz Ziegfeld died in 1932, Rogers was devastated. Rogers had endured similar losses in his lifetime—his mother’s death, the death of a two-year-old son—but he never turned to any conventional religious comforts. Will Rogers always saw Heaven as a kind of happy theater of hardworking angels. In his daily column, Rogers wrote movingly of Ziegfeld’s legacy—and surely of his own as well:
Ziegfeld left something on earth that hundreds of us will treasure till our curtain falls, and that was a “badge,” a badge of which we were proud and never ashamed, and wanted the world to read the lettering on it, “I worked for Ziegfeld.” So, good-bye, Flo, for you will put on a show up there some day that will knock their eyes out. Save a spot for me.
“YOU THINK THEY’LL GET THIS IN PEORIA?”
SID CAESAR AND YOUR SHOW OF SHOWS
First of all, Sid was wildly talented. There was nothing you could write that he couldn’t play, except the simple sentence like, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” That he could not say. So we laid off that.
–Your Show of Shows writer Larry Gelbart
In 1949, there were only two million television consoles in homes across the United States—and nearly half of them were in New York City. The network executives were also in New York, and they struggled to figure out what to put on the airwaves for the forty-two hours a week they were broadcasting. One early solution was the variety show, such as Ed Sullivan’s Talk of the Town, which showcased an evening of different acts. Another kind of entertainment show was a revue, but revues took more work; they required original material, original songs and dances—and an original point of view. The sponsor, Admiral Television, found an original mind in producer Max Liebman.
Liebman had worked magic at Camp Tamiment in New York’s Catskill Mountains, putting on three separate professional-level revues a season. Liebman agreed to produce the hour-long The Admiral Broadway Revue, to be broadcast by both NBC and the DuMont networks, and it was to be exactly what it sounded like—a Broadway-quality evening of sketches, songs, and dances performed by an expert ensemble. There was only one problem, as Carl Reiner later pointed out: “Liebman knew how to put on a show every three weeks. He didn’t realize that putting on thirty-nine shows is not the same as putting on three.” It would be a herculean task, but Liebman’s savior was not Greek at all; he was a Jewish saxophonist from Yonkers with a Roman name and a Roman nose.
Sid Caesar had worked for Liebman before; while in the navy, he had appeared in the coast guard revue Tars and Spars (Liebman, on hearing Caesar’s inspired improvisations, promoted him from musician to featured comic), then in a 1948 Broadway revue called Make Mine Manhattan. Caesar could play a mean sax, he could do knockout impressions, he could do pantomime, he could do double-talk in foreign languages, he could riff off any comic premise. There was one thing he couldn’t do: “He couldn’t tell a joke. I don’t think I ever heard Sid tell a joke,” said Reiner.
HE COULDN’T TELL A JOKE. I DON’T THINK I EVER HEARD SID TELLA JOKE.
Naval contemplation: Young Sidney Caesar, as the top comic of coast guard revue, Tars and Spars, 1947.
“But Sid had a kinesthetic sense. He knew intuitively how people behave—he had a perfect pitch about the human condition. He just knew.” The Admiral Broadway Revue would demand all of Caesar’s skills. Unlike Ed Sullivan, who simply hosted a show, or Milton Berle, who shared the stage with other acts, Sid Caesar would be his own three-ring circus, appearing in almost all the sketches, supervising the writers, and eventually producing his own programs.
The first seventeen weeks of The Admiral Broadway Revue were so successful that Admiral dropped the show—they were getting more orders for television sets than they could produce. So Liebman, Caesar, and their crew moved to Saturday nights to create a ninety-minute weekly revue that would set the standard for television comedy over the next four years. Your Show of Shows would prove to be the ultimate trapeze act without a safety net—all of the 160 shows were broadcast live. “A live show is a different animal altogether than what they have now on tape,” said Caesar. “It’s different because in live, the performer is the boss. Whatever you say is going to be out on the air in the next second.” It would be crucial, then, to make sure that whatever Caesar and his talented ensemble were going to say would be of the highest quality.
It was. Caesar presided over the greatest writing talent in television history. The Writers’ Room, as it would be called (and immortalized in various fictional plays and films), was originally inhabited by Mel Tolkin as head writer, Lucille Kallen, Reiner, and Mel Brooks. They were eventually joined by such first-rate comic writers as Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, Joseph Stein, Bill Persky, Sam Denoff, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin, and Michael Stewart. Each of them would go on to create or write some of the best and most important comedy films or sitcoms of the next two decades. (Woody Allen joined very late in the game, in 1958, for one of Caesar’s last series.) The weekly grind was the same; the team would meet on Monday morning and toss out ideas and segments. Caesar, who had no writing background at all, was the final arbiter of what went on the air; with a pantomime machine gun, he would shoot down ideas he didn’t like: “Rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat!” Caesar would go, playing off a routine he did in the navy. “Never say that one again! That’s the way I shot them down, because then it wasn’t insulting and it wasn’t embarrassing, it was funny.”
There was a unique combination of aggression and affection in the Writers’ Room. “Everybody was very territorial about their own work,” recalled Reiner. “Everybody really fought for their jokes—they would go home and say to their wives, ‘That’s my joke.’” But there was also a certain urban Jewish consanguinity among them. “We were able to be urbane,” said Gelbart. “Between us we read every book. Between us we saw every movie. Between us we saw every play on Broadway. You could make jokes about Kafka or Tennessee Williams. We also had dinner together. We went to movies together. We were all friends. And that was very important. We appreciated each other a lot.”
What they appreciated most was Caesar, and so the writers laid on a series of sketches, songs, parodies—even extended mime sequences—that could be served up brilliantly by Caesar and his ensemble; the impish, pert Imogene Coca, whose demure gooniness was the perfect foil for Caesar’s explosive energy; Carl Reiner, the slightly crooked straight man; and eventually, Howard Morris, the scrappy character actor extraordinaire. There were recurring sketches, such as “The Commuters,” one of television’s first glimpses of a domestic suburban couple, and recurring characters, such as the Professor, Caesar’s double-talk virtuoso, and Progress Hornsby (originally Cool Cees), “the ultimate smoker-upper”—a stoned bebop jazz musician who gave Caesar the chance to play the sax and gave the writers a chance to show what hip New Yorkers they were. “And then we have Nikto Barada on the radar—he’s the one who warns us in case we approach the melody,” drawled Hornsby. (To show you how hip the writers were, “Nikto Barada” was an allusion to the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still.)
Harder than it looks: Caesar, being pitched to by writers Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Mel Tolkin; Hail, Caesar!
Bald audacity: (left to right) Sid & Co. giving it to Yul Brynner in a King and I spoof; “From Here to Obscurity” with Imogene Coca nearly obscured the original From Here to Eternity.
Your Show of Shows was hippest, however, when it came to parody. “When you’re doing a television show, you need forms to fill. And one of the forms we filled every week was a parody,” said Reiner. The show borrowed from its Broadway roots and parodied every genre cliché: espionage movies, Westerns, backstage musicals, gangster films, silent movies. Eventually, however, they moved into new territory—new is the word—by parodying movies current at the box office. Most famously, the crew spoofed the overheated wartime soap opera From Here to Eternity as “From Here to Obscurity,” with Caesar and Coca aping the film’s beachfront love scene by getting doused with buckets and buckets of water.
Yes, we have some bananas: “The Three Haircuts” with Carl Reiner (left) and Howie Morris; creaming some Bavarians with Coca.
There were times when the writing staff drifted off into Obscurity themselves. As bright young New York intellectuals, the writers would attend some foreign art film and then go sample the food from that country afterward; a De Sica film would be followed by some Italian food; a Kurosawa festival would be the prelude to a Japanese steakhouse. Inevitably, these movies would become fodder for the weekly parody. “Ubetchu” was Ugetsu in disguise, produced by the fictitious Take-A-Kuki (“take a cookie!”) film company. In that spoof—which ran nearly ten minutes—Caesar played a bellicose samurai warrior, barking all of his dialogue in pidgin Japanese. It was outrageous—in every sense of the word. Reiner recalled, “We had to be brought to reality by somebody saying, ‘Hey, fellas, you think they’ll get this in Peoria?’ We didn’t care. We realized that we had people of a certain ilk in every part of the country—not a lot—and they didn’t have foreign movie theaters in Podunk. And so we were aware that we were doing something that tickled us and may not tickle other people.”
Even Caesar was often perplexed by the choice of parody. “He was parodying movies that he had never seen, but based on his faith in his writers, he went ahead and performed them,” said Gelbart. “If you thought it was funny, he would join the crapshoot.” Caesar, clearly, came up sevens. He was not comfortable in his own skin—the writers will attest that Caesar would go for days speaking in the persona of one of his characters—but he was fiercely committed to the show. He oversaw every detail and his off-camera habits were equally prodigious; to fuel his overpowering comedy furnace, he would often eat several dinners a night, frequently washed down with a fifth of Johnnie Walker.
Caesar played the Gary Cooper part in a High Noon parody:
I was supposed to have a sponge on my chest to pin the badges on, but I had to put on so much stuff: cowboy boots, pants, and then the vest and then this and that—as I walked out of the dressing room, I saw the sponge laying on the chair, and I didn’t have time to go back, because they were playing the opening music. And I walked out and I tried to say to the other actors, “Take it easy, you know, easy.” Three guys came back and said, “I’m sorry, sheriff, I’d like to help you out but my wife wants to go to the dance tonight,” and they would go boom! with the badges. I said, “Holy jeez!” And they’re long pins. And there were three of them. And they knew that they were putting the needle into me and, after the skit, as I’m changing costumes I said, “Get some tetanus shots ready!”
Inevitably, the tempo within Caesar’s empire would prove exhausting. In 1954, NBC broke up the Your Show of Shows team, thinking they could make more money by splitting Caesar, Coca, and Liebman into three separate shows. Only Caesar hung in there, starring in three seasons of Caesar’s Hour, using many of the same writers and formats (Nanette Fabray joined him as the distaff foil), followed by an unsuccessful attempt to reunite him with Coca called Sid Caesar Invites You. By that time, Caesar had been on the television treadmill for a decade and had held down the lead in over four hundred live hours of broadcasting, a feat unmatched since. In the ten years since The Admiral Broadway Revue, the two million television sets in the U.S. had increased by a factor of twenty-one—and, of course, half of them weren’t in New York anymore. As Larry Gelbart put it, “When we started, television sets were expensive, so we had a very, very sophisticated audience. As the price of sets went down, so did the IQ of the watchers, and we were finally knocked off the air by Lawrence Welk.”
Still, in television’s infancy, no one ever worked harder—or more hilariously—to raise the bar for comedy than Sid Caesar. He made Saturday evenings a very special—and irreplaceable—time. Carol Burnett recalls her own required viewing back in 1956:
My Fair Lady had opened on Broadway and I won two tickets in a lottery to see My Fair Lady on a Saturday night. I gave the tickets to my roommate because I said, “Fair Lady’s gonna be running for a hundred years. I know I’ll get to see it, but Sid Caesar is live and I’ll never see that again.”
“UNLIKE THE REST OF YOU SQUARES”
TOM LEHRER
We are the Folk Song Army, Every one of us cares. We all hate poverty, war, and injustice, Unlike the rest of you squares.
–Tom Lehrer, “Folk Song Army”
Tom Lehrer was one of America’s most unlikely folk heroes—if nominated as one, he probably would not run; if elected, he certainly wouldn’t serve. Still, Lehrer did serve to crack open the buttoned-up, deferential reserve of the American electorate in the 1950s. His weapons of choice were a keyboard and a ten-inch disc made of vinyl.
Lehrer was born in 1928 to a well-to-do Manhattan family, ethnically but not religiously Jewish. “ ‘God’ was primarily an expletive, usually preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘my’ or both,” he said. He was a genius at mathematics with a passion for the tricky wordplay in songs written by Gilbert and Sullivan or sung by Danny Kaye in the 1940s.
There’s sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discavard.
–“The Elements”
In 1952, while studying at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Lehrer was persuaded to go onstage at a Boston nightclub to perform some of the satirical songs that amused his Cambridge classmates. Although the novelty of performing eventually wore off, he became a local sensation. His songs were unconventional, to say the least, dealing with dope peddling, masochism, incest, dismemberment, and—perhaps worst of all—pacifism. Pop singer Tony Martin’s sultry “Kiss of Fire” inspired Lehrer to take romantic self-abnegation to new depths in “The Masochism Tango”:
I ache for the touch of your lips, dear
But much more for the touch of your whips, dear
You can raise welts like nobody else
As we dance to the masochism tango.
While continuing with his studies, Lehrer decided to put a dozen or so songs on a ten-inch long-playing record. Songs by Tom Lehrer came out in 1953 when he was still teaching undergraduate math. It became an immediate sensation on college campuses throughout the country. Anyone who wanted bad reviews of Lehrer’s work had only to look at the liner notes, where he had each pan painstakingly reprinted. “Mr. Lehrer’s muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste,” wrote the New York Times. Lehrer took it all in stride, with a healthy disrespect for the obsequiousness of celebrity, and responded in kind on his second album:
Any ideas expressed on this record should not be taken as representing Mr. Lehrer’s true convictions, for indeed he has none. “If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever made it.”
Lehrer would only write about three dozen songs in his career—and few radio disc jockeys would dare play them—but record buyers were so wild about his first two albums, they demanded his appearance onstage. He agreed—for a while. His concert and nightclub career essentially lasted only from 1957 to 1959; he never thought much of his celebrity and went back to Harvard to resume his studies and teach classes at MIT. “It isn’t as though I have to do this, you know. I could be making, oh, $3,000 a year just teaching,” he told audiences. Still, Lehrer was becoming the perceptive and skeptical voice of a generation, often quoted, frequently admired, despite all of his attempts to discourage a breakout career. “Lacking exposure in the media, my songs spread slowly—like herpes, rather than ebola,” he later recalled.
The early sixties—with their plethora of social and political issues—brought Lehrer out of retirement briefly to exercise his satirical skills. He submitted some material to a new television show devoted to spoofing the news, That Was the Week That Was. “[It] was supposed to be satiric without offending anyone, which is a contradiction in terms,” he said. After watching the program cut and alter his songs, Lehrer showed up to sing his own material, in his own inimitably snide fashion. By 1965, there was so much more to sing about. His songs from this period, recorded in his album That Was the Year That Was, are a veritable time capsule of everything disturbing, disappointing, and just plain wrong about the 1960s. In “Pollution,” he pointed out that “You can use the latest toothpaste/And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.” And if you needed to pinpoint where the real tensions were in the world, all you had to do was drop the needle on “Who’s Next?,” Lehrer’s extrapolation of nuclear proliferation:
We’ll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb.
Liberal preoccupations had no safe refuge in Lehrer’s hands; he was an equal opportunity destroyer. He skewered the naive aspirations of the mid-sixties’ National Brotherhood Week:
Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
