Screening & Author Talk
WHEN CAESAR WAS KING: HOW SID CAESAR
REINVENTED AMERICAN COMEDY
with author David Margolick in person
Sunday, December 7th at 2:30 PM
$20 Public | $13 Members
Copies of When Caesar Was King: How Sid
Caesar Reinvented American Comedy will be available!
From longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick comes the first
definitive biography of Sid Caesar:
founding father of television comedy. Sid Caesar reigned as America’s most
influential comedian of the 1950s, revolutionizing television with Your Show of Shows. This program will feature screenings of many classic Caesar sketches,
including spoofs of such movies as “From Here to Eternity,” “On the
Waterfront,” “A Place in the Sun,” and “Shane.”
WHEN CAESAR WAS KING:How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy
By the spring of 1954, Sid Caesar was the most influential, highly paid,
and enigmatic comedian in America. Every week, twenty million people tuned
their TVs to his NBC extravaganza, Your Show of Shows, and
witnessed his virtuosity in sketches and film spoofs, pantomime and soliloquy.
Onstage, Caesar could play any character and make it funny: a befuddled
game-show contestant, a pretentious German professor, a beleaguered husband
(opposite his redoubtable co-star Imogene Coca)—even a gumball machine and a
bottle of seltzer.
To Caesar’s mostly urban audience, his comedy was an
era-defining leap forward from the days of vaudeville, launching a new style of
humor that was multilayered and full of character, yet still uproarious. To his
rivals, Caesar was the man to beat. To his fellow American Jews, his show’s
success meant something more: a post-Holocaust symbol of security and a source
of great pride. But behind all that Caesar represented was the real Sid.
Introverted and volatile, ill at ease in his own skin, he could terrorize his
collaborators but reserved his harshest critiques for himself. After barely a
decade, he was essentially off the air, beset by exhaustion, addiction, his own
impossibly high standards, and changing viewership as television spread to the
American heartland. TV’s first true comic creation was also its first
spectacular flameout.
But in his wake came the disciples he personally nurtured—including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon,
and more. Caesar left an indelible impact on what still makes us laugh.
In When Caesar Was King, veteran journalist David Margolick
conjures this complexman as never before. Deeply researched, brimming with love
for Caesar and the culture from which he sprang, and reanimating a New York
City that has all but vanished, this rollicking and poignant book traces the
rise and fall of a legend.
David
Margolick is the
author of several books, including Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max
Schmeling, and a World on the Brink; Strange Fruit: The
Biography of a Song; and Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of
Little Rock. He was a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair,
and before that, a legal affairs reporter at The New York Times,
where he wrote the weekly "At the Bar" column. He is currently
working on a biography of Dr. Jonas Salk for the "Jewish Lives"
series published by Yale University Press. He lives in New York City.
