Department of English and American Studies Sid Caesar and His Writers
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Bc. Vojtěch Vokurka Sid Caesar and His Writers: Revolution in American Comedy Master’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Gene Terruso, M.F.A. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Vojtěch Vokurka Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr. Gene Terruso, for his time, for his ideas and for introducing me to Sid Caesar and his work. Also, I would like to thank Sid Caesar, his actors and writers for keeping me entertained while I was working on this thesis. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 6 1. Caesar’s Shows ............................................................................................................. 8 1.1 When Liebman Met Caesar… ................................................................................ 8 1.1 The Cast ................................................................................................................ 13 1.3 The Writers ........................................................................................................... 16 1.4 Evolution of American Sketch Comedy ............................................................... 19 2. Jewishness in Caesar’s Humor ................................................................................... 23 2.1 Roots of Jewish Comedy in America ................................................................... 23 2.2 Muting the Jewishness .......................................................................................... 25 2.3 Characteristics of Jewish Humor .......................................................................... 27 2.4 Reaching the General Audience ........................................................................... 33 2.5 Being Openly Jewish ............................................................................................ 35 2.6 Evolution of American Humor ............................................................................. 39 3. Parody in Caesar’s Sketches ....................................................................................... 45 3.1 Caesar’s Parodies .................................................................................................. 45 3.2 Parody on Saturday Night Live ............................................................................. 48 3.3 Movie Parodies ..................................................................................................... 50 4. Caesar and Physical Comedy ...................................................................................... 54 4.1 History of Physical Comedy ................................................................................. 54 4.2 Physical Comedy in Caesar’s Sketches ................................................................ 56 4.3 Physical Comedy in the Years after Caesar .......................................................... 59 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 64 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 66 Primary Sources .......................................................................................................... 66 Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 70 Introduction When comedian Sid Caesar died in 2014, the news outlets all over the United States printed their obituaries. There, Caesar was called “a larger-than-life figure” (Lowry 63), “pioneer of TV comedy” (Ivry), and “leading influence on American culture” (Auslin 60). Sid Caesar was one of the biggest stars of the 1950s late-night television. His three consecutive variety sketch shows, The Admiral Broadway Revue¸ Your Show of Shows, and Caesar’s Hour, ruled over Saturday nights on NBC from 1949 to 1957. Over the years, he and his castmates impersonated large number of various characters in order to make America laugh. And America did laugh. Thanks to a talented group of writers that Caesar was able to assemble, his shows were so popular that “cinema and Broadway theater owners tried to get NBC to change the day of the show from Saturday, claiming that too many people were staying home to watch Caesar” (Auslin 63). This master’s diploma thesis analyzes Sid Caesar’s sketches in order to determine how much his work influenced American humor and comedy in the following decades by examining certain aspects of his comic style that was in many ways revolutionary due to Caesar’s background and personality. In the first chapter, Sid Caesar and his three NBC shows are introduced together with the format of the shows, the cast, and the writers. The chapter describes Caesar’s beginnings in the entertainment industry which are connected with producer Max Liebman who discovered Caesar and helped him to create his first very own television show. Later in the chapter, the evolution of sketch comedy in America is examined from the first television variety shows up to today when Saturday nights on NBC are still reserved for comedy in a form of Saturday Night Live, a show that has been on air for over 40 years. 6 The second chapter focuses on the Jewishness in Caesar’s comedy. Almost everyone on Caesar’s writing team came from Jewish immigrant families. Even though Caesar and the writers did not explicitly mention their Jewishness in the sketches, their comedy was based on themes that are traditionally represented in Jewish humor (Margolick). Because of the popularity of the show, these writers unintentionally planted seeds of Jewish humor into American mainstream comedy and influenced many generations of comedians that came after them. Several writers from the team made a name for themselves later in their professional careers. Two of them, namely Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, later often worked with the genre of parody which had been heavily used in Caesar’s sketches. In the second chapter, some of Caesar’s parodies are introduced and compared to the contemporary production on Saturday Night Live. The strategy of incorporating parody into Brooks and Allen’s movies is discussed further in the chapter while comparing their movies with more recent American movie parodies. The last chapter focuses on the use of physical humor that was very important for Caesar in the sketches. The author analyzes Caesar’s physical comedy and traces it back to the pioneers of slapstick and dumb-shows in pre-war America. At the end of the chapter, the evolution of physical comedy in American culture is described with special attention to the last surviving live variety show, Saturday Night Live. 7 1. Caesar’s Shows 1.1 When Liebman Met Caesar… It’s Saturday, May 25, 1957. The last episode of Caesar’s Hour just ended. What is next for comedian Sid Caesar on television is just a couple of comedy specials, occasional cameos in popular sitcoms, or a guest appearance on one of the late-night talk shows (Cullen et al. 180). It may not seem like much of a career, but Caesar does not have to worry. The last episode of Caesar’s Hour was just the cherry on top of the cake that represents a television career consisting of three hit shows and almost ten years of work. Caesar does not have to worry. While he was making this metaphorical cake, he became a legend of American comedy, someone whose work will shape American humor in the following decades. However, to fully understand how Caesar’s legendary status came to existence, one has to look back and start with another gentleman - Max Liebman. Born in Vienna, raised in Brooklyn, Liebman had been infatuated with musical theater and comedy from a very young age so he became the director of entertainment at vacation resorts in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. His job was to hire singers, dancers, comedians and other entertainers to perform in clubs in these vacation resorts and entertain the guests. Liebman had worked as a director at many of these resorts before he finally settled at Camp Tamiment in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania (Sweet 74-75). Each fall, Liebman picked the best performances of the ten-week Tamiment run and compiled the numbers to one variety show to be staged on Broadway under the name The Straw Hat Revue. Thus, Liebman’s best performers had an opportunity to 8 shine in Manhattan for a few weeks before they returned back to the resort for summer (Cullen et al. 589). While creating The Straw Hat Revue, Liebman drew inspiration for his shows from vaudeville, a theater genre that was popular during his youth. The golden age of American vaudeville began around 1840 when theaters were being constructed specifically for performing acts that were a “mixture of recitations, ballets and hornpipes, songs from the concert repertoire as well as lighter melodies, and dramatic and comedy sketches” (Cullen et al. xv). Traditionally, a vaudevillian show was composed of unrelated performances, and the only linking aspect was the character of a host of the show (Hilmes 27). Most prominent of these vaudeville theaters were situated in big cities, such as Boston, San Francisco, and New York. As vaudeville gained on popularity, these large theaters were available