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Home , 2000 Year Old Man, Carl Reiner, Imogene Coca, Max Liebman, Mel Tolkin, Milton Berle

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 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 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 ...... 19

2. Jewishness in Caesar’s Humor ...... 23

2.1 Roots of Jewish Comedy in ...... 23

2.2 Muting the Jewishness ...... 25

2.3 Characteristics of ...... 27

2.4 Reaching the General Audience ...... 33

2.5 Being Openly Jewish ...... 35

2.6 Evolution of ...... 39

3. Parody in Caesar’s Sketches ...... 45

3.1 Caesar’s Parodies ...... 45

3.2 Parody on ...... 48

3.3 Movie Parodies ...... 50

4. Caesar and ...... 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 late-night . His three consecutive variety sketch shows, The Admiral Broadway ¸

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 . 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 and , 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 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 , 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 , 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 - . Born in Vienna, raised in , 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 . 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 in the in (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 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 , 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 to book for large number of vaudeville theater troupes that toured the country. According to Cullen et al., this was the starting point of what we now know as modern showbusiness (xviii) which was a “by-product of uniform system of railroads, the telegraph and telephones, … a popular daily press and a nation expanding in size and opportunity” (xviii). However, as the new technologies enabled vaudevillian troupes to easily tour the country, it was also technological development what caused vaudeville to slowly vanish from the American stages. In the mid-1910s, movie business started to steal vaudeville’s audiences. Some producers who started in vaudeville quickly realized the potential of motion pictures and founded film studios in , such as MGM, Paramount, and Fox (Cullen et al. xxi).

Another new invention that contributed to the waning of vaudeville in the USA was radio. In the early 1920s, first comedy variety radio programs emerged (Hilmes

27). Thanks to the new invention, people did not have to spend their money on tickets

9 on vaudeville shows, and they could stay home and listen to a combination of comedy and music in their living rooms. When the government standardized the use of radio frequencies in 1926, radio became a new main source of entertainment (Cullen et al. xxvi).

Before the invention of television managed to replace radio as the leading medium in the entertainment industry in the early 1950s, Max Liebman had met Sid

Caesar. Sid Caesar was a son of Polish who lived in Brooklyn, New York. He started as a saxophone player in the Catskills and discovered his talent for comedy only after enlisting to the Coast Guard. During his years in the Coast Guard, he started to perform and he got cast in a show called Tars and Spars which was directed by

Liebman. The show successfully toured the country and was made into a movie with

Caesar reprising his original role (Cullen et al. 178-179). Caesar’s talent for comedy was undeniable. However, just like in the days of vaudeville theater tropes, “talent was not enough” (Cullen et at. xviii). Fortunately, Liebman liked Caesar’s humor and knew how to get around in showbusiness.

Unlike many comedians at Tamiment who were telling jokes on stage in a manner resembling today’s stand-up comedy, Caesar did something else. He was not telling jokes, he was doing characters (CNN, “One Nation, Under Comedy”). His love and talent for inhabiting different character is visible even in his monologues which he performed as a part of every show. Even though these monologues were formally stand- up routines, Caesar was a natural story teller and he took his audience on a journey every time. In a monologue called “Five Dollar Date”, Caesar compares date nights in

1939 and 1949. In six and a half minutes, he manages to play a young boy, 6 taxi drivers, a coachman, a French and an Italian waiter (with appropriate accents) and a cinema manager, all while singing and making fun of the speeding society.

10 Caesar’s physicality and talent for inhabiting wide array of different characters completely resonated with Liebman who saw Caesar’s potential for creating a television show for the new era. A show with a lot of dancing and musical numbers but centered around comedy sketches which would be the new version of The Straw Hat Revue, this time not on stage on Broadway, but on the screens of around America. Thus,

Liebman could still keep the theater of vaudeville alive. His new show would be a modern continuation of the vaudevillian tradition, similar to the revue format of musical theater with which Liebman was obsessed.

Thus, Max Liebman returned to Tamiment in 1948 with one specific goal – to find talented people who could help him conquer television (Sweet 76). Liebman wanted to follow ’s footsteps and try to find luck on the newest available platform. Milton Berle was a famous radio personality and comedian who transferred with his show Star Theater to television in 1948 creating the first televised reoccurring comedy variety show, a genre “that dominated [all new platforms’] schedules from the beginning” (Hilmes 25).

Liebman and Caesar started working together on their first show, The Admiral

Broadway Revue. The show was set and performed in which sealed its

“position as the center of television production in the 1940s and ‘50s” (Murray 40).

Sponsored by Admiral, a company that was manufacturing television sets, Liebman created a show where he could use Caesar’s experience with performing in front of a live audience. Thus, Caesar and other actors, singers and dancers in The Admiral

Broadway Revue were able to handle the pressure of performing live in front of the whole nation. In fact, at that time it was hardly the whole nation that could watch

Caesar and the rest of the cast on television. In the late 1940s, only a few households in urban areas were able to watch television regularly (Cullen et al. 177). However, the

11 situation gradually changed. Michael Auslin provides a statistic: „In 1948, there were approximately 102,000 television sets in America. A decade later, when Caesar finished his last show, there were nearly 42 million households with a television set, reaching an astonishing 83 percent of the population.” (60).

The growing demand of American households for their own television sets was one of the factors that brought about the end of The Admiral Broadway Revue. After only 18 weeks, Admiral had to stop financially supporting Liebman’s show and started focusing on manufacturing television sets because more and more people wanted to watch what was happening on the small screen. Thus, The Admiral Broadway Revue had to be cancelled due to not having enough money to keep the show on air (Auslin

61).

Nevertheless, Caesar’s popularity was too big to keep him off air. NBC quickly managed to provide funding for a brand new show, and the era of could finally begin on 25th February 1950 and “the Saturday nights [on NBC] became the prime time for ” (Hilmes 29). Liebman, Caesar, the cast and the writers accepted a seemingly impossible challenge to create a new 90-minute show each week. In an article written in 1953, Maurice Zolotov describe Caesar’s approach to making television variety with the following words:

Caesar represents a new species of comedian, completely unknown to the

entertainment world up to now. This new breed has sprung up in response to

television’s rapacious craving for new material hurriedly contrived, speedily

rehearsed, swiftly staged. Gone are the leisurely days when comedians

performed the same routine for years without changing one syllable.

12 There were around six sketches in each episode. However, these sketches were usually longer than sketches in today’s television programs of the same genre. Even though the length of the sketches varied, a typical Caesar’s sketch is usually somewhere around 10 minutes long. To see how an episode of Your Show of Shows was structured, a short description of the show from March 21, 1953 follows.

The show started with a short advert by the sponsor of the particular episode. On that day, it was an ad for Camel cigarettes that informed viewers in the true 1950s fashion about the benefits of regular smoking. Then, the guest host was introduced and performed his/her opening monologue and presented the first sketch. The sketch was followed by a dance number, then another sketch, a musical number, and so on. The program was interrupted at times by the guest host or another cigarette advert. Near the end of the show, Sid Caesar performed his monologue in a form of a stand-up routine.

At the end, Caesar thanked the guest host and other performers for their participation and wished the audience a good night. In his book on the history of television, Vincent

LoBrutto adds that The Show of Shows Ballet Company provided the majority of dance numbers and The Charles Sanford Orchestra was responsible for the musical numbers

(361).

1.1 The Cast

In an essay by Michele Hilmes, the author argues that the hardest task when producing a weekly sketch show is to be original enough each week but not divert too much from the set concept in order to maintain a sense of continuation of the program

(27). One of the strategies that can help accomplish this task is employing a stable group of actors. The main cast of Sid Caesar’s shows included four actors. The star of the show was obviously Sid Caesar who took on the role of vaudevillian host who ties all acts together. Producer Max Liebman decided to team Sid Caesar up with Imogene

13 Coca who he had discovered during one of his first runs as the entertainment director at

Tamiment (Cullen et al. 240). Coca, a small woman of petit stature, was a perfect comic fit to tall and strong Caesar. With her professional background as a dancer, singer and overall vaudevillian actor, Coca was able to match Caesar’s talent for slapstick and physical comedy. This helped her to stay in the center of the show even though Caesar’s writers were, according to Cullen et al., more focused on writing parts for their boss than for Coca (240).

When Your Show of Shows came to its end after four years on air, split up with Caesar and became the star of her own Imogene Coca Show (Cullen et al.

242). In an effort to find a substitute for hilarious Coca for his new show Caesar’s

Hour, Caesar find a musical theater actress who had already appeared in some sketches on Your Show of Shows. Fabray’s beautiful looks were in line with the ideal of a perfect woman in the 1950s, more so than Coca who looked much more like a funny girl than a trophy wife. Unlike Coca, Nanette Fabray was younger than Caesar.

However, her looks were not the only reason why she was hired. Thanks to her background in musical theater, she could match Coca in both acting and singing and dancing (Waksberg). Just like with Coca, Caesar and Fabray often portrayed a married couple in various scenes from their home life. While Caesar and Coca were known primarily as Mr. and Mrs. Hickenlooper, Caesar and Fabray were referred to as The

Commuters in the sketches where they played a married couple (Symons 52). Symons claims that Caesar’s sketches centered at family environment were “predecessors of what would become the American tradition” (49). Many stars of the 1950s and

1960s American sitcoms originated their signature characters on stage when performing sketch comedy similar to Sid Caesar (52-53).

14 Another addition to the cast was . According to a story, Morris went to audition for Sid Caesar and Max Liebman. During the audition, Caesar stepped up to Morris, grabbed him by the shirt and lifted the man up with one hand. The search was immediately over (Fox, 2005). Short and skinny Morris was a perfect addition to the cast. Caesar could lift him up and carry around the stage. In one of the most memorable sketches called “This Is Your Story”, Morris as Uncle Groopy is latched on to Caesar’s leg and the star of the show just walks around the stage with him. In addition to his body type, Morris was a talented voice actor who often played old whining men, e.g. in sketches “Health Food Restaurant” or “Four Englishmen”. Both sketches are discussed and analyzed further in the thesis.

However, the main trio was missing a straight man that is a necessary character for many comic routines. Harmon Leon provides many definitions of a comedy straight man in his podcast Comedy History 101. In an episode that focuses on the use of a straight man in comedy, Leon says: “He’s … the voice of reason and responds in … outrage or frustration but never laughter in order to make his partner look more ridiculous.” Later he adds: “He’s a proxy for the audience. … Keep[s] everything grounded.” Straight men are usually used in double acts and sketch comedy to balance out the other player who tends to be wackier and funnier.

In sketch comedy, a straight man is usually portrayed by a tall comic. With

Caesar’s height and physique, he would potentially be a great candidate for the role of a straight man. Nevertheless, that did not correspond with Caesar’s physicality and his style of humor. His talent for pantomimic expressions and pulling faces disqualified him from becoming the straight man of the group – something Caesar would not want to be in the first place. Fortunately, Liebman knew about , a young comedian who was even taller than Caesar which Liebman as a producer required (Cullen et al. 178).

15 Thus, Carl Reiner joined the cast of Your Show of Shows and the main cast was complete.

Straight man is usually perceived as more intelligent that the wacky guy (Leon).

Caesar and Reiner masterfully played with this concept in sketches featuring a character of a professor who does not know much about his discipline. In one of the sketches,

Reiner, a straight man, plays a curious reporter who asks a professor of archeology many interesting and sophisticated questions. The professor, portrayed by Caesar, who is expected to know much more than the reporter, however answers in nonsensical sentences (Caesar, “Professor on Archeology”).

1.3 The Writers

Despite the amount of talent this cast possessed, the show needed a good team of writers that would be able to come up with an original content each week. Fortunately, during the run of these three Sid Caesar’s shows, Liebman and Caesar attracted arguably the greatest team of writers any television show has ever had (Sweet 76,

Lowry 63, Cullen et al. 177-178). Most of them were discovered either by Liebman or

Caesar himself at Tamiment or at one of the resorts located in the , a popular vacation area in upstate New York. Throughout the run of the shows, Caesar’s writing team went through many changes. Some writers left the team after a few years, other younger comics joined later. For purposes of this thesis, all three Caesar’s television shows are considered as a continuation and the term Caesar’s writers encompasses all people who worked with Caesar during the run of these shows. There were tens of people who wrote for Caesar and his cast over the years. Among those who were later able to capitalize on the experience of working for Sid Caesar’s and made a name for themselves were Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, who was both a cast member and a writer, , and Danny Simon, Woody Allen, , and

16 (LoBrutto 21). The later careers of these writers cover all branches of the entertainment industry.

After working for Caesar, Brooks stayed in television for a while and later moved to movies and became a director who focused primarily on parodies, many of which are discussed in Chapter 3 (Symons 79-81). Carl Reiner also stayed in television and while creating many celebrated sitcoms of the , he helped to discover various comedians of the next generation (Antler). Both Stein and the Simon brothers returned to the roots of variety shows and became playwrights. Out of the three, the most celebrated one is most definitely Neil Simon who went on to be one of the best

American playwrights of all time with a Pulitzer Prize for his 1999 play Lost in Yonkers

(Teachout 71). Woody Allen moved also moved to theater but later transitioned to moviemaking. With his distinctive personality, he launched a movie career that lasts over 50 years. Larry Gelbart’s biggest success was the television adaption of M*A*S*H which he co-created and wrote for several years (Vallance). The last name on the list,

Mel Tolkin, served as the head writer for both Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour.

He was trusted with the seamingly impossible job to tame the animal that was Caesar’s team and compel them to create a perfect 90-minute show each week. After Caesar’s

Hour, Tolkin continued writing for television. At one point, he wrote for the popular sitcom (Fox, 2007).

The talent and dedication of these writers to creating the best comedy show in the world were unprecedented. When the writers got back together for a special called “Caesar’s Writers” in 1996, they discussed their writing process and shared many stories from the years on the shows. The high number of writers helped to make every sketch perfect. At the reunion, Carl Reiner recalled a story from the writers’ room when they all argued what number was the funniest. They needed a number for Imogene Coca

17 to say in a sketch that took place in a casino. After providing Coca with multiple possibilities, they all finally agreed when Coca said in her unique voice: “Thirty-two!”

(Caesar, “The Funniest Number”).

Besides their talent for comedy, the writing team was full of interesting personalities. Auslin claims that Caesar’s shows were “more famous for what went behind the scenes then on stage” (61). The most unbelievable stories are linked with

Caesar’s short temper. The most iconic is a story that took place when Sid Caesar and

Mel Brooks visited . They worked together in an office in a high-rise building.

Over-worked Brooks was complaining about Caesar’s smoking by saying he needed fresh air. Robust Caesar answered Brooks’s wish by hanging him from the window by his legs (O’Brien, 2012). Another time when Brooks was at Caesar’s mercy was when

Brooks was trying to push a joke that Caesar did not think is funny enough for the show. During the writers’ reunion, Caesar reenacted how he handled unyielding Brooks:

“He poked me with the finger: ‘You do the joke!’ (Caesar pokes himself aggressively to the chest, then silently frowns for a moment and raises his finger.) Mel? I let you live”

(Caesar, “Golden Throne”).

Unfortunately, it was Caesar’s exuberant nature that led to the cancellation of

Caesar’s Hour. The furious tempo and exhausting hours spent creating the show took its toll on Caesar’s health, both physical and mental. Near the end of the show, Caesar started to drink heavily and take drugs (Lowry 63). When his third television show ended, he was only 36, yet he was too exhausted and worn out to continue to perform and lived in seclusion for many years (Cullen et al. 180). Upon the experience of working on Caesar’s show, Neil Simon later wrote a play called Laughter on the 23rd

Floor and Mel Brooks produced a movie called . They both are about

18 a writing team of a fictitious variety show whose star and writers are not unlike Caesar and his employees (Lowry 63).

1.4 Evolution of American Sketch Comedy

Caesar’s shows were not the first variety shows on American television and certainly were not the last. In a slightly modernized format, the genre of televised variety show stays alive thanks to NBC’s Saturday Night Live. When the show premiered in 1975, its truly live nature brought back the feeling of old comedy shows like Your Show of Shows that were broadcast live from New York each week which was an already forgotten format that time (Hilmes 36). However, even before the premiere of SNL, the variety show format had gone through many changes.

At the same time as Caesar’s shows were on air, there were other variety programs on American television, e.g. The Show on CBS and The Colgate

Comedy Hour. The latter was made just like Caesar’s shows by NBC, but ran on

Sundays (LoBrutto 361). Over time, the format of televised variety shows has changed.

Variety as a genre has been almost entirely wiped out and replaced by late-night talk shows. Live television is now reserved for sports, news, award shows. Occasionally, one of the US networks revives a classic Broadway musical with a new cast and airs it live as a special event. One of the musicals that got this treatment was The Sound of

Music in 2013 (Bernardin).

The only remaining reoccurring variety program that is broadcast live is

Saturday Night Live. The show premiered on October 11, 1975, and after over 40 years is still on television keeping the tradition of New York City as the center of American comedy alive (Hilmes 25). However, the show is structured differently than Caesar’s shows were. During Caesar’s prime, the song and dance numbers took almost half of the time of a show (Cullen et al. 178). Nowadays, there is always only one musical

19 guest on SNL who usually performs two songs. Also, the sketches on SNL are usually shorter with each sketch only about 5 minutes whereas Caesar’s sketches tended to be longer, sometimes even longer than 15 minutes, e.g. “The Nervous Suitor”.

Besides Saturday Night Live¸ there are other sketch comedy shows on American television. However, none of them is broadcast live. Sketch comedy shows, such as

Inside Amy Schumer and Key and Peele, are prerecorded in a film studio. Sketches from such shows resemble short movie scenes. They do not have laugh-track and they are not performed in a theater-like environment. These modern sketch shows were inspired by programs that had come primarily from the United Kingdom. Among these British shows was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. According to Hilmes, the creators behind this phenomenon “[took] full advantage of the innovations that recording could bring. The show was shot on videotape, permitting greater elaboration in sets, costumes, makeup, and staging” (34). Similar approach is often used even on SNL when a sketch would be difficult to perform live or when a use of visual effects is needed, e.g. in sketch “The

Day Beyoncé Turned Black” which is shot like a movie trailer.

Nevertheless, Caesar’s sketches were not different from today’s sketches only in the execution but also in the nature of their humor. Sketches performed on Sid Caesar’s shows did not usually comment on recent events and contemporary issues. Even though it may have been popular during the run of the shows. During the Second World War, comedian was successful with his ever-changing routines in which he commented on the most recent development at the front and in high politics. The nation conquered by fear of their sons’ lives used Hope’s humor as a relief (CNN, “Ripped from the Headlines”). This comedy style of poking fun at news was later adopted by most of the late-night talk show hosts and even by Saturday Night Live. Despite creating sketches that are not topical, SNL has a weekly segment called “Weekend Update”

20 which is a parody of news broadcasting and serves as a vehicle for making fun of the most recent news. Moreover, SNL sketches very often deal with the most discussed social and political issues. During ’s presidential campaign and then during his administration, Saturday Night Live’s sketches often centered at Trump’s most recent mishaps. They even hired as a guest star to regularly appear on the show and do his Trump’s impression, and Melissa McCarthy to imitate former

White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer (Jones 48). That is why Daniel D’Addario argues that “Saturday Night Live … has waxen and waned over decades” (24) which is understandable for a show that has been on air for over 40 years. He links the show’s popularity and relevance to changes in social and political climate in the USA drawing attention to the rising number of viewers during Trump’s presidential campaign and his subsequent administration (23).

Sid Caesar’s approach was different. His writers tried to create sketches of a timeless quality. Making fun of family relationships in sketches with Mr. and Mrs.

Hickenlooper whose dysfunctional relationship served as a source of many hilarious moments (Caesar, “Health Food Restaurant”), or aristocracy and upper class (Caesar,

“The Four Englishmen”), or intellectuals in the sketches with the professor, which were already mentioned above, or a simple grotesque-like comedy which is discussed in detail in the last chapter. Sid Caesar and his writers were able to create something that is timeless and universal. That is one of the reasons why their comedy shows were so successful. The American audience could understand the majority of their jokes no matter where they were from or what education they had. Only time when Caesar’s team used the approach similar to what was discussed above with Saturday Night Live was in their parodies and spoofs. In Caesar’s repertoire, there were sketches that were

21 direct parodies of certain plays or movies, and sketches that parodied certain theater or movie genres. Many of them are analyzed in Chapter 3.

22 2. Jewishness in Caesar’s Humor

2.1 Roots of Jewish Comedy in America

When asked about the legacy of Sid Caesar and his writers, director ,

Carl Reiner’s son, said: “Everything you laughed at in the second half of the 20th century was created by them” (CNN, “One Nation, Under Comedy”). Understandably,

Rob Reiner’s opinion may be a little bit biased considering his father was not only one of the writers but also a performer in Sid Caesar’s television shows. But Reiner Jr. has a point. Caesar’s writing team really helped redefine American comedy in the years after the Second World War and influenced many comedians that came after them. Not bad for a group of young Jews from Brooklyn.

It is true. Caesar’s writers were almost exclusively Jewish, with only exception being Tony Webster (Margolick). And almost all of them were raised in Brooklyn, New

York. As mentioned in the previous chapter, most of the writers were performing at the

Tamiment Resort in the Pocono Mountains. That was no coincidence because

Tamiment was a predominantly Jewish vacation spot (Sweet 74). Although located in

Pennsylvania, Tamiment was similar to the vacation resorts situated in the upstate New

York. Resorts, such as the Grossinger’s Granit Resort located in the Hudson Valley or

The Pines Resort, created what was then called the Borscht Belt, sometimes referred to as Jewish Alpes (Konstantinides). The beautiful nature of the in the upstate New York offered a safe haven for the hardworking New Yorkers.

Named after an Eastern-European dish, the Borscht Belt came to existence after the end of the First World War with resorts being set up by factory owners who helped build these vacation resorts for their immigrant Jewish employees in order for them to escape the scorching streets of the New York City and spend a nice vacation with their

23 families (Sweet 74). Because resorts like Tamiment offered a “relatively economical vacation” (CNN, “One Nation, Under Comedy”), they were obviously packed with guest from working class Jewish families each summer.

The guest at these resorts were usually first or second-generation immigrants, very often members of the working class, but educated with desire to become next generation’s middle class. The guests were usually from politically engaged families with inclination to the ideas of socialism (Sweet 74). These vacation spots offered an alternative for the Jewish families who were even at those times still very often discriminated by WASP families and denied access to country clubs and similar facilities (Quart 8). The fact that all the guests at these Jewish resorts shared similar roots and political ideas enabled the management of such resorts to organize the evening entertainment for their guests accordingly. Hired comedians could poke fun at anti-

Semites, they could comment on Germany before and during the Second World War, they could use expressions and all their jokes would be perfectly understood

(Sweet 75).

However, nowhere was the humor so edgy as it was at Tamiment. While many resorts in the Catskill mountains were family-oriented, Tamiment welcomed young single New Yorkers who could not only enjoy a beautiful vacation, but also meet their potential partner of the same ethnic background. Thus, Max Liebman, the program director at Tamiment and second-generation immigrant himself, could hire comedians who were willing to take more risks with their comedy (Sweet 74). Among these risktakers, there were both Mel Brooks who slides into an Adolf Hitler impression any time he has a chance (Pearlstein), and Sid Caesar whose aggressive physicality let him push his performances to extreme.

24 2.2 Muting the Jewishness

Nevertheless, when Liebman decided to put Caesar on television, he knew that the amount of Jewishness in his humor had to be dialed down. In the 1950s, it was still not uncommon for Jews to be discriminated against by the general public (Quart 8).

Liebman knew that all too well from his Straw Hat that run on Broadway after each season of his Tamiment run and consisted of the best material from past summer.

However, many good sketches from Tamiment had to be rewritten or tossed out completely because they were “too Jewish for Broadway” (Sweet 77). As an example of a declined sketch, Jeffrey Sweet mentions a Tamiment entertainers’ spoof on

Shakespeare’s with references to Jewish history and culture.

Thus, Liebman and the rest of the crew knew that in order to interest all

Americans, they have to alter their humor to be able to appeal to wider audiences. The truth is that even before Caesar, there were many Jewish comedians on American television. However, their success very often depended on the amount of Jewishness in their acts. Even the legendary comedian and pioneer of sketch comedy on television,

Milton Berle, was considered too Jewish for the general audience. After television gradually spread all over the country, audiences in rural areas did not respond well to his broad, sometimes even campy, style of humor (Antler).

Fortunately for Liebman and Caesar, Jewish identity is “ostensibly invisible”

(Silverman 262). Even though there are names, typically of German origin, that are often associated with having a Jewish background, American Jews were able to pass for

WASPs if they wanted. This allowed many Jews “to be free of any reminder of their ethnic past” (Quart 8). Being afraid of losing audiences, hiding their Jewish identity or at least not drawing attention to it had been a common practice for many American Jews working in the entertainment industry. Since the beginning of the American film

25 industry, many of the biggest production companies in Hollywood were owned and run by Jewish immigrants (Leitch 282). Driven by their desire to assimilate into the

American culture, these studio heads rarely greenlit projects that were telling stories centered on the Jewish community or from a perspective of a Jewish person. Despite intentionally hiding their Jewishness both on screen by not explicitly mentioning it and in real life by changing their German-sounding names, the producer were very often accused of pushing Jewish agenda. This was not uncommon before the rise of anti-

Semitism in Europe and also many decades after the end of the Second World War.

Bigoted critics published anti-Semitic pieces, such as William E. H. Meyer Jr.’s article from 1999 which is heavily criticized by Thomas M. Leitch in his article “Truth,

Justice, and the Gentile American Way”. In his article, Leitch dismisses Meyer’s claim that any involvement of a Jewish performer or moviemaker turns the film into a Jewish propaganda (282). Reversely, Leitch sides with the idea expressed also by Leonard

Quart who says that many Jewish entertainers of the earliest years of the American cinema actively suppressed their Jewishness not only to please their audiences, but more importantly for themselves to be able to assimilate to the American culture (8).

Moreover, some Jewish directors decided to tell stories from the perspective of a

Gentile even when shooting a film that centers on Jews. As an example, Quart, for mentions Elia Kazan’s film Gentleman’s Agreement which tells a story about unravelling an anti-Semitic group after the Second World War. Leading character in the movie, however, is a Gentile detective who goes undercover to a ghetto to gather information on the racists (9). It was only much later when a new generation of Jewish filmmakers emerged and were not afraid to explicitly mention their Jewishness. Many of the writers associated with Sid Caesar can be found on this list, e.g. Mel Brooks,

Joseph Stein, or Woody Allen. However, to create their “Jewish” pieces was possible

26 only after the revolution in the American humor that was brought by Sid Caesar and his variety shows. Like many revolutions in art, this revolution did not happen overnight.

2.3 Characteristics of Jewish Humor

If Max Liebman wanted to dial the Jewishness of Caesar’s comedy down in order to be more successful with the American audience, temperamental Caesar found a slightly different reasoning behind this decision. He said: “I didn’t want to make fun of being Jewish” (qtd. in Ivry). Having Jews and their culture as a punchline of his jokes was too easy for Caesar. He impersonated characters which made him different from the rest of the working comedians of his time (as mentioned in the previous chapter). His characters were taken from his own and his writers’ life experience. In an interview from 2006, Caesar recalls: “[The sketches were] what I and everyone else was doing on weekend and with our families” (qtd. in Auslin 62). On stage, it may have seemed that he was doing characters while in fact “[he] was doing life” (Nachman 105).

Unfortunately, Caesar’s Jewish background is the life he knew best. Even though he tried to hide his Jewishness, it does not mean that it had not find its way to his act. The fact that Caesar and Liebman hired comedians whose work they were familiar with from their summers at the Tamiment Resort did not help either. In the end,

Caesar was surrounded by a writing team whose members were “personally experienced in the traumas of modern Jewish history” (Ivry). Mel Tolkin – a survivor of anti-Semitic in , Mel Brooks - a war veteran who had been deployed in Europe, all of them – children of Jewish immigrants raised in Brooklyn, New York.

Despite being almost as broad as Berle and having an occasional Yiddish slip,

Caesar “avoided explicitly Jewish impersonations. [Yet] their portrayals were implicitly coded as Jewish” (Antler). Like a little wink to the camera, Caesar and his colleagues would give away subtle hints to establish a connection with the Jewish members of their

27 audience which added to the Jewish audience’s enjoyment of the performance. A perfect example of this tactic is a sketch called “German General.” There, Caesar plays the titular General who is putting on his heavily decorated uniform with the help of his valet only to reveal at the end of the scene that this proud and choleric German General is in fact a hotel doorman starting his daily shift. During the sketch, Caesar seems to talk German. However, the German-speaking audience can tell that it is only a gibberish, acoustically resembling German language but full of occasional slips of

Yiddish words. In 2014 on Conan O’Brien’s talk show, Mel Brooks praised Caesar’s natural talent for mimicking foreign languages that he did not know. Nevertheless, for a child of Jewish immigrants, the German gibberish had to be most definitely Caesar’s favorite.

What is undoubtedly much subtler nod to their Jewishness than making fun of

Germans and using Yiddish expressions is the over-all style of humor that Caesar and his colleagues used throughout the years on The Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show of Shows, and Caesar’s Hour. Their comedy style bears a lot of characteristics that are typical for Jewish humor which many scholars tried to analyze and define. Sigmund

Freud defined Jewish humor as a defense mechanism that lets “victims of persecution safely cope with their condition” (Horowitz 63). This sense of oppression and frustration comes up very often in various definitions. When talking about Jewish humor, American scholar Sarah Blacher Cohen says: “[Jewish humor] is a discrepancy between what was to be the ‘chosen people’s’ glorious destiny and their desperate straits” (qtd. in Rosenberg 111). Jews were being oppressed many times during the past centuries. Religious anti-Semitism, pogroms in many European countries, all leading to the genocide of millions and millions Jewish people in the Holocaust. These horrible

28 circumstances that Jews had to endure over and over again left their mark on the style of their humor whose main ingredient is very often “self-mockery” (Rosenberg 111).

Only that way, Jews could “retain a sense of … power” (Rosenberg 111) in the face of the oppressors. As Mel Brooks puts it: “If they are laughing, how can they bludgeon you to death?” (qtd. in Horowitz 63). Sid Caesar talked about Jewish humor in a similar manner: “Jews appreciate humor because in their life it’s not too funny. We’ve been trodden down for a long time. … And we’re very good at being self-deprecating.

Either we do it or somebody’s going to do it for us. We might as well do it first” (qtd. in

Ivry). Caesar’s words go hand in hand with the work of a Jewish comedian whose most famous character that he portrayed was a stereotypical cheap Jew

(Pearlstein). By making fun of alleged Jewish stinginess, Jewish comedians took the chance to make the same joke in their expanse away from the Gentiles. Jack Benny’s signature joke originated in his radio show but was later recreated on television on an episode of . In the anecdote, Benny walks alone at night when he is surprised by a burglar who is pointing a gun at him.

Burglar: “Your money, or your life?”

Benny does not answer.

Burglar: “I said: ‘Your money, or your life?’”

Benny: “I’m thinking!”

After the Second World War, Jews took this sense of “tak[ing] suffering with stride” (Rosenberg 111) with them when they found new settlements all over the world during the diaspora. Even though many Jews did not want to be seen as members of a victim community after the war and they rejected this status, a large number of Jewish

29 comedians cultivated this status and built their jokes on the feeling of oppression, frustration and self-deprecation. Although they risked “reinforce[ing Jewish] stereotypes” (Silverman 269), taking their frustrations and exploiting them in their routines helped Jewish comedians to “resist oppressive labels” (Silverman 269) and create Jewish characters that were constructed as real people rather that as marginalized caricatures for comic purposes or as poor and helpless victims (Silverman 262). This corresponded with Caesar’s way of creating truthful characters that were inspired by real life.

Despite muting the Jewishness of Sid Caesar and his writers in their variety shows, all the features that are typical for Jewish humor can be traced in their televised sketches. During the nine years when Caesar’s three consecutive shows were on air, not once did any actor utter the word Jew or Jewish, says David Margolick, a Vanity Fair contributor, in his eulogy for Caesar. As mentioned above, that would not stop the writers to smuggle their Jewish heritage to their skits. Since he was the star of the show,

Sid Caesar usually played the leading roles in the sketches. Many of them revolve around Caesar’s characters who come face to face with an unpleasant situation. Even though Caesar may be the most rational character in a scene, he is, in a classic Jewish manner, the one who ends up as the butt of the joke.

In a sketch called “Slowly I Turned”, Caesar finds himself on top of a New York

City skyscraper. When a young woman shows up wanting to end her life by jumping from the building, Caesar stops her and urges her to tell him what is wrong. During her confession, Caesar gets beaten up both physically and emotionally. When the woman changes her mind about committing suicide and leaves, another young broken-hearted woman shows up with the desire to jump. Ragged Caesar cuts in front of her and dives from the rooftop. Caesar’s eventual defeat is the most prominent in sketches with Mr.

30 and Mrs. Hickenlooper. Coca’s Mrs. Hickenlooper’s plans usually make her husband end up in a situation he does not want to be in.

Jewish anecdotes also very often revolve around food and overeating in particular (Margolick). Gluttony of Caesar’s Mr. Hickenlooper is contrasted with the

Christian modesty of his wife in sketches such as “The Poker Game” where Imogene

Coca describes her on-stage husband’s eating habits: “He had breakfast the way he always has it. Fruit juice, oatmeal, and dry cereal, some bacon and eggs, waffles and sausages, pancakes, fried potatoes, coffee and cake.” Or, in another sketch called

“Health Food Restaurant” where Caesar and Coca who again portray a married couple go to a new restaurant that serves the healthiest food in town. When a waiter brings a bouquet of flowers to their table and the wife starts to devour it one blossom at a time, the husband cannot believe his eyes. When he finds out that the bouquet is a pallet cleanser and the rest of the menu is not that different, he loses his temper at first, but later succumbs to his wife’s constant nagging and joins her angrily eating from the flowerbed that the waiter has brought him.

In addition to joking about Jewish love of eating, these sketches were also a nod to those Jews who happen to have a Gentile spouse. This was not uncommon for many

American Jews to find one’s partner among the non-Jewish Americans. Maybe as a part of Americanizing themselves via assimilation, marrying a person of Christian believes was a way to go. As well as finding new friends among Catholics (Quart 8). Although the Hickenloopers were ethnically undefined, some critics argue that they are one of the earliest portrayal of an intermarriage (Margolick). It was not only Caesar and Coca who relied on portrayal of a married couple out of which one spouse is Jewish and the other one Catholic. While Caesar only used the Hickenloopers sporadically, Jewish comedian and Catholic comedian Gracie Allen built their careers on

31 juxtaposing the characters of a stern husband and a ditzy wife. This real-life couple’s successful sitcom The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show ran on television simultaneously with Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour (Symons 52).

In general, depiction of a family life can tell a lot if one is looking for clues of ethnicity. Jewish and other immigrant families were often depicted as more lively and loud that the uptight and posh families of the WASP Americans. In Woody Allen’s earliest movies, he explores his Jewishness and depicts scenes taken right from his childhood memories on several occasions. In Annie Hall, he lets the audience have a peek into his family members’ loud and flamboyant behavior during a family gathering.

That is later contrasted with Annie’s family when Allen’s character Alvy gets invited for a quiet and sophisticated luncheon. When Alvy breaks the fourth wall during the meal, he points at the difference between his and Annie’s families saying: “I can’t believe this family. … Nothing like [mine]. The two are like oil and water.”

The contrasting of the different lifestyles resonated with other minorities who tried to find their place in the American society. The Jews who fled from the oppression in Europe met with some form of anti-Semitism in the USA. Seeing people whose behavior is similar to their own could help Jews and even other ethnic minorities feel a sense of belonging in America.

Besides the connection between ethnic minorities, Rachel Silverman in her essay

“Comedy as Correction” draws similarities between depiction of Jews and gays and lesbians on television. By far, the most visible similarity between Jews and members of

LGBT community is the use of camp aesthetics which is, according to Silverman,

“derived from Jewish (…) identity” (269). A glimpse of the camp aesthetics can be spotted in Caesar’s broad physical style of his performance. This camp aesthetics was in a perfect juxta position with stern and frigid nature of typical WASP families of the

32 1950s. It seems as if Silverman talks about Caesar when she describes camp as “a strategy to deal with anger” (270). Caesar, known for his occasional fits of anger, had a really short temper and performing helped him contain it.

2.4 Reaching the General Audience

Nevertheless, the biggest question is: Why was Caesar’s humor so successful all over the while sharing a lot of the features with Jewish humor that seemed to divide the American audiences? Irving Howe, a Jewish literary critic, posed a similar question in 1951. He argued that the underdog position of Jews and the self-deprecation would not resonate with the WASPs and their perception of America as a leading world power that answers to no one (Rosenberg 112). Even though his later work shows

Howe’s disappointment with what remained of the Jewish humor in American comedy calling it only a “sad substitute [of Jewish humor] in the American culture” (112) because many features of the humor were missing, he did not take into account how important the rest of the features had become for the mainstream comedy in the USA.

The fact that the USA were at the top of the world in the beginning of the second half of the 20th century did not stop Jewish comedians, such as Sid Caesar, to model their comedy after typically Jewish features. As Kate McKinnon, winner of 2016 and

2017 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her work on Saturday Night Live, replicated words of comedian Rita Rudner in her interview with : “There’s nothing funny about a confident person doing great.” McKinnon was answering a question about where she finds humor for her characters. Her answer is a testament to the comic style of Sid Caesar and his team which is based on Jewish tradition. The truth is that comedy always needs a victim because as Casper says: “Laughter [is always] directed at someone as a kind of scorn

33 (584). What Jewish comedians did is that they turned the tables and made themselves the victims of their own jokes.

Jewish comedians, such as Sid Caesar and his writing team, were able to successfully adapt Jewish humor for the post-war American audience. A testimony to their success is the traditional characters or tropes from Jewish folklore, schlemiel and schlimazel, who found their place on American television in the second half of the 20th century. Schlemiel and schlimazel personify everything that is discussed above that deals with self-mockery, laughing in the face of failure, and being the butt of one’s own jokes. While schlemiel is a person whose own “actions cause his [ultimate] downfall”

(Gillota 154), schlimazel’s failure is caused by an external force that brings him a never-ending series of bad luck (Rosenberg 112). Despite the constant oppression from others, the self-destructive schlemiel is used more often by Jewish comedians. Gillota traces the reoccurrence of schlemiel back to the Jewish need to defy their oppressors.

According to his article, constant failing in the world governed by WASPs is a Jewish way to challenge the dominant culture, define oneself as the Other, and “destabilize

American myths” (154). By creating characters similar to these two folklore figures but situating them to the contemporary American reality, Jewish comedians were able to

“stay connected with their heritage but also assimilate” (Rosenberg 112).

Since these two characters did not have a counter-part in the American folklore represented by Manifest Destiny and the position of the winner of the Second World

War (Rosenberg 112), Jewish comedians had to introduce this archetype in their routines. Not long after the end of Sid Caesar’s shows, schlemiels were lurking from both television and the big screen. Woody Allen’s films are infested with a schlemiel- type characters, typically portrayed by Allen himself. For example, his inability to speak with women is front and center in his film Play It Again, Sam. There, Allen’s

34 clumsiness is described ironically by one of the girls he tries to impress as “hav[ing] a delicate touch” after he breaks a gramophone and a couple of LPs. More recent examples of schlemiels are Ross Geller from Friends and ’s on-screen persona in his show Curb Your Enthusiasm who is, according to Gillota, a modern prototype of a Jewish schlemiel (153). Even Sid Caesar’s writers occasionally used schlemiel in their sketches. Sid Caesar plays a schlemiel-like character, for example, in a sketch called “The Nervous Suitor”. There, he tries to charm a colleague whom he fell in love with. His clumsiness and nervousness are the biggest obstacles that he has to overcome to wow the girl he desires to marry. He destroys a bouquet he brought for the girl, offends her mother, spills tea all over the girl’s dress and much more.

At first the WASP Americans find their pleasure in laughing at these luckless characters thinking that this can never happen to them. However, the second half of the

20th century came and it brought problems even to the ever-winning United States. It was not long after the War when a lot of Americans met with disappointment. Social uneasiness that came with issues that were brought up by the Civil Rights Movement, and later the long and taxing War in Vietnam brought America back to the harsh reality.

No wonder that almost 80 percent of working stand-up comedians were Jewish by the end of the , according to the Time magazine (Horowitz 63). All Americans suddenly need to laugh. Thanks to Jewish comedians, they already knew that people can laugh through tears and that “laughter and trembling [can be] inextricably mingled”

(Gillota 154).

2.5 Being Openly Jewish

In later years, the notion of hiding one’s own Jewishness vanished. Even the writers from Sid Caesar’s team openly referred to their Jewish heritage in their work.

Mel Brooks’s filmography is full of Jewish characters. Woody Allen’s brand is a

35 neurotic New York City Jew. After they established themselves as household names, they were no longer afraid to show their audiences who they really are and where their humor comes from. They could use their Jewish voices more freely. Unlike in the earlier years when they were working for the network television and they would not risk their openly Yiddish humor on a general audience. Maybe it was because of their earlier success, or it was all a part of the Civil Rights movement. In the 1970s, African-

American families were given more space on television and similarly, other shows explored Jewish topics more explicitly (MJL Staff). According to a research presented by Rosenberg in her article, anti-Semitist tendencies were generally on a decline in

1960s and 1970s in America (121).

Thus, Mel Brooks was able to reach his full potential. His theatrical and flamboyant personality was no longer held back by the fear of being too Jewish. Right after the end of his work for Sid Caesar, Brooks and Reiner were successful with their

“”. What started as an improvisation for amusement of their Jewish friends at parties became a series of sketches performed on stage and comedy albums

(Margolick). The routine fitted Reiner and Brooks perfectly. The former, straight man par excellence, played an unperturbed reporter who interviews the latter gentleman who happens to be the titular 2000 Year Old Man. Naturally, he is a cranky Jew with

Yiddish accent whose grand-children never come to visit him. It is Brooks’s delivery that makes the routine unforgettable. Brooks lets himself go and shoves his “Jewishness in [his audience’s] face” (110), as Dixon puts it.

Brooks’s Jewishness also resurfaced when he started writing and directing movies. His first feature film centers on a Jewish producer and a Jewish accountant who try to produce a Broadway flop in order to come to easy money. Not only are the main characters Jewish, but the whole movie is in fact about a musical

36 about Adolf Hitler and satirizes anti-Semitism in the United States. In another one of his films, , Brooks smuggles a Jewish character into a western movie. In

History of the World, Part I, one of the acts of the movie is about torturing Jewish people during the Spanish inquisition. The list of Jewish references in Brooks’s movies could go on. Besides Brooks, Jewishness plays a big role in the post-Caesar work of another member of the writing team and that is it the plays by Joseph Stein. After

Caesar’s shows ended, Stein went on to become a successful playwright. He won Tony award for best book for musical Fiddler on the Roof which tells a story set in Eastern-

European town and among its main themes is the effort to maintain Jewish religion and culture alive.

The situation was similar in a realm of stand-up comedy. The club nature of this particular branch of comedy could always be far edgier that what was airing television.

Thus, Jewish stand-up comedians could express their Jewishness more freely. In the beginning of 1960s, these comedians started to appear on television screens with much bolder routines. Jewish stand-up comedian opened his act on The Steve

Allen Show in 1959 with “Well, Elizabeth Taylor became bar-mitzvah’d?” reacting to actress’s conversion to Judaism. In the same routine, Bruce discusses the offensive nature of his comedy. It was his schtick, later labelled “sick humor”. It covered everything from Bruce “picnicking in a cemetery” (Nachman 403) to being sentenced to four months in a workhouse for obscenity in 1964 (Moylan). Lenny Bruce had no boundaries and was willing to say anything to not only get a laugh but also challenge social standards (Nachman 426).

With his “sick humor”, one more characteristic of Jewish humor that has not been discussed in this chapter resurfaces. It is something what Dixon calls “the license to be offensive” (110). This also comes from Jewish history, mainly from the tragedies

37 of the past century. Jews as the victim community of these tragedies hold license that says what can be said and what must not in terms of Jewish suffering mainly during the

Holocaust. This topic is heavily discussed in Ferne Pearlstein’s 2016 documentary The

Last Laugh. It features many comedians that were already talked about in this thesis, such as Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. In her documentary, Pearlstein asks her guests questions that deal with laughing in times of tragedy. She specifically focuses on jokes and humor related to Holocaust, and her exclusively Jewish interviewees do not give her a simple answer.

Arguably one of the most interesting parts of the documentary is Mel Brooks’s negative answer to question: “Is it OK to make fun of Holocaust?” Normally, a no would be the anticipated answer but from someone whose comedy masterpiece The

Producers features a cheerful musical number called “Springtime for Hitler”, this answer comes as a surprise. Also, at the end of his movie History of the World, Part 1, there is a short scene with a telling title – “Hitler on Ice”. According to his own words,

Brooks sees impersonating Hitler as a “revenge through ridicule” (Pearlstein) but he strongly refuses to make a Holocaust joke. However, he understands why many younger

Jewish comedians use the Holocaust as a punchline. It is only a matter of time, says

Brooks. If enough time has passed, a joke about tragic times can become acceptable. In addition to the time distance, comedian Judy Gold adds one more criterion. “You can’t tell a crappy joke about the greatest tragedy in the world,” says Gold in Pearlstein’s documentary. An offensive joke simply has to be funny which is a quality that cannot be objectively determined. Comedians who decide to go for an ethnic or possibly offensive joke must be willing to face criticism. That happened, for example, to half-

Jewish comedian Lena Dunham who wrote a satirical article for The New Yorker where she compared Jewish men and dogs. Jewish Anti-Defamation League quickly “accused

38 [her] of evoking historical stereotypes against Jewish people” (Epstein). The young comedian faced backlash and she did not even go so far as many of her colleagues who joke about the Holocaust.

From the plethora of Jewish comedians that tell Holocaust jokes, I mention

Sarah Silverman who devotes a whole segment of her Jesus is Magic stand-up special to joking about the Holocaust, going as far as saying: “I believe that if black people were in Germany during World War II, the Holocaust would have never happened. … Or not to Jews.” With this statement, Silverman reveals another problem that could be discussed when it comes to asking how far a comedian can go with his/her jokes. And that is the dilemma whether being a member of one minority gives a comedian right to joke in expanse of another minority. ’s style of comedy is similar to

Lenny Bruce’s, her goal is to be offensive and move the acceptable line further. Once, she faced backlash after telling a joke on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show. In her joke about getting out of a jury duty by pretending to be racist, Silverman used a derogatory term for Chinese people. Immediately, certain members of Chinese-American community asked for an apology from Silverman. When asked about why she choose to use this derogatory term in her joke, Silverman said: “I could’ve said ‘dirty Jew’. But it wouldn’t have been as funny because I’m a Jew. And it’s … too safe” (CNN, “One

Nation, Under Comedy”). As they continue to follow the footsteps of their Jewish predecessors, Silverman and her peers do comedy that makes the audience “think and cringe” (Dixon 110). By joking about taboo topics, they point at problems in the society and continue to stir the conversation.

2.6 Evolution of American Humor

As discussed above, the situation on the late-night TV and in American comedy in general gradually changed and Jewish comedians became the leading figures of

39 American humor both on stages and on screens. The up-and-coming comedians inspired by the predecessors that were at that time predominantly Jewish modeled their routines on the foundations of the comedy of their idols.

Non-Jewish comedians have adopted the “weak Jewish man” act and ap-

plied it to their own ethnic backgrounds. Louis CK is the twenty-first

century’s master of non-Jewish self-derision, joking at the expense of his

Catholic up-bringing, and regularly referring to himself as “an asshole.”

Newcomer created an entire series out of his act of being

romantically, charmingly self-deprecating and the child of Indian

immigrants. (Hammerman 59)

Many African-American comedians also build on their frustration from feeling oppressed by white Americans. In ’s stand-up special Killin’ Them

Softly, he spends a large portion of his time expressing his frustrations with the police and their profiling. Even Conan O’Brien, comedian of Irish descent, saluted Sid Caesar on his show after the news broke of his death admitting: “Everything that anyone is doing in comedy right now you can probably trace it all back to Sid Caesar.” Work of all the contemporary comedians mentioned above proves that the Jewish sensibility in humor became the American norm and “Jewish men’s comedy in America [began to be referred to] simply as ‘comedy’” (Hammerman 55).

Nevertheless, establishing this norm was not instant and also not linear. After

Caesar’s Hour had got cancelled, Carl Reiner continued to work for television. He moved from NBC to CBS and created one of the most popular sitcoms on American television, The Show. It ran for 5 seasons from 1961 to 1966, and

40 created many future stars, e.g. . At that time, explicit Jewishness was still considered to be dangerous for reaching general audience. Thus, Reiner’s first draft where Reiner’s character was Jewish had to be rewritten to make him Irish (Antler).

Interestingly, Carl Reiner portrayed a temperamental star of a fictitious show that shared many personality traits with Reiner’s former boss, Sid Ceasar (Ivry).

Similarly, Neil Simon tends not to point out his characters’ Jewishness in his plays. Despite being undoubtedly one of the best American playwrights of all time,

Simon moved to Broadway after Sid Caesar’s show and wrote plays without explicitly mentioning their ethnic background, unlike his former colleagues Brooks, Stein, and

Allen. Even in later years when Jewish characters were all around American television, big screen, and theater stage, Simon continued to not draw attention to his Jewishness even though many of his plays were based on his life. His decision to do so may have come from his shy personality. In Richard Benjamin’s movie My Favorite Year which is a slightly altered depiction of a week on Your Show of Shows when American movie- star Eroll Flynn was to make a guest appearance, Neil Simon is depicted as a quiet member of the writing team who would rather whisper his ideas to one of his colleagues than discuss it with the whole group. Nevertheless, the fact that Simon is as brilliant playwright as he may play an even bigger role than his personality. As a testament to depicting the American reality, Simon talks about universal topics that have nothing to do with being a Jewish-American but rather with being an American (Chank).

After the era of “open Jewishness” on screen, the situation slightly changed.

1990s brought a large number of sitcoms set in New York City, e.g. ,

Seinfeld, and Friends. There were many characters in these sitcoms who only happened to be Jewish, but their heritage did not play any significant role in the narrative. It seemed like it does not matter anymore whether a comedian is Jewish or not. Being a

41 comedian and being Jewish has become almost synonymous. on his own show did not have to point out his Jewishness but the fact that he is Jewish screams from virtually almost every frame. On Seinfeld, Jerry works as a stand-up comedian based in New York City. By the 1990s, there was only a small chance that he would be anything else but Jewish (Hammerman 56). Even though Rosenberg argues that comedians such as “Allen, Seinfeld, and David rejected traditional forms of Jewish comedy” (110), the truth is somewhere else. They may be more American but that does not mean they are less Jewish.

Nevertheless, Jewish comedy on television has been changing again since the turn of the century. Nowadays, many Jewish comedians use their heritage in their jokes, seemingly setting themselves apart from their Gentile colleagues. Their work is a new chapter in the history of Jewish comedy in America. After decades of oppression and forced hiding, Jewish comedians openly showed their Jewishness in films and in television, and stood at the forefront of American comedy. Gradually, Jewish comedians and Jewish characters became a norm and creators did not have to draw attention to their Jewish heritage. The new generation of Jewish comedians construct their jokes as if they wanted to be seen as a minority once again (Gillota 158). Among these is who landed his late-night gig right at the beginning of the 21st century. On , Stewart often pointed out his Jewishness while discussing topics relating to . In an opening monologue called “We Need to Talk about Israel”, Stewart wants to discuss political situation in Israel and Gaza Strip.His correspondents do not let him finish his monologue about Israel representing opinions of different political groups. One screams at him that as a Jew he cannot be unbiased and that he will side with Israel while another one also warns him about his absence of bias but on a basis on being a “self-hating Jew” (also discussed in Gillota 155). Another

42 contemporary comedian who relies heavily on his Jewishness in his comedy is Seth

Rogen. The movie The Night Before where Rogen stars is in fact set around Christmas holidays and Rogen’s character’s Jewishness is the one of the main sources of comedy.

In one scene, he goes to a Christian church for a mass with his wife but after seeing

Jesus Christ on the cross he panics and runs away from the church thinking the

Christians want to lynch him for what his people did to their Lord.

This however applies mainly to male Jewish comedians. In recent year, many

Jewish female comedians have emerged and graced the American television screens.

Namely, Amy Schumer who stars in her own sketch comedy series Inside Amy

Schumer, Lena Dunham, the lead actress in already-cancelled HBO hit series Girls, or

Rachel Bloom who not only stars in her musical TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend but she also co-created the program. Their style of humor is edgier and often times goes over the top mainly in topics relating to sex and relationships. Their more riskier humor is most definitely influenced by the work of late .

Even though these female comedians may be sometimes harsher than their male colleagues, as Hammerman states, there is almost a “parenthetical quality” (50) to their

Jewishness. The on-stage persona of these performers does not stand and fall on the fact that they are Jewish. The only time their Jewishness is relevant is when a joke demands it. As an example, I present an exchange from Schumer’s stand-up special Cutting when she retells a story of how she met an old Christian lady who tried to interest her in joining the Church:

Out of nowhere, she’s like: “Have you heard the good news?” I didn’t know

what she was talking about. … Then I realized that she was inviting me to

her church. As nicely as I could I said: “Ma’am, I’m so sorry but my people

43 are Jewish.” And she was like: “Well, that’s OK, your people just haven’t

found Jesus yet.” And I’m like: “Yeah, no, we found him. … Maybe you

haven’t heard the bad news.”

As a matter of fact, she introduces this segment by proclaiming that as a white woman she does not have to deal with racism, pointing out the aforementioned invisibility of Jewish ethnicity. She then tells the audience that she is in fact Jewish and presents the scene with the old Christian lady. However, this scene is only an abrupt segue to allow her to talk about her dating experience with men of various ethnic backgrounds. Being a member of an ethnic minority gives her the discussed license to go a little further with her racial humor. Hammerman uses the same part of Schumer’s routine to show that Jewish female comedians use their Jewishness differently than men. She claims that the female comedians do not use it to build their jokes on vulnerability but rather on being proud of being Jewish (57-59).

They do not choose to express themselves in a manner that borders on offensive because of their Jewish heritage but their frustration comes from being a woman in a patriarchal society. They don’t make Jewish jokes, they make “women jokes”

(Hammerman 51). For them the Jewish fight is over, but now they have to fight a more important one. And in a true Jewish manner, they are fighting it with humor.

44 3. Parody in Caesar’s Sketches

3.1 Caesar’s Parodies

The audience is watching a well-known scene. A young woman is expecting a visit from her elegant sister while her grumpy husband dressed in a white but dirty undershirt comes home from work. However, this Stanley Kowalski is not played by

Marlon Brando. It is Sid Caesar who took on the iconic role. And this is not A Streetcar

Named Desire, but “A Streetcar Named ???”, a parody of the famous theater piece written by the creators of Your Show of Shows. Even though the names of the characters are different, the story and their personalities stay almost the same. Stella and Stanley constantly fight and yell at each other only to kiss affectionally a few seconds later.

Stanley stuffs his mouth with fried chicken as Blanche (here called Magnolia) retells a story about a young man that wants to marry her. Later, she accuses Stanley of touching her inappropriately even though Sid Caesar stands two feet away from her. When Stella joins the argument, Stanley scream: “You’re both nuts!” and slams the door behind

Blanche kicking her out of his apartment.

Caesar’s legacy is full of parodies. The writers usually took a popular film whose characters could be recreated by the cast. That way, Caesar and Coca (or later

Fabray) were able to alter their familiar husband-and-wife routine with new material.

This is affirmed by Alex Symons in his book on Mel Brooks’s work when he says that

“Caesar hybridized relatable moments of domestic life with famous scenes from

Hollywood and European films” (49). Thus, movies like A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and got revamped on Caesar’s shows. Having

Imogene Coca, and later Nanette Fabray, as his established television wives, Caesar could easily portray couples from famous movies only by placing himself and the

45 actress into appropriate setting. Caesar’s comic style stays untouched in these parodies.

He still gets to be loud and broad. In “On the Docks”, spoof of Elia Kazan’s On the

Waterfront, he breaks the wall to get to his love interest and fights mafia members multiple times.

Interestingly, they also sometimes did a parody of a European film that many audience members and viewers around America could not be familiar with. In order not to exclude anyone, the writers had to make the sketch to be funny even for someone who is not familiar with the original. In “La Bicycletta”, Caesar, Reiner and Coca mock an Italian movie called The Bicycle Thief. If someone from the audience were not familiar with the film, the cast did not help him to understand because they speak in

Italian gibberish throughout the whole sketch. And that is the main thing that makes the sketch funny for everybody. Their masterful gibberish peppered with Italian-sounding

English words is hilarious on its own. Add Imogene Coca in a crazy wig and a simple story about two thieves stealing from each other, and everyone laughs regardless their film education. Moreover, by parodying foreign films, Caesar fulfills an important characteristic of parody that is defined by Wes D. Gehring in his book Parody as a Film

Genre, and that is the educational purpose of parody (3). In the book, he establishes seven basic characteristic that are typically found in works of this particular genre. In short, Gehring’s characteristics are:

1. “Parody should be funny even without viewers expertise on the subject under

comic attack” (2).

2. “[Even] though the fundamental goal is to be funny, … this genre is also

educational tool (3).

3. “[Parody] should not be confused with ” (5).

46 4. “There are two … kinds of film parodies – the broad and obvious puncturing of

a genre or auteur, and a more subdued approach that manages comic deflation

with an eventual reaffirmation of the subject under attack” (6).

5. “Film parody … is a genre of indeterminate time and space” (10).

6. “Although parody usually has a focus genre or auteur under comic attack, it

frequently is peppered with eclectic references to other structures or texts” (13).

7. Parodies point out “self-consciousness about the filmmaking experience” (16).

Not only did Caesar and his writers prove that they were familiar with the original by parodying the European film, but they also broaden the horizons of Americans who were watching their shows and were being introduced to new and interesting works in the process.

Nevertheless, Caesar did not do only parodies of specific movies. Among his genre parodies is a spoof of English court dramas where Reiner and Caesar play two incompetent British lawyers with characteristic powdered wigs (Caesar, “The English

Courtroom”). Or, they poked fun at their own medium when performing as a fictitious boyband called The 3 Haircuts. In a sketch of the same name, Caesar, Reiner and

Morris portrayed the Haircut brothers who appeared in a variety show segment with their hit songs “You Are So Rare” and “Flipping over You”. With their uniform look and well rehearsed, yet slightly furious, dance routines, The 3 Haircuts parodied popular boybands of the time. In 2017, the writers on Saturday Night Live created a sketch based on a similar formula. Their sketch “Come Back, Barack” is a parody of a music video of an R’n’B boyband.

47 3.2 Parody on Saturday Night Live

On Saturday Night Live¸ parodies and spoofs are featured very regularly. Unlike

Caesar, they focus more on making fun of the television format than movies. One of

SNL’s reoccurring segments is “Weekend Update” which is in fact a parody on news casting. With “Weekend Update”, SNL comes closer to satire. As mentioned above, there is a difference between satire and parody. Gehring further clarifies that while

“parody deals with literary [or cinematic] norms, … satire deals with social norms” (5).

Even though they mock the television format of news broadcasting which is in the realm of parody, they also have a dig at current political and social environment. The hosts of “Weekend Update” typically read the news from the past week and provide a short snarky commentary to discussed topics. Sometimes, they go even further, and the host is joined by one of his/her colleagues who impersonates well-known public figures who are at the center of attention in the particular week. After the latest parliament elections in Germany, SNL star Kate McKinnon came on “Weekend Update” as German

Chancellor Angela Merkel to do a short interview with the host (McKinnon, “Weekend

Update: Angela Merkel on Reelection”).

Contrarily to SNL, Caesar stepped into political and social satire only indirectly.

Even though, as Auslin claims in his article, Caesar’s young writers were eager to

“smash the idols [of their times], such as suburbia and consumerism” (61), they did not make fun of specific real-life figures. Their approach was far more general. They attacked pseudo-intellectuals in the sketches with the zany professor (Caesar, “Professor on Archeology”), they attacked the ideal of a nuclear American family with the sketches with “the childless Hickenloopers” (Auslin 61), and they made fun of the then trends with sketches like “The 3 Haircuts” or “The Health Food Restaurant”. Everything in these sketches was general enough to have a dig at more targets at once.

48 SNL’s approach is much different. They regularly poke fun at their own competition while using the proper names and logos of other television networks. This is usually done in a form of a fake promo for one of the networks’ program, e.g. presenting a fake line-up for E! Network which is full of new and absurd reality shows like Where’s

Kanye? and Powerful Sluts of Miami, or shooting a fake promo for the new season of

HBO’s Girls where plays a new addition to the cast, a poor Albanian girl.

These are usually pre-taped in order to be cut appropriately to mimic the format of a television promo or a movie trailer.

Since the most parts of SNL are still broadcast live, many parodies of movies and television shows are still performed in front of a live studio audience. A parody of the game-show Jeopardy! appears regularly in many variations, such as

Jeopardy! with impersonating game-show host . Interestingly,

Carl Reiner’s favorite sketch from Your Show of Shows is a parody of a television show called “This Is Your Story” (Lowry 63). In the sketch, Caesar plays a member of the audience who is forcefully brought on stage to meet with his long-lost relatives. This sketch is not only a parody of a popular television format but also a hilarious act of physical comedy.

SNL writers in their parodies often mix live performances with prerecorded segments. Such sketch is, for example, a parody of popular television show Game of

Thrones where the introductory part is taken directly from the original show to set the scene and the rest of the sketch is performed live. In later years, Caesar sometimes used this strategy, as well. E.g. In the spoof of On the Waterfront, the beginning of the sketch shows Caesar walking through real New York City docks as mock film credits roll in front of him.

49 Caesar’s shows and Saturday Night Live also slightly differ in the actual performances. While SNL cast members try to create the most accurate and still funny impressions of the actual people they are portraying, Caesar, Coca, Reiner and Morris did not attempt to do believable impressions of actors from the original films. They hyperbolized certain aspects of the characters, such as Blanche’s Southern accent in

Streetcar’s spoof. Contrarily, in a recent SNL spoof of Casablanca, Kate McKinnon and

J. K. Simmons as Ilsa and Rick create an alternate ending of the 1942 movie and both actors try to imitate the original looks and accents, although slightly exaggerated.

3.3 Movie Parodies

After leaving Caesar’s shows, Mel Brooks continued to create parodies. During the run of the shows, he started mostly with parodies of specific films which he continued to produce at the beginning of his movie career with a spoof of Mary

Shelley’s classic, , but he later moved to parodies of genres. In an article in which Dave Kehr analyzes American of the 1970s and 1980s, he claims that “few of [Mel Brooks’s] qualify as genuine parody: They don’t grasp their genre firmly enough, insightfully enough, or consistently enough to make the [cut]”

(11). This may be caused by Caesar’s influence who always wanted to make something more than just a parody. Blazing Saddles can be labelled as a satire as well as a parody.

Even Leitch argues that Brooks in Blazing Saddles ridicules Jewish stereotypes and racial issue much more than he tries to mock the western genre (284).

Despite the satirical aspect, Blazing Saddles represent enough of the Gehring’s characteristics of parody that it is safe to say that this Brooks’s movie belongs to this genre. In the movie, Brooks deconstructs the Western genre by pointing out the tropes that are typically overused in movies of the genre. In this case, it is, for example, a hero who has the perfect aim and never misses its target. Brooks’s parodies undoubtedly

50 influenced directors who came after him. Jim Abrahams in Hot Shots! Part Deux makes fun of a similar trope when a body count appears in the corner of the screen as the main protagonist single-handedly destroys an army of 300 soldiers – a dig at the invincibility of a hero in action movies. An example of making fun of genre tropes is present also in

Scary Movie, a parody of horror movies by Keenan Ivory Wayans. In the movie, a girl is being chased by a murderer. During the chase sequence, she finds herself in front of a table with knives and guns that could help her defend herself from the murderer, yet she grabs a banana and keeps running – mocking the irrationality of characters in horror movies. Both Hot Shots! and Scary Movie represent movie parodies whose main plot follows the plot of a specific movie, however they also reference a wide array of different movies. E.g. Scary Movie follows the plot of cult classic Scream but there are also scenes that spoof movies like The Blair Witch Project or I Know What You Did

Last Summer. Thus, they fulfill another one of Gehring’s characteristics, number 6, which is closely linked to being of indeterminate time and space. Gehring argues that time and space setting of parodies are very broad and indeterminate (10). When a parody is peppered with references to other movies even the broad setting can be broken in order to make the reference work.

However, there is one characteristic that Gehring does not mention even though it occurs in parodies very often, and that is inappropriate humor, especially jokes based on bodily functions. Once again, Mel Brooks was one of the main influences for future directors even in this “discipline”. Blazing Saddles are often credited as the first film to ever use a fart noise. However, fart jokes were nothing new. Back in the 5th century

Ancient Greece, Aristophanes incorporated “gross-out gags about bodily functions” into his plays (Kroll 53). Aristophanes is the author of eleven surviving comedy plays that were written before the Macedonian conquest and serve as the only examples of

51 comedy genre from that period (Hall 12). Interestingly, there are some parodies among

Aristophanes’s plays as he would spoof the writing of his contemporaries (Gehring 1).

The (in)famous scene in Blazing Saddles where cowboys who are eating beans around a campfire start to “vent their feelings” must have been controversial at the time. It certainly is a scene that falls into a low comedy genre but by using the noises, Brooks pushed the boundaries further which is often the reason why creators use this type of humor (“How Long Can You Go?” 31).

Circling back to Gehring’s list, according to his last characteristic, parodies are very often peppered with something he calls “self-consciousness about the filmmaking experience” (16). According to Gehring, directors of parodies tend to break the forth wall and admit to viewers that they are in fact watching a movie, and not witnessing reality. Forth wall breaking can be done in various ways but is always there to shatter the imitation of reality that film usually tries to be. As Casper points out in his article, parody “rel[ies] on stable binary between the real and the fake” (582). Woody Allen often breaks the fourth wall in his movies, and not only in his parodies. He does not use this strategy to mock the process of moviemaking, he does it to establish a connection with the audience and to cleverly incorporate inner monologue to the narrative. Alvy’s breaking of the fourth wall during the lunch with Annie Hall’s family has already been mentioned in the previous chapter. Later in the movie, Allen perfects this strategy when he once again addresses the audience while expressing his disgust with a ranting intellectual who is standing behind him in a line in a movie theater. Alvy’s soliloquy that normally goes unnoticed by the rest of the characters is interrupted by the intellectual who joins Allen’s character and starts to defend himself in front of the viewers. To shut the intellectual down, Allen brings out the actual author whom the intellectual has been talking about to explain the man that he does not know anything

52 about the author’s work. The illusion of the real is shattered completely by Allen’s closing line in this scene when he says: “If only life were like this.”

Furthermore, Brooks also intentionally deconstructs the illusion of the real in his parodies. As an example, Gehring mentions the final scene in Blazing Saddles when the big battle between the characters from the movie gets out of control and the cowboys break through the walls of the set to the shooting of a different movie (15). Similarly,

Brooks points to an aspect of filmmaking in his Star Wars parody, . There, the villains rent a VHS of the movie they are in to find out where the good guys are hiding. Or in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, another one of Mel Brooks’s movies, the main character at one point pulls out the screenplay of the movie to check whether the story is on the right track.

Decades after Brooks, other moviemakers tried to replicate this strategy and incorporate similar gags to their movies. In the first instalment of the Scary Movie series which parodies the biggest hits of the horror genre, the fourth wall is broken on multiple occasions. Once, a character openly mentions that they are in fact in a movie as the camera turns to the director and a soundman who holds a microphone over the actors’ heads. Another time, camera is closing up on Anna Faris’s character’s face up to the point when it actually collides with her head. This mirrors a scene in Brooks’s High

Anxiety, a spoof on Hitchcock, that is mentioned by Gehring. Normally, the visual effects would allow a camera to seemingly go through walls and closed windows.

However, there, the camera breaks the window as it tries to go through it (16).

53 4. Caesar and Physical Comedy

4.1 History of Physical Comedy

The fact that Sid Caesar was a large man has already been mentioned many times throughout this thesis. Over six feet tall and around 240 pounds (Cullen et al.

179), he relied heavily on his physicality in his sketches. As Auslin points out:

“[Caesar’s] antics often left him covered in sweat and hoarse by the end of a sketch”

(61). When watching a recording of a Caesar’s sketch, it truly seems that he has gotten on the stage to work out. Even though his writers were skillful enough to create a perfect dialogue, Caesar knew that the best sketch has to combine both verbal and physical comedy.

When one hears the term physical comedy, he/she immediately thinks of slapstick. Casper defines slapstick comedy as “a psychical form of comedy in which unruly actions are enacted upon a body in an excessive ridiculous and sometimes violent manner” (583). He traces the roots of slapstick comedy back to the Ancient

Greece and Rome which makes slapstick as old as two millennia (584). Julian Dutton in his book Keeping Quiet: Visual Comedy in the Age of Sound adds that performance of the physical comedy comes from ancient rituals (4) and that mime1, a theatrical performance without speech, was a prominent genre from the 3rd century BCE and survived all through Middle Ages up to the modern times (6). Mime performance is sometimes referred to as dumb-show. In an article by Leslie Thompson that examines the use of dumb-show in Early Modern plays, the author gives evidence that dumb- shows were significant in plays written and performed in the Elizabethan era (19). They

1 In this thesis, terms mime and pantomime are interchangeable and used to describe a performance where actors do not use speech, but gestures to convey the story. Mainly in the United Kingdom, the term pantomime refers to a specific theater genre which involves elements of slapstick, music, and cross- dressing, and is usually performed around Christmas (Serck). 54 were carefully rehearsed “since any intrusive or random movement would blur their effect” (38). The slapstick comedy we know from the earliest years of the cinema was also heavily influenced by Italian commedia dell’arte that emerged during the

Renaissance (West 50, Dutton 7). Slapstick is still performed and watched to this day mainly because it is a genre of comedy that is verbally unreproducible. Thus unless one is willing to risk hurting oneself, a new viewer has to watch the performance for himself/herself. As Randal K. West comments on slapstick in his article “Making

Physical Comedy Funny”: “You need to see it to believe it” (51).

However, I am sure that laughing at what we now call slapstick is as old as humankind. A Cro-Magnon could hardly keep a straight face when his cavemate accidentally hit himself over the head with his club. Chris Nashawaty would agree because he says that there is “something … primal about seeing a grown man … getting belted with a frying pan to the face”. However, whether the caveman laughed at his friend or not depends on the consequences of his injury. Casper says that “pain is never funny in itself” (585). According to Casper, the main appeal of physical comedy and slapstick in particular is the aspect of staginess. The fact that we as an audience are aware that what we see is only acted out and performed is what provokes our laughter

(585). There are no consequences to the accidents these comics go through. They are not in pain. And that is why we allow ourselves to laugh. Moreover, we laugh because we are relieved that we are not the target (Dutton 2) and we can enjoy a momentary

“feeling of superiority over other people” (Casper 584). That is why members of high society and upper class were very often the targets in physical comedy (Dutton 3). Thus, workers had a chance to indirectly laugh at their employers or to enjoy the moment when a member of aristocracy stumbles and falls right in front of their eyes.

55 Sid Caesar was no exception. He also made fun of higher circles of society in his sketches, especially in his pantomimes. Although not completely silent, a sketch entitled

“The Four Englishman” is a hilarious mockery of the British aristocracy. All four members of the Caesar’s cast come one by one in a festive attire and after their introduction by a butler, they sit on a couch. They all sit there silently facing the audience and the audience laughs for a whole minute at the stillness of the otherwise energetic comedians. Later when the butler comes with drinks and food, the real slapstick begins. As the three Englishmen and one Englishwoman are immersed in an incomprehensible conversation, they spill their beverages and drop their food on one another and completely ruin their clothes and soil their faces.

4.2 Physical Comedy in Caesar’s Sketches

The influence of Caesar’s physical comedy can be traced back to Charlie

Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers were vaudeville comedians of the

1920s who later successfully transitioned to the big screen. The brother that was the most influential to the genre of physical comedy was Harpo. Since he was always

“getting laughs by pulling faces” (Dutton 75), he eventually stopped trying to keep up with his brothers who were much more skillful in verbal comedy, and decided to “never again talk onstage” (76). Influenced by , typically impersonated a character of a “rascal, under-miner of society” (78) which spoke to the energetic Caesar. However, the list of the greatest American slapstick performers of the first half of the 20th century would not be complete without . Just like the Marx Brothers, The Three Stooges started on stage and later moved to the big screen under the wings of . Their act is a pure slapstick, full of exaggerated sounds, hitting and punching. In the late 1940s, Columbia decided to try out the new

56 medium and moved their act to the American television where The Three Stooges live to this day (Nashawaty, Austerlitz).

The frequent use of many forms of physical comedy adds to the longevity of

Caesar’s sketches. As Julian Dutton argues: “Dumb-show[s] will be understood and laughed at in a 1000 years’ time all over the world while every gag of every stand-up comedian working today will be meaningless gibberish” (1). Caesar regularly performed some form of pantomime on his shows. Typically, he would incorporate his silent movements to a musical background. Famously, Caesar and Fabray acted out an argument of a married couple while the orchestra was playing Beethoven’s Fifth

Symphony. The sketch starts with a close up of the couples’ index fingers as they aggressively gesture to the four-note motif of this well-known symphony. As the instruments take turns, the wife and her husband each silently express their points of view. When the dramatic beginning segues into the softer second part, expression on the faces of the spouses change accordingly. At that point, it almost seems that they are willing to forgive the other partner anything. Not long after this, however, the symphony starts to get close to its dramatic ending and with that the seriousness of the argument increases as well. Caesar and Fabray continue in the well-rehearsed sketch, the wife slaps her husband to the rhythm and later they each have specific notes for expressing the words “Yes!” and “No!”. The sketch ends with a reconciliation after the wife figures out that the blond hair on her husband’s clothes are of their dog not of her husband’s alleged mistress.

Similarly, Caesar did pantomime to the tune of the classical music back in the days when Imogene Coca was still on the show. Together they played two musicians who play percussion instruments in an orchestra. The only proms on stage were two folding chairs and Caesar and Coca. The instruments were acted out. During the concert

57 of their imaginary orchestra, they mostly wait impatiently for their occasional hit to the drum or crash of the cymbals. They even manage to play a game of black-jack that gets interrupted by the sound of the Marseillaise when the two musicians have to stand up to show their respect. During the big finale of the composition, they do everything from playing every possible percussion instrument to ringing a church bell, shooting from a cannon, throwing grenades and firing a machine gun.

Television enabled Sid Caesar and other variety show hosts to incorporate physical comedy into their acts which was something that was not possible after the entertainment had moved to radio. In physical comedy, jokes are “confined to a single human sense – sight” (Dutton 1). Thus, these performers could once again revive slapstick comedy that used to be a significant part of the theater of vaudeville (Hilmes

29). Therefore, Caesar was able to merge slapstick, pantomime and music together just like in the old days of vaudeville.

Nevertheless, physical comedy is not only falling over boxes and bumping into lampposts without speaking. A comic performance can and should have elements of physical comedy even if its jokes are mainly verbal. Randal K. West attests that even

“the most sophisticated dialogue … can be accompanied by very broad slapstick” (50) in order to liven up the scene. Caesar worked with certain forms of physical comedy in almost every sketch. In “This Is Your Story”, which is has been discussed in the previous chapter, the sketch stands and falls with the physical performances of the cast members. Right in the beginning, Caesar tries to escape from the theater and ends up being carried on stage by the ushers. The rest of the sketch is mostly hugging, kissing, and carrying Howard Morris around as he is latched on Caesar’s leg. Another form of physical comedy is pulling faces. Caesar’s face expressions make the audience laugh

58 also in the aforementioned sketch “German General”, especially in the part where the

General is suffocating because his valet buttoned his uniform up to his neck.

4.3 Physical Comedy in the Years after Caesar

In the years after Caesar’s departure from the primetime, there were many

American comedians whose humor and comedy were based on their physical abilities.

Such comedians are, for example, and Jim Carrey. Williams’s stand-up routines were known for the “wild and chaotic style” (Gentry 95) of the comedian’s expression. Even though his energetic style that compensates his smaller figure is closer to Howard Morris than to Sid Caesar, there is one aspect of Williams’s style that is very

Caesaresque – his ability to mimic voices and languages. In Saller’s piece that was written after Williams’s tragic death, the author describes the actor as a “dialect perfectionist” (99). Just like Caesar, Williams was able to mimic various accents and often accompanied his acts with voices that imitated inanimate objects. This is also true for Jim Carrey’s comedy style. He is known for his voice acting which he “mixes [with] physicality of silent comics” (Kroll 53). Kroll argues that Carrey “brought comedy back to its … dumb roots” (53) in the 1990s. Both Kroll and Giles who calls the comedian

“Hurricane Jim” (48) do not use the word dumb to discredit Carrey’s delivery. On the contrary, they both praise Carrey’s courage to revive the old techniques and try them out on the contemporary audience. Despite the similarities with Caesar’s style, it is unfair to say that these comedians were influenced directly by Caesar. Even Caesar’s physical comedy follows the footsteps of his predecessors who based their acts on vaudeville. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that, thanks to Caesar, physical comedy found its way to television and comedy variety shows.

Nowadays, pantomime is absent in televised sketch comedy. Both on Saturday

Night Live and in the pre-recorded sketch shows, building a sketch on a pantomimic

59 performance would seem dated and out of place. The last time a mime performed on

Saturday Night Live was most definitely in the musical performance of the song

“Chandelier” by Australian singer Sia in 2015. However, that performance was not for comical purpose but to help Sia convey the message of her song.

Physical comedy, on the other hand, has not completely vanished from the show.

Many of SNL actors’ impressions stand on their physicality. In recent years, a Saturday

Night Live’s performer who relied heavily on physical comedy was Kristen Wiig.

Before Wiig left the show in 2012 (Robinson), she had managed to impersonate many characters whose peculiar ways of moving around the set and funny face expressions would make audience. From the array of Wiig’s impressions, there is one that is done particularly well, and that is Wiig’s impression of Liza Minnelli, a famous musical actress, in the sketch “Liza Minnelli Tries to Turn off a Lamp.” Wiig’s talent for physical comedy enables her to perfectly mimic Minnelli’s dance moves. The whole sketch revolves around Minnelli’s inability to turn off a lamp due to constant dancing and posing.

Besides her impressions, one of Wiig’s original reoccurring characters was Sue, a woman who loves surprises. In “Surprise Party”, Sue is told that she is going to take part in preparing a surprise party for her friend. Upon hearing the news, she starts fidgeting unable to contain her excitement. At one point, her other friends have to help her to open a bag of because her hands have gotten paralyzed. In a classic slapstick manner that links Wiig’s performance to the pioneers of dumb-shows like

Chaplin and The Three Stooges, she hits herself over the head with a bottle in order not to give away the secret about the party when her friend surprisingly arrives early. The sketch ends with hyper-excited Wiig jumping through closed window into the garden.

60 Aspects of physical comedy occur even in contemporary pre-recorded sketch shows. These shows are not typically recorded in front of a studio audience and the individual sketches are shot in film studios, not on a stage. Thus, creators of these shows can fully capitalize on the advantages of the “movie magic”. They can cut a scene for greater impact or use visual effects and camera angles to help actors make their accidents even more serious. This has been a common practice since the beginning of the film industry when vaudevillian slapstick performers moved to the big screen and the camera let them go through seemingly graver incidents than before without ever getting hurt (Casper 585).

Although today’s sketch comedians do not engage in fully-fledged slapstick, they occasionally borrow from the wide array of physical comedy routines. The use of

“movie magic” and visual effects is featured in a sketch called “Turbulence” by comedy duo Key and Peele who had a sketch show on . Actor Keegan-Michael

Key is tossed around a plane when the titular turbulence strikes. Meanwhile, he hits his head over the roof of the plane many times which is shot in a close-up to intensify the incident.

In another sketch by Key and Peele that is based on physical comedy, the comedians present a modern variation of the slapstick comedy of early silent films when the action used to be accompanied by short title cards that helped to tell the story. In

“Aerobics Meltdown”, Key and Peele play TV aerobics instructors who dance in a live- broadcasted television show. They do not talk, only dance. The title cards from silent films are substituted by paper boards on which the director of the show writes a message for the character portrayed by Key. Thanks to these boards, both Key and the viewers find out that Key’s family has been in an accident but since the show is live, the director urges him to keep dancing and smiling. The sketch is built on Key’s face

61 expressions that change as the directors feeds him with more and more gruesome details of the accident.

That is not the only sketch by Key and Peele where they play with old comedy formats. “Obama’s Angry Translator” is a perfect modulation of the straight man - wacky man routine. Peele plays Barack Obama who is said to be unable to get angry with his opponents. Thus, he hired an anger translator, played by Key. Everything

Obama says calmly is “translated” in an energetic and aggressive manner by his new employee. Key’s expressive delivery is intensified by the calmness in Peele’s voice just like a straight man’s ordinariness amplifies the wackiness of his comic partner.

However, physical comedy does not live only in the realm of movies and sketch comedy. Throughout the years, this genre got a new shape with something that Kevin

Casper calls simulacra slapstick. He argues that human “capab[ility] of finding pleasure in malice” (585) evolve beyond the staged form of physical comedy. With shows like

Jackass where the protagonists let themselves get hurt on purpose, slapstick comedy found a new platform. Nevertheless, Casper calls Jackass a simulacra, or a copy of the real, because it “tries to hide the fact that it is, itself, an image, a reproduction, a fake, and thus does not show the same distinction between the real and the fake that traditional slapstick upholds” (586). When creating Jackass, the producers must have based their idea of the show on the popularity of programs like American Funniest

Home Videos. This show was built on the notion that people like to laugh at the misfortune of others. When the technology enabled American households to have their own home video cameras, television producers came up with the idea to ask the public for the recordings of accidents that had happen to them or their relatives. Nowadays, these videos are all over YouTube in compilations of fails. Even though these recording show real incidents, we can still allow ourselves to laugh at them because as West

62 points out: “They wouldn’t show a piece on American Funniest Home Videos when someone gets really hurt” (52). We laugh because we believe that there were no tragic consequences to these accidents. Thus, physical comedy still survives to this day in various forms as the only kind of comedy that can be understood no matter what language the audience speaks.

63 Conclusion

When Sid Caesar died in 2014, media outlets all over America were not exaggerating when they claimed that Caesar had been a leading influence on American culture. Over the 1950s, Caesar helped establish variety show and sketch comedy on

American television. With his shows The Admiral Broadway Revue¸ Your Show of

Shows, and Caesar’s Hour, he was able to not only revolutionize sketch comedy, but he also influenced the genre of sitcom.

Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and the rest of the writing team opened doors for other Jewish writers and comics and they also influenced many non-Jewish comedians who were inspired by their self-deprecating approach to comedy and life. Even though their comic style was heavily rooted in

Jewish humor, their comedy resonated with other minorities and later even with WASP

Americans.

The writers of Caesar’s shows played a big part in establishing the genre of sketch comedy that survives to this day, both in its original live broadcast form on

Saturday Night Live and in its modernized version on prerecorded sketch shows like

Inside Amy Schumer and Key and Peele. Caesar’s influence on variety shows is still visible in many SNL sketches. His emphasis on physical comedy that was inspired by the pioneers of movie and television slapstick served as a model for future comedians of how to incorporate their physicality into verbal comedy. Moreover, Caesar’s heavy use of parody in his sketches had an even greater impact on the live sketch comedy we see today on American television which is full of spoofs and short parodies that make fun of movies and television programs.

The legacy of Sid Caesar, his shows, his cast, and his writers lives on not only in the recordings of their own work, but also in the work of a large number of comedians

64 that came after them. It is safe to say that American humor and American comedy would not be the same without their influence. Just watch any contemporary American comedy movie and try to spot a sign of Sir Caesar or one of his writers. I am sure they will be there – indirectly entertaining their audience for over 60 years.

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78 Résumé

This master’s diploma thesis focuses on the work of comedian Sid Caesar, especially on his three sketch shows from the 1950s, The Admiral Broadway Revue¸

Your Show of Shows, and Caesar’s Hour. The author of the thesis tries to trace how

Caesar’s work influenced American humor and comedy in following decades by examining certain aspects of Caesar’s comic style which was in many ways revolutionary in its time.

In the first chapter, Sid Caesar and his three NBC shows are introduced together with the format of the shows, the cast, the writers. Among the writers were Mel Brooks,

Cark Reiner, Woody Allen, and Neil Simon.

The second chapter focuses on the Jewishness in Caesar’s comedy. Even though

Caesar and the writers did not explicitly talk about their Jewishness, their humor is based on Jewish humor. Because of the popularity of the show, these writers unintentionally planted seeds of Jewish humor into American mainstream and influenced many generations that came after them.

The use of parody in Caesar’s sketches and later in movies by Caesar’s writers is discussed in the third chapter.

The last chapter focuses on the use of physical humor that was very important for Caesar in the sketches. The roots of physical comedy are discussed and shown how they influenced Caesar. At the end of the chapter, the evolution of physical comedy in

American culture is described with drawing attention to Saturday Night Live.

Resumé

Tato magisterská diplomová práce se zaměřuje na tvorbu amerického komika

Sida Caesara, obzvláště pak na jeho tři televizní pořady z 50. let 20. století - The

Admiral Broadway Revue¸ Your Show of Shows a Caesar’s Hour. Cílem autora je zjistit, jakou měrou Caesarova práce ovlivnila další generace amerických komiků a americký humor obecně, jelikož některé aspekty Caesarova stylu byly na svou dobu revoluční.

V první kapitole jsou rozebírány Caesarovy pořady, je představen jeho styl humoru, herci, se kterými hrál, a jeho tým scénáristů, mezi nimiž byli například Mel

Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen či Neil Simon.

Druhá kapitola se zaměřuje na “židovství” Sida Caesara a to, jakou roli jeho původ hrál v jeho stylu humoru. Většina aktérů, kteří tvořili Caesarovy pořady, byla

židovského původu a nepřímo stavěla svou tvorbu na tradičním židovském humoru,

čímž ovlivnili americkou kulturu druhé poloviny 20. století.

Ve třetí kapitole se rozebírá využití parodie ve skečích Sida Caesara a v pozdějších filmech režírovaných jeho scénáristy.

Poslední kapitola se zaměřuje na fyzickou komedii, která byla pro Caesara velmi důležitou součástí jeho skečů. Hovoří se zde o počátcích fyzické komedie ve filmovém a televizním průmyslu a o tom, jak Caesar ovlivnil nastupující generaci komiků, kteří stojí za pořady, jako je Saturday Night Live.