When Caesar Was King: How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy

From longtime New York Times and Vanity Fair writer David Margolick comes the first definitive biography of Sid Caesar: founding father of television comedy and icon to generations of Americans.

By the spring of 1954, Sid Caesar was the most influential, highly paid, and enigmatic comedian in America. Every week, twenty million people tuned their TVs to his NBC extravaganza, Your Show of Shows, and witnessed his virtuosity in sketches and film spoofs, pantomime and soliloquy. Onstage, Caesar could play any character and make it funny: a befuddled game-show contestant, a pretentious German professor, a beleaguered husband (opposite his redoubtable co-star Imogene Coca)--even a gumball machine and a bottle of seltzer.

To Caesar’s mostly urban audience, his comedy was an era-defining leap forward from the days of vaudeville, launching a new style of humor that was multilayered and full of character, yet still uproarious. To his rivals, Caesar was the man to beat. To his fellow American Jews, his show’s success meant something more: a post-Holocaust symbol of security and a source of great pride. But behind all that Caesar represented was the real Sid. Introverted and volatile, ill at ease in his own skin, he could terrorize his collaborators but reserved his harshest critiques for himself. After barely a decade, he was essentially off the air, beset by exhaustion, addiction, his own impossibly high standards, and changing viewership as television spread to the American heartland. TV’s first true comic creation was also its first spectacular flameout.

But in his wake came the disciples he personally nurtured--including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and more. Caesar left an indelible impact on what still makes us laugh. In When Caesar Was King, veteran journalist David Margolick conjures this complexman as never before. Deeply researched, brimming with love for Caesar and the culture from which he sprang, and reanimating a New York City that has all but vanished, this rollicking and poignant book traces the rise and fall of a legend.

DAVID MARGOLICK is a longtime contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he writes about culture, the media, and politics. He served as national legal affairs editor at The New York Times, where he wrote the weekly At the Bar column for seven years. He is the author of Beyond Glory and Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. He lives in New York City.