Sid Caesar hams it up with Imogene Coca in Your Show of Shows (AP) When Caesar made his breakthrough, television comedy as an art form was still … Starring as Doris Hickenlooper opposite Sid Caesar’s Charlie Hickenlooper, she made her audience laugh with her hilarious acts, often involving martial tribulations. He is survived by their son and two daughters.Sid Caesar, who has died aged 91, became the best-known comedian on American television in the 1950s; but while his innovative and influential Your Show Of Shows was credited with accelerating — indeed arguably creating — the postwar surge in sales of television sets in the United States, he subsequently spent two decades battling drink and drug addiction.Stand-up comedian who broke new ground with his television series The Larry Sanders ShowIn 1945 he made his first nightclub appearance at the Copacabana in New York playing saxophone in a swing band. Between 1954 and 1958 Caesar also starred in his own domestic comedy series Caesar’s Hour, the prototype of countless imitations, with his “wives” including Nanette Fabray and Janet Blair.Caesar’s other film appearances included Tars and Spars (1946); The Guilt Of Janet Ames (1947); It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963); A Guide For The Married Man and The Busy Body (both 1967); Ten From Your Show Of Shows (1973), Airport 75, Grease and The Cheap Detective (1978), and The Fiendish Plot Of Dr Fu Manchu (1980) in which he played an FBI agent trying to track down the Chinese arch-villain.Caesar’s Your Show of Shows ran for four years (1950-54), and was also the inspiration for the Peter O’Toole film My Favourite Year (1982). When Caesar took on the unknown Mel Brooks, and paid him $5,000 a week, the future star comedy writer introduced himself as a Jewish pirate: “You know how much they’re charging for sailcloth these days?… I can’t afford to pillage and rape anymore.” Imogene Coca is best remembered for her appearance on the television live show, ‘Your Show of Shows’, which ran from February 25, 1950, through June 5, 1954.
With Caesar’s 90-minute weekly Saturday night show, small-screen comedy came of age.But within a year this backhanded triumph had led directly to Your Show Of Shows. He got a part in another successful coastguard musical, Tars And Spars, and was the only member of the cast to be used when Columbia made a film of it in 1946.Caesar eventually overcame his addictions, thanks to a self-help regime he loosely described as “spontaneous Jungian analysis”. Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Buddy Rich on "The Hollywood Palace" - Theatre Sketch by Kovacs Corner.
In 1978 he spent four months in bed, secretly ordering beer whenever his wife turned her back.From time to time he would emerge to make a guest appearance on other people’s television shows and he remained a close friend of Mel Brooks, appearing in his films Silent Movie (1976) and History Of The World Part One (1981).Using mostly his own material, Caesar drew on his observations of everyday life, making use of the comedy of situation or character rather than the gag or wisecrack, so prefiguring the emergence of the sitcom.