Sid Caesar, a gigantic comedy talent from TV’s 1950s, who invented not only his amazing self but also the template for the Carol Burnett Show and Saturday Night Live, is remembered in the most recent New York Times blog post by Dick Cavett, who takes a break from excoriating his bosses. Caesar, a complicated and troubled figure, spent all his talent and energy in one decade and never did anything close to that level again. He made nearly $4 million a year for most of that time, so he probably wasn’t hurting for money, though he was hurting. I don’t think you reach Caesar’s level of genius without natural gifts and without a difficult childhood. A rickety foundation allows for a lot of bounce in the legs but also inevitable falls.
Below is an excerpt from Cavett’s reminiscences and a short clip of the talk show host with the comic. Also very worthwhile is a tribute that Conan O’Brien (very influenced both verbally and physically by Caesar) did with one of the comedian’s Your Show of Shows writers, Mel Brooks. Watch here.
“It happens so often, the suffering from drug and alcohol addiction or other psychological problems of comic giants like Jonathan Winters, Peter Sellers, Peter Cook, Buster Keaton … the comedy list only begins there. And those other afflicted giants: Garland, Barrymore, Robards, Burton, Taylor, Tracy et al. And the great writers, like … sorry, my space is limited.
We tend to think that having a skyrocketing talent and being able to exercise it before an adoring public would guarantee a happy life. Silly old us.
Sid’s autobiography Where Have I Been? is a horror story. A tale of such stuff as very bad dreams are made on. Suffering an alcoholism that seemed to match in size his talent, he lost whole years of his life while living them.
A striking instance from that book sticks hard in my mind. In the midst of one of his darkest periods, Sid learned to his surprise that he had recently made a feature movie in Australia! His total memory of those months consisted of the boarding of a plane and a single sunset.
Someone years ago wrote, in a stately article in The Partisan Review, that there seemed to be in humankind what he called ‘the law of negative compensation.’ That the gifted must also be the punished.”
