By the time we got to the live show on Saturday night, we had been through four rehearsals. The first time there was a loose blocking, which was followed by a tighter blocking. Friday was a complete run-through with a few stops for the technical people. The cameramen studied the shots; the costumes and props were tested and altered as necessary. On Saturday we’d have a full-dress rehearsal, and then we’d go out live at nine o’clock that night.
We never thought about the following week’s show. We were still writing the current week’s installment right up to curtain time! The writers were there, watching, making suggestions, and contributing additional dialogue. We stayed there right through the actual live broadcast, watching from the green room and often making changes right up through to the time the sketch was performed live. We were an extremely dedicated and passionate group.
Believe it or not, even with all that tireless preparation mistakes and blunders still sometimes happened during the live performance. For instance, on one show, Sid’s dresser got the running order of the sketches mixed up. Sid entered a board-meeting sketch, filled with men in business suits, wearing a Roman costume topped with a Roman helmet and carrying a sword. Everybody was shocked, but Sid carried it off brilliantly. “Sorry I’m late,” Sid said, “but I just came from an all-night costume party. Let’s get on with the business.”
Amazing! We were absolutely petrified and then incredibly relieved. We all collapsed in a heap of hysterical laughter.
Another time was when we satirized the movie High Noon in which Gary Cooper has to face the bad guys all alone after the townspeople desert him. Sid was playing the Gary Cooper sheriff character, and we made a lot of the townspeople deputy sheriffs. To punctuate their quitting, they pinned their badges on Sid’s chest over his own badge. Sid was supposed to have a sponge inside his shirt to protect him from the pins. But in his haste, the dresser forgot to put the sponge in during the quick change. We were amazed at how realistically Sid yowled when one by one they pinned the badges on him.
Sid and Imogene were great at going with the flow, but once in a while, it got to be a bit much. The audience never knew if anything was wrong. For instance, we were doing a satire on From Here to Eternity, which became “From Here to Obscurity.” Sid and Imogene were in the classic Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr scene where they are falling in love on the beach while the waves break over them. Off camera, there were five or six stagehands with big buckets of water hurling them at Sid and Imogene. I don’t know how they did it, they were practically drowning, spitting water like human fountains all over the place. But they never broke up and the audience laughed their heads off, never knowing what Sid and Imogene were going through.
Sid had an incessant nervous cough. It was nothing more than that. But he learned to use it to his advantage. He had an enormous amount of material to memorize and the cough gave him momentary pause to remember exactly where a line or situation fit. Occasionally, I would even write in the cough to give him time to swallow what was coming. He got a kick out of seeing “cough, cough” in the script.
And to be perfectly truthful, not all the jokes worked. I had an idea for an interview with the German Professor in a zoo. He is walking by the reptile house and he hears a tapping on the window. It’s a snake tapping his teeth against the glass, trying to get his attention.
“What’s the matter with you?” the professor asks.
The snake says, “You gotta get me out of here. It’s dangerous!”
The professor says, “Why?”
The snake replies, “I’m surrounded by snakes!”
“I have bad news for you,” the professor says. “You’ll have to stay. You’re a snake too.”
That joke didn’t get any laughs. Complete silence.
“Mel,” Sid said, “I will see you after the show.”
From that point on, whenever someone in the writers’ room suggested that we use an unpopular joke we’d say, “You want to do the snake joke again?”
Carl Reiner trying futilely to separate Howie Morris from Sid Caesar’s leg in the classic sketch “This Is Your Story.”
We got to do a few live shows at the Center Theatre, the sister theater to Radio City. The five-thousand-seat theater had its own amazing energy. It was there that we did probably the funniest sketch ever done on television. It was the now celebrated takeoff of This Is Your Life. In the sketch that we wrote, Carl Reiner as the host of “This Is Your Story” comes down into the audience, walks up the aisle, and when he reaches the row that Sid is sitting in, he smiles. Sid thinks he is picking the guy sitting next to him to be in the show, and chuckles at what’s going to happen. But when Carl points directly at Sid and says, “Al Duncey, this is your story!” Sid passes out.
When Carl takes him by the arm, Sid wakes up, and instead of sticking to the script, which has Carl leading him to the stage, Sid shows the genius that made him immortal. He swats Carl with his raincoat, driving him back, and decides to improvise—telling us in pantomime that he is not going up there on that stage no matter what. Carl, thinking on his feet, grabs a couple of ushers and says, “Let’s get him up there!” When the ushers go for Sid, he once again smashes them back with his raincoat and runs up the aisle. Thank god we had a guy with a handheld camera who followed him on his mad chase all over the Center Theatre. It was amazing. Nobody knew what was happening, but it was absolutely hilarious!
Finally, all the ushers in the theater tackle him and carry Sid to the stage. He relents, and reluctantly becomes part of the show. Now, the parade of relatives begins. The funniest and most memorable is Howie Morris playing Sid’s “Uncle Goopy.” They hug each other ceaselessly, crying tears of joy to be together again. When Carl finally gets control of the show for a moment, he takes Sid downstage to introduce a new relative. But Howie will have none of it. He leaps onto Sid’s leg and never lets go. Sid carries him around as if Howie was always part of his leg. Occasionally, Carl is able to tear him off Sid’s leg and carry him back to his seat, but only for a second. Before you can count to three, he is back on Sid’s leg. The sketch is exploding with hilarious improvisations between Howie, Sid, and Carl. The laughter was nonstop; you couldn’t catch your breath.
Sid Caesar was a crazy comic genius, but occasionally he was also just crazy. Let me take you back to Chicago in 1950. It was just after the first season of Your Show of Shows and Sid had a two-week engagement at the Empire Room at the Palmer House Hotel. He took me along to punch up his act and as good company. Things were going swell for a while, but then doing his act twice a night finally started to get to him. After the show, he’d go up to his room and to help him relax, he’d drink a half a bottle of vodka and light up a cigar.
“Give me some new material!” he would shout. “I’m sick and tired of doing the same stuff every night!”