After the first couple of seasons on Your Show of Shows, the comedy writing demands had become too great for just Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen, and me, so we added the Simon brothers writing team—Danny and his kid brother, “Doc” Simon. The “Doc” being Neil Simon, who later would go on to be one of the most celebrated comedy playwrights on Broadway. Neil taught me that every second counts in comedy writing. Both Danny and Neil were like that. They took advantage of every second and every joke at their disposal. Neil never forgot a joke. He said that he never forgot anything that he ever heard that had made somebody laugh, whether he wrote it down or not. That’s the type of memory he had. He didn’t need to steal jokes; he was so damn talented.
When Your Show of Shows morphed into Caesar’s Hour, the writing staff grew even larger, adding the talents of the likes of Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein, and Mike Stewart. All of whom would go on to great success: Larry Gelbart, who created one of television’s most celebrated series, M*A*S*H; Joe Stein, who wrote Enter Laughing and Fiddler on the Roof for Broadway; and Mike Stewart, who later created the books for great Broadway musicals like Bye Bye Birdie, Hello Dolly, and 42nd Street. Though we had lost Lucille and Imogene to their new show, we gained another great female comedy writer, Selma Diamond, and the beautiful and talented Nanette Fabray was Sid’s new leading lady on Caesar’s Hour. We had a bigger budget, real offices in the Milgrim Building in midtown Manhattan, and our own theater at the Century on Eighth Avenue. Writing comedy with all those truly gifted comedy writers on Caesar’s Hour was like the thrill of jamming with great musicians. We made great comedy music in that room. But Sid would take it and bend it through the prism of his heart, his crazy mind, and what evolved would be beyond our wildest expectations. He always took our material to a higher level.
Doc Simon was incredibly funny but very shy. Carl Reiner knew this and would sit next to him in the writers’ room and quite often Doc would whisper his contributions into Carl’s ear. Then Carl would leap to his feet and say, “Doc’s got it!” And another great Neil Simon joke was born.
Larry Gelbart and Doc Simon both really enjoyed my comic spontaneity, and we’d often have lunch together. One day we were walking up Fifty-seventh Street and coming down toward us were three nuns. They immediately knew I couldn’t resist.
Larry said, “Mel, leave it alone.”
Doc said, “Mel, whatever you were gonna do—don’t do it.”
I answered, “Not to worry, not to worry.”…But I was lying.
As the nuns approached, I shouted: “Get out of those costumes! The sketch is OUT!”
Both Larry and Doc collapsed in laughter and hit the sidewalk. They were my best audience.
On another occasion after lunch we were on Sixth Avenue and there in a store window were a hundred little toy microscopes selling for ninety-nine cents each. I walked into the store, Larry and Doc followed.
I said to the store owner, “I’m Dr. Melvin Brooks, head of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.” Larry and Doc stifled their laughter, wondering where I was going with this.
I continued, “At Johns Hopkins I am working on multi-celled anomalies and need a very strong and powerful microscope to detect cellular differences. Will those microscopes in the window do the job?”
The shop owner shrugged and said, “Yes, they’re very good.” Again Doc and Larry, unable to contain themselves, screamed in laughter and hit the floor. They never stopped telling the microscope story.
At the 1957 Emmy Awards ceremony, Sid, Carl, Nanette, and Pat Carroll all won Emmys and the show won for best series of one hour or more, but The Phil Silvers Show beat out Caesar’s Hour for best comedy writing. I leapt up onto the table and screamed, “Coleman Jacoby and Arnie Rosen won an Emmy for comedy writing and Mel Brooks didn’t! That writers like that can win the award and geniuses like me would be denied? Nietzsche was right! There is no god! There is no god!”
Me desperately selling Sid a joke with fellow writers Woody Allen and Mel Tolkin looking on.
They were good writers. But we were great writers. We were the best comedy writers that ever wrote for television. And they still won the Emmy! I went backstage and found a pair of scissors in the wardrobe room. I cut up my tuxedo. I cut my bow tie first. Then I cut my jacket into little black shiny confetti. Then I took my trousers off and proceeded to cut them up too. I was just in my shorts. I was almost naked in front of everybody when I said, “I’m never wearing a tuxedo again!” Somebody put a sheet around me, and put some ice on my head, and took me home. I might have been a little drunk.
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The pressures and grind of a weekly live network television show took its toll on Sid. On set he was alert and prepared. Off camera, he was drinking more and more to cope with the pressure. He would spend Sundays, our only day off, in the shower for hours, trying to decompress.
The writers, his friends, were extremely protective of him. What is now known as “the Coleslaw Episode” occurred on a Wednesday night during the run of Caesar’s Hour. A sketch unexpectedly fell apart and we had to write an entirely new sketch in a single day. Sid, Carl, and the other writers and I went to dinner at a nearby restaurant. “First we’ll have a drink,” Sid said, “then we’ll eat, and then we’ll work.”
Going back to Europe to write for Sid Caesar’s BBC show, this time crossing the Atlantic without a rifle and a helmet.
What Sid didn’t tell us was that he’d been taking a strong sedative at the time.
When the waiter came to take the food order after our drinks, Sid said, “I’ll have fillet of sole…” and promptly slumped forward, face-first, into a bowl of coleslaw.
The writers laughed at first, thinking it was a joke. When we realized that Sid had passed out, Carl told us that we had to pretend that this was a skit or else the incident would be in all the morning tabloids.
I stood over Sid with a knife in my hand and said: “So, Inspector, this undoubtedly is the murder weapon.”
Larry Gelbart responded, “Let us pray,” and they all put their heads down on the table.
This kind of improvisation went on for forty-five minutes, with Sid out cold. We periodically checked to make sure he was still breathing. Finally, as the waiter brought the check to the table, Sid’s head popped up and he said, “…and shoestring potatoes,” picking up exactly where he had left off when he went down into the coleslaw.
After Caesar’s Hour ended in 1957, we did several special hour-long variety shows starring Sid. On those, we got the assistance of a brilliant young writer called Woody Allen. Woody got into the swing of the writers’ room very easily right from the start. He didn’t just write funny jokes, he wrote characters, behavior, funny situations. Quite often after a hard writing session, I had to walk it off. That is, instead of taking a cab home I would walk. It was a long walk from Rockefeller Center all the way up to Fifth Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street (where I lived at the time), and Woody would generously offer to accompany me. I don’t know whether it was just for the good talk, or if he thought at least he’d be there to call 911 if I collapsed. I appreciate the memory of his friendship and entertaining chatter on those long walks home.