Fans of sketch comedy owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Sid Caesar. Decades before Second City Television and The Kids in the Hall, Caesar and his cohort of fellow comics, including Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and a young writer named Mel Brooks, revolutionized television with the 1950s NBC sketch series Your Show of Shows. In When Caesar Was King, David Margolick (Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling; Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song) chronicles the career highs and two-decade lows of Caesar, "the most original and talented television comic there ever was." Caesar's humor, Margolick notes, was zany yet sophisticated, blending slapstick, pantomime, his extraordinary gift for double-talk, and parodies of films such as Bicycle Thieves and Ugetsu. Not bad for a guy born into a Jewish household in Yonkers in 1922 who didn't speak until he was three.
It wasn't long before Caesar, who discovered his gift for mimicry at an early age, became so popular that his fans included Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Asimov, and Albert Einstein. All that success had downsides, however, including a dangerously gargantuan appetite--he'd eat four steaks in one sitting, and had an affinity for jellied calves' hooves--and a booze-and-pills addiction that led to a period from 1960 to 1980 that Caesar called "a twenty-year lost weekend." Margolick covers all of this, as well as the influence of Caesar's Jewish heritage on his humor, in a lively narrative that explains Caesar's enduring appeal. Comedy fans will love it. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer