Those​ who were born in the US in the early 1940s, as I was, came of age in the most buoyant period of the 20th century. In the years between 1945 and 1960, personal income almost tripled. Philip Roth called it the greatest moment of ‘collective inebriation in American history’. After the Great Depression and two world wars, the middle classes were beginning to live America’s dream of prosperity; the less fortunate didn’t yet seem to be spoiling the charm of abundance.

Television was the totem of plenty: it cast a new spell of contentment over the land. In 1950, 9 per cent of Americans owned a television and were spending more than four hours a day in front of it; by 1960, 90 per cent of Americans owned a TV and were watching it for more than five hours a day. That year too, ‘boob tube’ entered American slang as a synonym for TV. By then, the republic was more or less spellbound.

The man who coined the term ‘TV’, a car salesman turned inventor called Earl ‘Madman’ Muntz, was a friend of my father’s. Dad had invested in Muntz TV, the first streamlined seventeen-tube low-cost black and white model, which Muntz began selling in 1947. In 1950 my sister, Jane, and I visited Muntz at home in Beverly Hills and encountered for the only time in our lives a TV at the bottom of a swimming pool. The controls were at the pool’s edge. You chose your channel, dived into the aquamarine water and swam to your show. In goggles, snorkels and flippers we eddied at the deep end watching I Love Lucy.

Dad, who was generally considered the king of Broadway comedy, had only the year before replaced Sid Caesar, the new king of TV comedy, in the national tour of the revue Make Mine Manhattan. Back then, the radio comedian Fred Allen joked, television was called ‘a medium because anything well done is rare’. Although Allen excepted Caesar, he was on the money about TV and the blandness of the America it reflected back to its distracted viewers. Joke-blowers filled the ozone: Milton Berle, George Gobel, Donald O’Connor, Jack Carter, Ernie Kovacs, Red Skelton. In this soporific landscape, Caesar’s brand of intelligent laughter – satirical, sketch-driven, character-based, artful – stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. It was ‘like seeing a new country’, Neil Simon said; he was part of Caesar’s legendary writing room before he became Broadway’s most successful comic playwright. ‘All other comics were basically doing situations with farcical characters. Caesar was doing life.’

In previous decades, comedians had made their names and cultivated an audience primarily by travelling the country on vaudeville circuits with a single well-turned act. They worked up a routine, tweaked it for success and, like all entrepreneurs, followed the laws of profit and repeated it. Television changed show business. Instead of the performer pursuing an audience, the audience now came to the performer. Television networks existed to sell that audience to advertisers. Caesar was the first star spawned by TV. Thanks to its reach and intimacy, he was able to achieve in a few years both a gigantic following and dazzling paydays. Between 1950 and 1954, doing 39 shows a season, his salary jumped from $5000 to $25,000 a week (about $300,000 today). At the height of his popularity in the mid-1950s, each ninety-minute episode of Your Show of Shows (1950-54) or the hour-long Caesar’s Hour (1954-57) was watched by some fifty or sixty million viewers. His first show, Admiral Broadway Revue (1949), was so popular that in the course of a few months its sponsor, the Admiral television company, went from producing around a hundred TV sets a week to five thousand a day. In order to meet the expanding demand, Admiral decided to focus on ‘production rather than programming’ and the show was cancelled. ‘We’re being dropped because the show was too good?’ Caesar asked the head of the company in bewilderment.

In the first flush of his fame, Caesar was often compared to Charlie Chaplin. This seems a far-fetched, even ludicrous claim now. One crucial difference between them is that Chaplin owned his own studio and controlled what he made. In TV’s new mass market, the product dictated the comedy. Anything controversial, ambiguous or unsettling was monitored and censored by the sponsors: sexual content was almost entirely forbidden (even the word ‘pregnant’ was banned); kissing was timed and limited; no mention was made of politics, religion or homosexuality. In one of Caesar’s pantomimes for Admiral Broadway Revue, the company objected to a sketch in which he moved furniture around a living room to make room for an ungainly TV console. ‘You can’t do that,’ the executive said. ‘You’re making fun of television.’

Caesar claimed that network censorship made him and his writers more creative, which is as may be; what’s certain is that it defanged American comedy and completely eliminated the phallic fun of an earlier era’s low-comic hijinks. Harpo’s horn, Chaplin’s cane, W.C. Fields’s walking stick, Groucho’s cigar – the accoutrements of aggression with which each zanni prodded and goosed the world they contended with – had no place in the beige bourgeois universe of the small screen. The recognisable replaced the wonderful, the ordinary the extraordinary. The great clowns of earlier decades had capered against a cruel, intractable, dangerous world. The comedy of Caesar’s writers’ room was pitched at an internal one. Instead of exploiting the surreal body, TV constricted it, turning comedians into talking heads whose routines were called ‘stand-up’, the term itself an indication of the way dynamism had been drained from performance. ‘This was probably the first generation of writers ever to be psychoanalysed … they knew more about relationships than anybody had ever brought before to the art of television comedy,’ Larry Gelbart, one of the star alumni of Caesar’s comic academy, said. ‘When I say “urbane”, between us we read every book … saw every movie … saw every play on Broadway. You could make jokes about Kafka.’ (How did that go, I wonder?)

‘Maybe the most important thing I did on the show was to sit with and preside over that group of geniuses,’ Caesar wrote in his autobiography Caesar’s Hours (2003). ‘We wrote together note by note, page by page … I would try it on for them. I had to feel good about each sketch because I was the one who had to perform it.’ This bespoke material worked well for Caesar, but not always for his bumptious collaborators, some of whom took out an ad in Variety to vent about Caesar’s vaunted improvisational genius. ‘You mean the show is not AD LIB?’ ‘No, it’s written by MEL TONKIN LUCILLE KALLEN MEL BROOKS.’ Over the years, the rowdy writers’ room also included Simon, Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Michael Stewart, Joseph Stein and Woody Allen. Tonkin, who was head writer on all Caesar’s shows in the 1950s, said that ‘no other comedian needed material to open his mouth as much as he did, being an uneducated lout.’

The writers’ room was a storytelling laboratory. For the writers, the sketches were five-finger exercises for later, more ambitious work of their own. Caesar was a stranger to himself – ‘He didn’t know who Sid Caesar was’ (Reiner); ‘Sid’s personality could be described as “non-existent”’ (Gelbart) – but comedy gave his emptiness a meaning. Becoming the characters was at once his liberation and his salvation, ‘something else to hide behind’, he said: ‘It’s an absolute tonic. It’s like stepping into air.’ He thought of the writers as ‘violins’ and called them his ‘praetorian guard’. They, in turn, saw Caesar as the unlikely Stradivarius who gave an extra dimension to their comic music. To Gelbart, ‘his gift to those of us who gathered in that room was to offer us the challenge of discovering who we were – or who we might possibly become – as writers.’

The art of the comedian is perishable. Caesar’s precipitous rise and fall is a case in point. In When Caesar Was King, David Margolick’s admirable mission is to remind the reader of Caesar’s clout and to bring him back into the cultural discussion. To that end, he has thrown a wide net over the shows and the people who made them, although he doesn’t know quite what to make of all the varied stuff he’s dredged up. He has quotes from every TV critic, gossip columnist and newspaper, and testimonials from tummlers of note from Lenny Bruce to Larry David. If Mark Twain were alive, I’m sure he would have worked him in too. Margolick renders to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but also what doesn’t, hitching the wagon of Caesar’s reputation to the prestige of his writers’ mature accomplishments: ‘Not just The Dick Van Dyke Show, but The Andy Griffith Show, M*A*S*H and All in the Family; Bananas and Annie Hall, Blazing Saddles, Fiddler on the Roof, The Odd Couple, Hello, Dolly! – all were written by people who wrote for Caesar first.’

Caesar and his writers had the Herculean task of churning out six comedy sketches a week, 39 weeks a year, an exhausting mind-meld which Caesar called ‘a combination of euphoria and terror’. ‘I look back on The Show of Shows + wonder how you + I existed in the midst of this male, mad with power atmosphere,’ Imogene Coca, Caesar’s gamine co-star, wrote to Kallen. ‘We all had success – we all made more money than we’d ever made – did it have to be that agonising?’ Caesar saw that agony as energy, ‘a cyclotron’. From Monday to Saturday, when the show aired, the writers were submerged in the force field of their collaboration; Sunday was for real life. ‘We had nothing prepared for the next week. I mean that. We’d come in at about ten in the morning,’ he explained to David Letterman in 1982. ‘We used to sit there and we’d say: “Did you go anywhere? Have any of you even been anywhere?” We had no social life. We used to work from ten to six to two-three in the morning.’

Margolick’s argument hinges on its subtitle: ‘How Sid Caesar Reinvented American Comedy’. If that statement is true, then gallstones are jewellery. Caesar and his talented crew of Merry Andrews memorialised their collaboration in the film My Favourite Year (1982), produced by Brooks, and in Simon’s Broadway play Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993). But however iconic the writers’ room has become in the public’s imagination, Caesar and his team didn’t reinvent much of anything. They repackaged for the small screen the tropes of parody, sketch, pantomime and song which had always been the staple of the Broadway revue. As Caesar said to Letterman, ‘We compared ourselves to Broadway. We tried to emulate it.’ Broadway’s template was even ballyhooed in the Admiral Broadway Revue, whose pitch was ‘trying to bring Broadway into your home’. Are Caesar’s opera spoofs funnier than Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s ‘Catch Our Act at the Met’ from Two on the Aisle, or more trenchant than Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen’s lampoon of the ‘Song of the Woodsman’ from The Show Is On? Or are the confusions of wordplay giddier than Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’? Not by a long chalk. Even Caesar’s trademark double-talk – he could riff in the sound of innumerable languages, including Chinese – didn’t originate with him but had been a staple of Broadway folderol since the brothers Willie and Eugene Howard imported it from vaudeville into a series of George White’s Scandals, one of the most popular American revues of the 1920s and 1930s.

In recounting the way the TV shows were put together, Margolick is clear, sometimes even vivid. But he’s confused about the nature of comedy and therefore about Caesar himself. Caesar was a lost soul. ‘The only man Sid ever had trouble being – the one character that eluded him for years – was Sid himself,’ Gelbart said. When he was inhabiting a character and speaking scripted dialogue, he had both direction and personality. Offstage, as even his loyal, inspired straight man Reiner observed, Caesar was ‘short-changed on charm’. Brooks’s first wife, Florence, who didn’t invite him to their wedding, said: ‘Without a character to play, he was sort of blah – as relatable as a jellyfish.’

Words were not Caesar’s language. He was, according to Simon, ‘extremely smart but completely inarticulate’. He is reputed not to have spoken until the age of three. ‘Comedy comes from animosity and frustration,’ Caesar said. ‘You want to get back at something, but you’re afraid to do it in a big way because it’ll get you in trouble.’ Margolick does not think psychologically. He glosses over Caesar’s early refusal to speak as ‘introversion’ rather than as an attack on his first audience: his overworked, unavailable and unhappy parents. ‘I grew up angry. I kept quiet because I didn’t know what might happen if I let loose,’ he said.

Born in 1922, the fourth son – ‘the make-up child’, he called himself – to Max and Ida, who ran a series of all-night luncheonettes and rooming houses until Max filed for bankruptcy in 1935, Caesar felt trapped in his confounding, fractious home. ‘It was like being in solitary at Sing Sing,’ he said. ‘I was always running away. I guess I’m still running away … You know, something happens in your life and you want to get even.’ The mother’s all-defining gaze was never on him. ‘The first lesson I learned at my mother’s knee was to stay out of the way of her flying feet, or I’d get a belt from my father’s hand.’ He wasn’t just unseen by his mother, he was judged valueless. ‘You’re not worth the nickel I’m going to give you,’ he remembered her saying. Caesar’s central childhood memory is one of desertion, of his father putting him on a train aged four with a sign around his neck saying ASBURY PARK, where his maternal grandparents lived and where his mother had retreated after a marital fracas. He arrived in New Jersey just in time to glimpse his mother on the opposite platform aboard a train bound for New York. ‘If my mother and father had beaten me with baseball bats,’ he said, ‘they couldn’t have hurt me half as much.’ The silence that kept his rage under wraps extended to grade school, where he was nicknamed ‘Silent Sidney’ and assigned to a class for impaired children. He graduated at sixteen from Yonkers High School in 1939, and by then he’d learned to play the saxophone, which spoke his moods for him. ‘The Depression had taken an emotional toll on my father. I wasn’t bringing enough money into the house and they couldn’t afford to keep me.’ He left home to try to join the musician’s union. ‘I didn’t even have ten cents in my pocket.’

In the elegiac flourish of the biography’s last pages, Margolick describes the dispersal of Caesar’s worldly goods as they went under the hammer at Julien’s Auction House to the Stars in 2015: Caesar’s massive gun collection, his gold chains, his furniture. He singles out lot 461, a Selmer ‘Cigar Cutter’ dated to 1932, described as ‘a rusty saxophone accompanied by a hard-shell case in a travel bag’. In the final paragraph, he asks: ‘Why had Caesar held on to it?’ Margolick has amassed the historical facts but missed the point. The saxophone marks the moment in Caesar’s life when he was properly born. ‘What the music did for me was not only train me as a musician, but also allow me to think creatively. You could ad lib and be very creative as long as you stayed within the chord structure,’ he wrote. ‘Comedy is music. It has a rhythm and a melody. It elicits passion, joy and melancholy. And if you listen to it, you can hear a beat.’ If you want to get the feel of the real Sid Caesar, watch him on YouTube playing the saxophone with Benny Goodman on the clarinet and Gene Krupa providing the backbeat. Caesar is briefly at home in himself: alive, swift, going with the big band’s flow. He’s beyond sorrow and words. He’s making a beautiful noise in the world. ‘Comedy and music have much in common and I often sought to combine the two,’ he wrote.

Some​ of Caesar’s old routines on kinescope have found their way online. Readers can judge for themselves; to my eye, only a handful pass the test of time. Most seem overwritten, too broad, too slow. When they are good, however, they are tasty amuse-bouches. Caesar’s tatterdemalion Viennese Professor, an authority on everything and nothing, is a throwback to the old ‘Dutch’ burlesque shtick and the precursor of the immortal Reiner-Brooks routine ‘The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man’ (‘Joan of Arc? I dated her.’) ‘What’s the biggest problem in space today?’ Reiner asks Ludwig von Spacebrain, an expert on jet propulsion. ‘I would say closet space,’ the professor replies. ‘The Three Haircuts’ – Caesar, Reiner and Howie Morris, with big hair and big banality – belt out ‘You Are So Rare to Me’ (the piquant rock piss-take sold more than 100,000 records). And for sheer zaniness, the send-up of the mawkish This Is Your Life, with Caesar’s reluctant nobody discovered in the audience and deciding on impulse to bolt away up the aisle, is choice comedy jazz.

Many of Caesar’s sketches start well but don’t build to a boffo finish. The same was true of his career. By 1958 his comic star was fizzling out. On TV he was being challenged in the ratings by the accordion-playing bandleader Lawrence Welk, who liked to say: ‘I play the kind of music mother likes.’ Caesar sent up Welk variously as ‘Lonnie Bilk’ and ‘Ricky Tick’. ‘Hi there, nice Americans,’ Tick says in one spoof, promising ‘another programme of toe-tapping, tip-tapping, toe-tipping, tap-topping, toe-tipping tempo tunes’. TV turned America into a chucklehead nation. Caesar could parody Welk’s mediocrity, but he couldn’t beat it.

The medium that had made Caesar a household name dismissed him almost overnight. At the height of his popularity in the mid-1950s, Caesar had a 62 per cent audience share; by 1957, it had dropped to 26 per cent. Of the 130 shows on NBC, Caesar’s Hour was 94th. He had become too familiar a face; Caesar’s Hour was cancelled. Although he made a couple of hapless attempts at resuscitating his TV career, by 1960, at the age of 38, his comic ride was over. At a certain speed, all things disintegrate. For twenty years, Caesar disappeared into drugs and drink. ‘It was like the earth opened up and swallowed me,’ he said. ‘I had nothing to fall back on.’ He was a victim of TV’s impermanence. He lost funny, and with it his claim on the nation’s imagination. ‘Mel, what happened?’ he asked Brooks in 1981, when Brooks gave him a bit part in History of the World: Part 1. ‘Who was I, what did I do? Tell me what happened.’

‘I did not get to see my kids grow up,’ Caesar said. ‘I did not get to make peace with them until much later on.’ The talking cure he underwent to free himself from his alcoholism, drug addiction and chronic depression was not psychoanalysis but self-analysis. Almost every day from 1979 to 1999 he talked into a tape recorder, which is the equivalent of arraigning yourself in your own court and getting off on good behaviour. ‘You can’t lie to yourself,’ he said, with a straight face.

By then, pickled in marijuana, Caesar had evolved from ‘an aggressive, almost neo-fascist type American’, according to his son, Rick, into ‘a delayed flower child’. When he couldn’t take his comedy on the road, he took his recovery, which itself sounded like Caesar double-talk. ‘There’s a now, a was, and a gonna be. Now is now, and after now is a was. And what comes after is gonna be … It’s gonna happen as soon as the now is over.’ ‘Sid has found a Happy Pill … I found myself wishing for the old really lousy Sid,’ Coca wrote to Kallen. ‘This new “I love – I love” Sid is even more self-involved than the Scrooge Sid.’

Caesar outlived his fame and the shift in the tastes of the American public, who were experiencing social ructions which required stronger comic medicine. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Woody Allen and Bill Hicks, each in their own acerbic way, aspired to disenchant the republic of its illusions where Caesar had wanted merely to tickle the nation to death. To the old guard, Caesar would always be a genius; to the next generation of more worldly, better-educated TV funny men, he was a sidebar. ‘They have PhDs, so they know what’s funny,’ Caesar complained. ‘They graduated with doctorates of philosophy on humour, magna cum louder, louder and louder.’ Caesar smiled with cold teeth at the accomplishments of the graduates from his comic academy. To Brooks, the loud-mouthed tummler Caesar had once paid $40 a week out of his own pocket to deliver ‘the unexpected’ for his TV revues and who was now responsible for the Broadway mega-hit The Producers, he said: ‘So, you went from me to Hitler.’ To Woody Allen, he offered: ‘Funny that I’m going to be a footnote in your life story.’ Margolick’s biography excavates the story of Caesar’s forgotten heroics, but Caesar himself, in all his delirium and delight, remains a ghostly remnant.