{"id":3769,"date":"2026-01-06T23:51:29","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T04:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3769"},"modified":"2026-01-09T11:52:29","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T16:52:29","slug":"was-sid-caesars-cancellation-a-media-parable-for-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2026\/01\/was-sid-caesars-cancellation-a-media-parable-for-today.html","title":{"rendered":"Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar\u2019s \u201cShow of Shows\u201d on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don\u2019t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar\u2019s \u201cShow of Shows\u201d went off the air in 1954 and I was born in 1948. So I was all of six years old. The memory stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caesar virtually disappeared from television when \u201cCaesar\u2019s Hour\u201d \u2013 his sequel show — was cancelled by NBC in 1957. But Caesar\u2019s reputation as a comic genius, a talent to set beside Chaplin and Keaton, more than lingered.  Then in 1973 \u201cTen from \u2018Your Show of Shows\u2019\u201d \u2013 grainy kinescopes \u2013 turned up in movie theaters. To this day, no other comedian makes me laugh myself prostrate to the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Caesar career was famously short-lived; he was all of 35 when he lost his weekly TV berth. It was always my understanding that he simply burned out, that doing live TV full tilt every week — the ruthless schedule, the manic energy \u2013 was just too much. And Caesar was visibly high-strung: he stammered, he coughed, he frayed. The desperation he enacted was both funny and real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From David Margolick\u2019s new biography When Caesar Was King <\/em>I now learn, however, <\/em>that the king was partly dethroned by Lawrence Welk, who showed up nationally on ABC in 1955 and slaughtered Caesar\u2019s ratings. Consciously and strategically, Welk embodied the bland. His band\u2019s \u201cbubble music\u201d was engineered to smooth and soothe. Sampling Welk on youtube, I discovered a single Black guest artist \u2013 a smiling tap dancer who made the show seem even whiter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Welk\u2019s own delivery was blank was his very signature. His instrument was the accordion. His core audience included elderly ladies for whom Caesar was a neurotic anomaly. One Iowa dentist claimed that NBC was trying to \u201cram\u201d Caesar \u201cdown our vision.\u201d \u201cIn some magazine I noted that Sid Caesar was rated the wit of the year,\u201d she told the Chicago Tribune<\/em>. \u201cShould that be so, I\u2019m Samuel L. Clemens\u2019s twin sister.\u201d The Nashville Banner<\/em> invited readers to chime in. \u201cI don\u2019t like \u2018Your Show or Shows\u2019 either and don\u2019t know anyone who does,\u201d wrote Mrs. Gladys Miller. \u201cIf all of TV was like \u2018Your Show of Shows,\u2019 there would be no market for TV sets,\u201d testified Mrs. R. E. Farris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same moment, NBC\u2019s press department boasted: \u201cThe small town this generation has known has ceased to exist. Television has created similar tastes in all sizes of communities. Sectionalism and regionalism are vanishing as people sit in their living rooms, looking into the magic window of television.\u201d Margolick comments that it proved hard to abandon the \u201cstarry-eyed notion that folks outside big eastern cities would be thrilled to have sophisticated entertainment dumped on their doorstep. But in what one advertising derisively called \u2018East Cupcake, Iowa,\u2019 this wasn\u2019t necessarily so. Far from binding together two different Americas, television only heightened \u2013 and, maybe, even widened \u2013 the chasm.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was Sid Caesar\u2019s cancellation by NBC some kind of parable? Is it pertinent to Donald Trump\u2019s America?  To the impending cancellation of Stephen Colbert by Paramount? To the ongoing conglomeration of big media?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newton Minow, as JFK\u2019s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in 1961 famously called TV \u201ca vast wasteland.\u201d That was half a century before Trump\u2019s FCC chairman, Brendon Carr, threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC affiliates who carried Jimmy Kimmel. As I happen to know a thing or two about cultural programming during the early decades of commercial television, I can put Minow\u2019s complaint in another context: the wasteland was not uniform. Caesar actually fit into a corner of creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we think of television heroes from the 1950s, the marquee name is CBS\u2019s Edward R. Murrow, who stood up to McCarthy and in 1958 warned that commercial TV, driven by profit, was insulating Americans. Six years before that, \u201cOmnibus\u201d debuted on CBS. It was an arts showcase urbanely hosted by Alistair Cook. Leonard Bernstein\u2019s TV career \u2013 a landmark in musical pedagogy — began on \u201cOmnibus\u201d with an exploration of Beethoven\u2019s Fifth Symphony<\/a> in which he pondered the composer\u2019s discarded sketches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what first bears mentioning is that Bernstein was blacklisted when in 1954 Robert Saudek invited him onto \u201cOmnibus.\u201d More than an enlightened arts initiative, his engagement was an act of defiance that effectively reactivated Bernstein’s American career, and not only on TV. Bernstein\u2019s \u201cYoung People\u2019s Concerts,\u201d also on CBS, began in 1958 and ran until 1972 \u2013 53 programs in all. Bernstein\u2019s YPC producer was Roger Englander.  When President Kennedy was shot, Englander was instantly on the phone. CBS scheduled Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in a memorial concert — a  performance of Mahler\u2019s Resurrection<\/em> Symphony, with soloists and chorus \u2013 that was aired live just two days later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most prominent commercial sponsor of Bernstein\u2019s early TV work was the Ford Motor Company. At one point in the relationship, Charles Moore, a Ford vice president, visited West Berlin, then a West German island surrounded by Communist East Germany. Moore decided that the United States would be inadequately represented at a forthcoming festival. Ford put up $150,000 to send Bernstein and the Philharmonic to the West Berlin Music, Drama, and Arts Festival \u2013 and turned it into a 1960 \u201cFord Presents\u201d special on CBS.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over at NBC television, David Sarnoff\u2019s prime cultural initiative was a series of live concerts, including complete operas, featuring Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony (1948 to 1952). Sarnoff also created an English-language NBC Opera stressing contemporary and American repertoire. Born in a Russian shtetl, Sarnoff was a driven, self-made tastemaker without formal education. In his youth, he acquired a reverence for symphony and opera. But for Sarnoff Sid Caesar must have seemed a mere comedian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Margolick makes clear, Caesar on NBC was pegged by many Americans as \u201celitist,\u201d even \u201cintellectual.\u201d He was also (like Leonard Bernstein) self-evidently Jewish. His producer was Max Liebman. His writers included Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. His fans included Bernstein, who would re-enact Caesar\u2019s parody of insomniacs for his children. Though it would not have occurred to me to group Caesar and Bernstein together, on second thought many Caesar skits parodied high culture. For instance: they assumed audiences knew the fashionable Japanese art films that inspired \u201cU-Bet-U,<\/a>\u201d in which Caesar plays a clumsy samurai warrior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most notably, Caesar \u2013 himself a trained musician who once played his saxophone professionally — took on classical music and opera, a specialty that peaked during his last seasons as a TV regular. I am thinking, for instance, of \u201cGallipacci,<\/a>\u201d the Pagliacci<\/em> spoof that opens with a mercilessly banal production number: \u201cSanta Claus Is Coming to Town\u201d rendered in Italian double talk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the coup de grace was Caesar performing Grieg\u2019s Piano Concerto. Though I adore Victor Borge, Caesar\u2019s parody is supreme. Working with his in-house pianist, the formidable Earl Wild, Caesar sits on a piano bench facing the audience, playing an invisible keyboard on an otherwise vacant stage. The manic hilarity of this act was predicated on a labor of love: split second coordination of Caesar\u2019s hands and fingers with Wild\u2019s off-stage manipulations of virtuoso passagework, including planned wrong notes and tasteless sentimental rubatos. It was all choreographed in a matter of days, then flawlessly executed on live TV.  There exist several versions; the one to watch is here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Caesar\u2019s comedy was never political. It was never explicitly Jewish. But it was fundamentally disruptive, with everything else fair game: Hollywood films, Broadway plays, health food restaurants, rock \u2018n roll, progressive jazz, corporate boardrooms, and popular TV shows not excluding Lawrence Welk. A spirit of demolition reigned unchecked. Many sensed this and objected. For others, Caesar\u2019s humor was as cathartic as any other form of sublime artistic expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I assume that Sid Caesar would not appeal to today\u2019s emerging national culture tsar. Caesar was too fundamentally irreverent and hence dangerous. Scanning the more than 250 names proposed for Donald Trump\u2019s impending National Garden of Heroes, I find a single comedian: Bob Hope. In fact, Caesar is not even among the comedians awarded Kennedy Center [sic] Honors, a long list including Danny Kaye, Bill Cosby, Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Billy Crystal, and Lily Tomlin. Perhaps that\u2019s incidental. Or perhaps it registers the \u201cchasm\u201d dividing two Americas that David Margolick links to television in his biography of TV\u2019s most original star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a related blog on Trump, JFK, Bernstein, and the arts, click <\/em>here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar\u2019s \u201cShow of Shows\u201d on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don\u2019t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar\u2019s \u201cShow of Shows\u201d went off the air in 1954 and I was born in 1948. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3769","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-YN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3769"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3788,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3769\/revisions\/3788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}