MOVING THE DIAL

The comic genius who pushed early TV further than it could go.

- DAVID DENBY

The great silent comics—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon—were compact men, resilient and sprung-wound yet graceful as they coped with menaces like recalcitrant umbrellas, stick-wielding cops, and collapsing buildings. They made minimal demands on the world; they wanted only to survive its aggressions. Sid Caesar, who was equal to them in talent and who dominated television comedy for most of the nineteen-fifties with “Your Show of Shows” and “Caesar’s Hour,” was large and beefy, a noisy, lunging Everyman, a tumult of dissatisfied flesh. Caesar did not look like a comic. As a young man, he might have passed for a macher on Queens Boulevard—a lawyer, say, or a department-store manager. But this average-looking citizen could become almost anything, throwing himself into roles with shattering power.