Living Legends--a Swan Song in Vegas

There’s something to be said for the appearance of Sid Caesar, Milton Berle and Danny Thomas in “The Living Legends of Comedy,” which opened a proposed national tour at the Riviera Hotel on May 27. But I don’t know what it is.

Vegas, which has long been the elephant graveyard of American entertainment, the place where performers can milk a fame whose options have elapsed elsewhere, has claimed the dust of three more. And it’s sad to see. Berle never seemed more desperate, Caesar more bewildered or Thomas more of a sentimental nonentity.

Las Vegas still represents the American metaphor for staking a claim in the imagination of momentarily moneyed freedom. The slots, the tables, the wheels, the computerized card games and horse races whose sounds and lights throw out an instant sensory overload, all seem to represent an escape from the drudgery of the American work week and a deliverance into a dream where cash is an ironic mix of the valueless and the crucial, and the sensual appetite meets the illusion of total satiation.

That’s why Vegas is so tolerant of the mediocre and the passe; it exists in the middle of the desert as a city of glamour and possibility, even if these qualities, for most, prove illusory (and their owners show up with disposable cash). The same holds true for the performers here. Many have come to a dry end, but many more have used a Vegas interregnum to gather strength for a new career offensive.

That seems to be the case with our Living Legends, each of whom lays claim to a greater or lesser degree on the American show-biz imagination (it’s been reported that a group of Broadway producers once asked NBC to change the Saturday venue of Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” because its popularity was cutting into theater attendance). Would that they seemed merely retrenching in order to mainline into the American nerve again. Would that they seemed less lost in the stars.

Seeing them, individually and together, was like showing up for a live concert and hearing Muzak instead. Buddy Freed’s orchestra played what’s termed an inspirational medley consisting of “That’s Entertainment,” “Be a Clown” and “Side by Side,” after which our three appeared onstage for a stretch of excruciating banter which consisted (in part) of the following:

Berle (glancing at the elaborate rows of light banks): “I’m happy to be here in this Jewish erector set.”

Thomas: “There’s no sign that says ‘Milton Berle and his day laborers.’ You said ‘We’re your helpers.’ ”

Caesar: “And we’re no help.”

Thomas: “You should’ve been here in rehearsal. He (Berle) kissed me.”

Berle: “And he put his tongue in my mouth.”

Thomas: “You’re the most innovative entertainer in show business.”

Berle: “That’s like Zsa Zsa Gabor saying ‘Ouch!’ on her honeymoon.”

Right away you feel the nausea of the time warp, where references seem distant, hermetic, and not worth pursuing (“Berle doesn’t steal jokes,” Caesar said. “He finds ‘em before they get lost”). Who cares? A joke about Zsa Zsa ?

When Berle came on for the first of his solos, he said things like “I’m so unlucky, if I sawed a woman in half, I’d get the end that eats.” He belched. “I got so much gas, I’m being followed by Arabs. . . . This is a hip audience. See the hips on this broad? . . . This your wife? Got some nude pictures of her? No? Want some? . . . George (Burns) couldn’t be here. Something came up and he was proud.” More of same.

Caesar came on to tell us that he likes to do comedy of truth, and then did two mime routines, one of a young boy at his first dance (all awkward hands and floppy tongue), and the other of a concert pianist making his Carnegie Hall debut playing Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor and getting caught up in his own emotional transports.

Caesar might have done tolerably well had he quit at this point, but later he came back to do his Professor Hugo Knowitall. Without the marvelous array of writers and comedic talents who once surrounded him, Caesar seemed lonely and comedically fragile onstage.

Berle introduced Thomas. “He’s known as the greatest storyteller in the world. And for the works he’s done for St. Jude, he’s a great humanitarian. He’s built a half-way house for girls who won’t go all the way. Here he is, the Pope of Beverly Hills.” The band played “Danny Boy.” Thomas came on to tell us, “I don’t cheat on my wife, not because I’m religious, it’s because she’s Sicilian.”

He told us how much he loves the Italian language, and his mother-in-law, who can eat more than any four living truck drivers. He told two jokes about Dean Martin. He joked about “the equality thing, the ERA. Why would a woman be equal to a man? Why stoop down? Can a man think like a woman? No man can enter the sanctum sanctorum of her.”

He interrupted his promise to sing, expecting no doubt our breathless anticipation, with dialect jokes and then, on rolling orchestral swells, sang “September Song” with a concluding note to his wife, Rose, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

There was no sentimental crumb Thomas didn’t mop up. Later, Berle came back (they all kept coming back, it seemed, in waves) to tell us every dumb joke he had ever heard, calling for house lights up at the end so that he could see his fans and all the good people out there--”Just give me an audience like you for the rest of my career,” he said. The audience rose, out of appreciation, weariness and relief.

“The Living Legends of Comedy” is one of the most egregious and deadly examples of glommy old-time show biz noblesse oblige, where entertainers use reputation instead of talent as a ticket to ride, and where, despite disingenuous sentimental disclaimers, they make an audience feel like it’s privileged to be in on the joke. Onstage, Caesar can’t seem to edit his material, and Berle and Thomas have no apparent interest in dumping their old cigar-butt clubbie camaraderie in favor of comedic reflections on the present tense.

Age need not be fatal to a comedian’s career, as we’ve seen with George Burns and Bob Hope, Johnny Carson (now that he’s starting to get up there), and Bill Cosby, who will live to chronicle all his ages. But it takes a greater look outward than these three have hazarded. Long before the end of their show you feel gripped in a mirthless casino atmosphere, where everyone’s luck eventually runs out in bad air.