Comedy for Keeps

Video and audio signals were thrown into the air, grabbed by TV antennas 35 years ago and then, we thought, disappeared into the cosmos.

And what sights and sounds these signals possessed: live drama and comedy that had a spontaneity and freshness never again equaled by an upstart medium growing into maturity.

Most of the live television experience was lost because videotape wasn’t available until 1955. Quite a few TV shows, however, were filmed off the screen, and some of these “kinescopes” survive. They are they only record we have left of the “live” TV experience.

No program lit up the airwaves with more intensity and originality than “Your Show of Shows,” a 90-minute comedy-variety program on Saturdays from 9 to 10:30 p.m., airing from Feb. 25, 1950, to June 5, 1954.

“Your Show of Shows” was created by producer-director showman Max Liebman. It was the original “Saturday Night Live.” Ninety minutes of original entertainment starring four startlingly original comedians: Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. The show was written by a group of writers who today dominate American mass culture: Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Joseph Stein (“Fiddler on the Roof”), Michael Stewart (“Hello, Dolly!”), Larry Gelbart (“M*A*S*H”), Lucille Kallen and Mel Tolkin.

Most viewers thought these live shows were lost forever. But producer Liebman had collected kinescopes of many of the programs. In 1976 he packaged a series of 90-minute TV specials for syndication. Unicorn Video has now issued eight volumes of these selected excerpts from “Your Show of Shows” kinescoped on videotape.

These are not the complete original programs that included Broadway-flavored singing and dancing and classy snippets of ballet and opera.

It’s a pity we can’t relive the entire show, singing and dancing included. But that’s a small complaint since each tape holds seven to eight vintage comedy sketches featuring the genius of Caesar, Coca, Reiner and Morris and the writers in their prime.

The brilliant, live and unedited comedy is all here--from Caesar’s professor skits to the hilarious, often flawless pantomimes to the staccato monologues to the sharp-tongued husband-and-wife skits to the mock-foreign language and silent movies and opera spoofs including ad-libs, unexpected mishaps and Caesar’s always present, annoying cough.

The first two volumes in Unicorn’s videotape series are typical of the collection.

They include Caesar’s “Airplane Movies,” his original spoof of Hollywood’s wartime movies that initially brought Caesar to Liebman’s attention; Caesar’s “professor,” this time as an expert on fishing and archaeology; “The Boarder,” in which wife Coca takes in boarder Morris without telling husband Caesar (this gets funnier with each viewing); two famous pantomimes, the “Violin Recital” and “In the Subway” (no one on TV ever was better at pantomime); “The Nervous Suitor,” in which an anxious Caesar courts Coca in one of the funniest skits ever seen on TV; a Caesar monologue about a man caught in the city at night without any money; and a typical film satire in which the cast imitates foreign speech.

Another superb sampling of “Your Show of Shows” is a single compilation issued for motion picture release and now available on Media Home Entertainment videotape and Image Entertainment laser disc: “Ten From Your Show of Shows,” a compilation of comedy sketches from 1950 to 1954.

These tapes meet the crucial home video test: They get better viewing after viewing. They offer expert testimony that “Your Show of Shows” was indeed the extraordinary achievement viewers remember, a genuine classic of television’s golden age.

The modern-day counterpart to “Your Show of Shows” was producer Lorne Michaels’ “Saturday Night Live.” We are now able to evaluate this live comedy repeatedly through the unprecedented release of 16 volumes of “Saturday Night Live,” circa 1975-1980, Warner videotape, 60 minutes each.

Watching these volumes of “Saturday Night Live” as well as “The Best of John Belushi,” “The Best of Dan Aykroyd” and “The Best of Gilda Radner,” also on Warner Home Video, it becomes clear that, like “Your Show of Shows,” the comedy that flashed once on the screen and then disappeared holds up very well. For the most part, it is clever, inventive, daring, hard-edged and unpredictable: the Coneheads or the Aykroyd-Curtain “Point Counterpoint” or Mr. Bill or “cheesebugah, cheesebugah, cheesebugah” or Radner’s “Never Mind” or Murray’s Nick Winters or the Loopners or the parodies of presidents, network executives and, best of all, television past, reminds you of the razor-sharp, often gross, contemporary comedy that commercial TV had never seen before and may never see again.

Its elements were classic (political satire, a keen distrust of the establishment, especially business and corporations, including TV corporate power) and revolutionary (a stripping away of all show-biz conventions and formalities; a conscious attempt to turn the medium inside out with behind-the-scenes gallows humor; a new all-embracing and permissive attitude toward sex and, especially, drugs).

Perhaps the best collection is “The Best of John Belushi” featuring classic Belushi sketches from October, 1975 to May, 1979. Included are, of course, the Blues Brothers. And its highlight is Belushi in a 1978 Tom Schiller film called “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” in which Belushi visits the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time cemetery. It is a poignant gem.