Honoring His Caesarship : Broadcasting: New York’s Museum of Radio & Television kicks off the L.A. fest with a tribute to comedy legend Sid Caesar tonight.

Woman (Imogene Coca): I think the old method of spanking a child is passe .

Man (Sid Caesar): I say don’t spank a child. Talk to the child, reason with him, find out what’s on his mind. And when you find out the real reason, the cause-- then belt him.

On a cluttered desk in his hilltop Beverly Hills home rests a nameplate bearing a self-mocking title: “His Caesarship.”

It fits.

Oh, it’s true that the so-called Golden Age of Television is largely a figment of legends and selective memories, that upon close examination there was much less gold than tin. Yet from 1949 to 1957, Sid Caesar presided over a Camelot of comedy, a realm of distinctively brilliant art that started with “The Admiral Broadway Revue,” continued with “Your Show of Shows” and concluded with “Caesar’s Hour.” As a body of daring work--performed live in a raw, scratchy, black-and-white medium that shunned controversy--it’s awesome.

Thus how appropriate that New York’s Museum of Radio & Television is kicking off its 11th annual Los Angeles Television Festival--which runs through March 19 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--with tonight’s sold-out tribute to Caesar.

At times visited by sheer madness, his comedy characters were at once physical and soulful. He created sight-gag masterpieces and joined his colleagues in sputtering foreign dialects that were side-splitting gibberish. He also deployed silence as few other comic actors have, instinctively withholding responses until just the right millimoment. Yet above all, much of Caesar’s comedy reflects his remarkable eye for seeing the absurd in the ordinary.

Television has had its share of comedy geniuses. Yet arguably none has been as uniquely gifted and inventive as Caesar. Watching him perform, you just know light bulbs are popping continuously in his brain.

Of course, he didn’t do it alone. He was in the right place at the right time, benefiting from an ensemble of supporting players and writers as talented as television has ever known.

His co-bananas in those days included Imogene Coca, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. Some of his writers were Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Woody Allen, Danny Simon and Neil Simon, whose current Broadway play, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” is itself about writers working for a series like “Your Show of Shows.”

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Except for Allen, all of the above (plus other past colleagues of Caesar’s, including Gisele MacKenzie, his comedy partner in a later series) are scheduled to participate in tonight’s salute. They’ll come . . . they’ll laugh . . . they’ll praise . . . they’ll schmooze. . . .

Not in attendance will be the late Max Liebman. He was the storied impresario who first paired Caesar and Coca for “The Admiral Broadway Revue” on the old Dumont network. Although it seems almost too quaint to believe, the series was canceled after one season by Admiral itself because it could not keep up with the demand for TV sets caused by the success of Caesar and Coca. Liebman translated his Admiral series into something similar on NBC, a 90-minute variety program titled “Your Show of Shows”--a grueling 39 episodes a season--that included four long skits and a stand-up routine each for Caesar and Coca. Four years later, the two were heading separate NBC shows, with Caesar joined by Fabray and holdovers Reiner and Morris on “Caesar’s Hour.”

But enough about that, and on with the comedy.

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“What would you like to see?” asked Caesar, 72. After consulting an index, he began popping in cassettes.

Here is Caesar’s thick-accented Deutsche professor and blowhard for all seasons in a dented top hat and shabby formal wear lecturing Reiner’s rapt reporter about what a mountain climber must do should he fall.

“You right away fill your lungs with air . . . and you start to scream. And you keep screaming all the vay down.”

“But why do you keep screaming?”

“Dummkoph! So they know where to find you.”

For sheer comedic brazenness, here is “The Four Englishmen,” with Caesar, Coca, Reiner and Morris as haughty, upper-crust Britishers who remain rigid and unflappable in formal attire even when drenched by water from rain pouring through the leaky roof of their posh club.

Here too is Caesar in a stunning, virtuoso, rhythmically freewheeling stand-up, comparing nights on the town in 1939 and 1949.

If the famous “Your Show of Shows” parody of “This Is Your Life” isn’t network TV’s funniest sketch ever--with Caesar as a poor schnook in the audience who fights having his life told and has to be chased down and carried to the stage--then it’s the “Caesar’s Hour” spoof of “Sunset Boulevard.” On the screen is Caesar as the brooding, macho Rex Handsome, a silent movie star whose career takes a turn for the worst with the advent of talkies.

It’s a Western. The barroom doors swing open, and there is tough, fearless, wide-bodied Rex. “Draw!” someone says. Shots ring out. A guy tries to disarm Rex, but he’s too quick and sends him flying.

Rex (in a high effeminate voice): “Anybody else looking for trouble?”

Movie parodies were a favorite of this great production team. The “Shane” satire was titled “Strange,” with Caesar as the heroic Alan Ladd character and Coca in the worshipful Brandon de Wilde role.

Coca: “Gee, that’s a nice gun, Strange. That’s a nice holster, Strange. Nice gun belt, Strange. I like you, Strange. You got nice boots, Strange. You’re nice, Strange.”

Caesar: “Get away, kid, or I’ll blast you.”

If there were ever evidence of Caesar’s mastery of the funny/sad qualities epitomized by Chaplin and Keaton in films, though, it was a “Pagliacci” spoof. On the screen, in his funny hat and satin pajamas, is Caesar as the tragic clown Gallipacci. Distraught after losing his woman (Fabray), he is singing mock Italian lyrics operatic-style to the tune of “It Was Just One of Those Things,” while putting on his makeup and (Caesar says he improvised this) playing tick-tack-toe on his own face.

Later, the entire cast of “Gallipacci” sings “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

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Intently observing this still-fresh 40-year-old routine through 1994 eyes, Caesar sat in his office and laughed out loud. Other sketches he grinned at, others he watched silently, his eyes narrowing like a connoisseur standing back and studying a painting in a gallery.

It’s inconceivable that the art of Sid Caesar has never been widely rerun or syndicated on national television. In 1973, Liebman packaged excerpts as a theatrical movie titled “Ten From Your Show of Shows,” and Caesar said that in the mid-1980s Lorimar paid to edit the material into 65 shows for syndication but then lost interest. A couple of years ago, he said, some of them were run at 12:30 a.m. on cable’s Comedy Channel.

A much better spot would be Nickelodeon’s “Nick at Night,” which has run lots of vintage black-and-white comedy series. Or syndication to local stations. “I don’t understand why nobody wants them,” Caesar said. “It’s all lawyers and accountants today. You go to the networks, the top guy is maybe 28 or 30.”

Humor is generational. Yet the humor of these shows remains contemporary. Is it that they have no continuing characters, as do such widely syndicated antiques as “I Love Lucy” and Jackie Gleason’s “The Honeymooners”? Or is it that the present age of hyper comedies--more and more of them tailored to the one-lines of stand-up comics--has created vastly different appetites?

“I make the audience work,” Caesar said. “Our comedy is mostly character. There are jokes, but we don’t rely on them. In the ‘Sunset Boulevard’ parody we take two or three minutes just to set up. They don’t have patience for that anymore. Today, if it goes more than three seconds without a laugh, forget it.”

Caesar, whose favorite current comics include Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, also winces at another exploding phenomenon of the ‘90s--gratuitously lewd material in monologues. That attitude will get him labeled a dinosaur. “I know,” he said.

On the screen is a parody of “The Seventh Veil,” with Caesar as the tyrannical guardian of a pliant young pianist (Coca) whom he forces to practice around the clock, even making her eat and brush her teeth at the piano. “In seven short years, I’ve taken a raw, innocent girl,” he boasts, “and made her a nervous wreck.”

His Caesarship. Some dinosaur.