Showtime Renders Its Praises Unto Comic Great Sid Caesar

“It was like a university of comedy,” Neil Simon recalls about his prime-time 101 days as a writer for the great Sid Caesar’s TV repertory company in its heyday, which later inspired the playwright’s Broadway hit, “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.”

A modestly funny TV version of that play, with Nathan Lane reprising his stage role, can be seen tonight on Showtime, followed by a vastly more rewarding documentary on Caesar and his times.

Caesar would be on any short list of nominees for the most creative comedic artist ever to work on TV. Ranking him tops gets no argument here. In an industry where hyperbole is applied gratuitously, he is one performer who earned his anointing as a genius, his body of sketches and character monologues in the 1950s as fresh and wheezingly funny today as when he was double-speaking across the airwaves as one of TV’s early comedy giants. And its most brilliant.

What stunning work, a tribute not only to Caesar and his supporting players--Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris and later, Nanette Fabray--but also to their heroically skilled and tenacious writers. Simon’s classmates at this “university of comedy” included his brother, Danny; Larry Gelbart; Mel Brooks; Mel Tolkin; and Lucille Kallen, their efforts affirming the critical importance of writing in this laughter equation.

Most them have lots to say in “Hail Sid Caesar! The Golden Age of Comedy,” a Showtime documentary from Peter Jaysen and Rich Tackenberg that features digitally restored highlights of some of Caesar’s classic sketches and other routines. They’re timeless, from a romp of a monologue about a man on a date to his famed “This Is Your Life” parody with Morris. One whiff, and you’re put away--again.

You can quibble about “Golden Age” being in the title. Much of the comedy of that era was as banal as Caesar’s series--the Max Leibman-produced “Your Show of Shows” and subsequent “Caesar’s Hour”--were hilarious. If you’re laughing at today’s TV comedy, moreover, this age is golden to you.

Yet the documentary, narrated by Rob Reiner, is a real kick, offering examples galore of Caesar’s inventiveness as a performer--he was his own golden age--and loads of anecdotes from his former collaborators. Most are humorous, a few affirming Caesar’s own accounts of the manic behavior, bouts with despair and reliance on booze and pills that devastated his life for years.

Erratic behavior also drives Simon’s screwball Max Prince (Lane) in “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” whose director, Richard Benjamin, prepped for this when guiding the like-minded feature film, “My Favorite Year,” nearly 20 years ago. Although it’s just semi-autobiographical, and Prince is semi-Caesar, “Laughter,” too, focuses on the star of a hit 90-minute comedy series in the 1950s and his writers (played by Saul Rubinek, Peri Gilpin, Dan Castellaneta, Zach Grenier, Mackenzie Astin, Victor Garber and Mark Linn-Baker from the stage play). Some of the anecdotal material in the documentary also surfaces in the play.

We meet Max when he is losing it, his addictions taking over his life, his show’s ratings in decline. “I’m losing to an accordion player in Wisconsin,” he says. In real prime time, the cornball who ultimately sank Caesar’s urbane comedy was Lawrence Welk.

The best scene in “Laughter” has oily network executives telling Max how much they love his show before ordering him to dumb it down for Peoria: “Things like foreign movie takeoffs. Personally, I love ‘em, we all do, but . . . “

Simultaneously, they cut his show to an hour en route to later cutting it from the schedule.

Max’s responses to adversity are played broadly, and his goofy writers are an infantile lot, exaggerated behavior better suited to stage than the intimate small screen. As a result, Max and his bickering gang are much less funny than grating, no recipe for comedy.

*

“Laughter on the 23rd Floor” can be seen tonight at 8 on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under 14).

*

* “Hail Sid Caesar! The Golden Age of Comedy” follows at 9:45 p.m. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).