Caesar's Hours: My Life in Comedy, with Love and Laughter »

Sid Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1922 and began his career in comedy while a musician in the Catskills. He was a film and stage star by his mid-twenties, and in 1950 came the debut of Your Show of Shows, followed later in the decade by Caesar's Hour. Caesar has also starred in numerous Broadway shows and Hollywood movies. He lives in Beverly Hills, California. Eddy Friedfeld is an entertainment journalist and film critic. He lives in New York City.

The legendary television star tells the backstage stories of the classic comedy of Your Show of Shows, Caesar's Hour, and other landmark programs

The New Yorker

More than twenty years ago, Caesar delivered a memoir (“Where Have I Been?”) that detailed his rise to comic stardom in the fifties and the addiction to alcohol and tranquillizers that obliterated the next two decades. This volume revisits much of the same material, but with greater focus on the sources of Caesar’s style—for instance, he learned his trademark “double-talk,” a stream of nonsense sounding plausibly like a foreign language, from listening to the immigrant clientele at his father’s luncheonette. Some of his influences are more predictable than others. He admires the way Chaplin and Keaton worked “both sides of the street,” playing humor off against pathos. Caesar was a professional saxophone player before he moved into comedy, and he feels that that skill “was integral to my performing.”