"Early on in their careers, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks all produced gags for the American comedian Sid Caesar, who has died aged 91. "Writing for Caesar was the highest thing you could aspire to," said Allen, adding: "at least as a TV comedy writer. The presidency was above that." Simon later based the play Laughter on the 23rd Floor on his experiences of working for Caesar's popular variety programme Your Show of Shows (1950-54), while Reiner's time with Caesar inspired him to create The Dick Van Dyke Show. At the height of his fame in the 1950s, Caesar was making more than $1m a year and Your Show of Shows was drawing audiences of up to 25 million. Broadway theatre owners complained that as a result of his popularity, they always had empty seats on Saturday nights – the time that Your Show of Shows and its more highly regarded successor, Caesar's Hour (1954-57), were broadcast live to the nation. Caesar's fans included Albert Einstein – who died before their planned meeting – and Alfred Hitchcock, who remarked that "the young Mr Caesar best approaches the great Chaplin of the early 1920s". It was all a far cry from Yonkers, New York, where Caesar was born to a Jewish immigrant and restaurateur, Max, and his considerably younger Russian wife, Ida. "Caesar" was the name given to Max by the immigration officers when he arrived at Ellis Island from Poland. Sid was the youngest of three brothers; another brother died of meningitis before Sid was born. During his youth, his family ran a hotel, and Sid's passion for the saxophone meant that guests were often willing to pay more for inferior rooms situated far away from the cacophony of the youngster's room. After the depression bankrupted his father, Caesar – who graduated from Yonkers high school – picked up work as a comedian, building upon the banter which he had developed with his parents' restaurant customers, talking to them in a muddle of made-up languages that became known as his signature double-talk. As a young man, he also had success as a musician, playing with bands led by Claude Thornhill, Shep Fields and Charlie Spivak. In the early 1940s he performed in music and comedy shows at hotels in the Catskills and met Florence Levy, the niece of the entertainment director Don Appel. She engaged Caesar in long conversations about books and art, and they married in 1943. On being called up for second world war service, Caesar became a coastguard in Brooklyn in the company of the composer and songwriter Vernon Duke, with whom he began to put on shows. These included Caesar's imagined dialogue between Hitler and Donald Duck, and one of Duke's best songs, Taking a Chance on Love. So successful were they that Duke was despatched south to put on the show Tars and Spars, the coastguards' equivalent of This Is the Army, and in due course Caesar was summoned. "One day I'm fixing toilets at the Brooklyn barracks; two days later, I'm in a room at the Palm Beach Biltmore and rehearsing all day with Victor Mature and a great choreographer like Gower Champion."" http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/feb/12/sid-caesar
