CAESAR'S HOURS My Life In Comedy, with Love And Laughter SID CAESAR WITH EDDY FRIEDFELD

"[Caesar] offers a satisfying salmagundi of memoir mixed with a probe into the mechanics of merriment....Caesar's prose is appealing, informal and fun to read....required reading for directors, writers and performers."
Publishers Weekly, September 29, 2003

"I've always liked Sid Caesar and admired him for his integrity, sense of humor, and contribution to television comedy. But now that I've read his book, I love him."
Drew Carey

"My comedic influences growing up were Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby, and Saturday Night Live. When you watch Sid Caesar's Your Show Of Shows and Caesar's Hour, it's obvious that he was an enormous influence on all of my role models. Caesar's Hours tells the story of this true comedic pioneer. It also proves that everything and everyone that inspired me is a direct result of Sid's creative genius."
Ray Romano

"Caesar's Hours is a must-read for anyone who wants to hear what it was all like straight from God. Well, certainly one of the Gods of comedy. Sid Caesar revolutionized comedy like Brando did acting or Hendrix the guitar. They, and others like them, the chosen few, seem to be put on this earth for their craft. This behind-the-scenes and behind-the-man memoir is amazingly informative and a poignant and moving history of the world of comedy by a man who didn't just live in it, but actually created it."
Richard Lewis

"I love Sid Caesar. He inspired me to be a comedian."
Billy Crystal

"Who better to write about the golden age of television than the golden boy himself, Sid Caesar. Had I not been privileged to work with Sid and the extraordinarily gifted writers he attracted and assembled in one room, I doubt I would have become important enough to be asked to contribute to this back page. I thank you Sid for your contribution to my human and comedic development--and for writing this warm, informative, and entertaining history of your life and our times."
Carl Reiner

"Thanks to his phenomenal physical stamina, which was always at the service of his miraculous mental machinery, the wonder is that the small screen ever could contain Sid Caesar at all.

Some men are born with the ability to pitch a strikeout to any man at the plate. Some are born with the ability to outbox, outrun, and outthink all other men. Sid Caesar was born with the ability to be all other men. He had only to don a costume, add a mole, a moustache, or a monocle, then assume the right accent and attitude, and he was able to portray, with dead-on accuracy, anyone from a suburbanite to a Samurai, from a king to a cobbler, from a duke to a drunk. Anyone that we, his writers (and total fans) would ask Sid to be, he would obligingly, killingly funny, be.

Sadly, the only man Sid ever had trouble being--the one character that eluded him for years--was Sid himself. Troubled as he was for far too much of his life, Sid just didn't seem to be able to work his way to the front of the line of all of the countless characters he'd created to hide behind.

He could break your heart in the role of a silent movie star whose career went south with the advent of sound. He could re-break it, as, in a mock opera, he sang and played (all in largely improvised Italian double talk) the part of "Galipacci," a clown, forced to hide his tears from the circus audience.

It was that particular role that best typified Sid's own inability to articulate, or in any way reveal, the inner man, the real Sid Caesar. So difficult a task, that whenever he was required to speak in his own voice to express his own feelings, he often made ordinary English sound like just so much improvised double talk. Obliged to greet the audience at the start of each show--it was Caesar's Hour after all--Sid would struggle so desperately with a simple, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," there were nights when just those few short words threatened to turn into a mini-series of their own.

If any of this sounds harsh or critical, be assured that however crazy Sid was, we, his writers, were even crazier about him. There were no "don'ts" in the writer's room. Except for maybe don't be boring and, for sure, don't ever stop trying to come up with stuff that only Sid could do. When you've got a Mozart on your hands, you don't write "Chopsticks" for him to perform. Show in and show out, we were encouraged to come up with the freshest, most challenging material we could think of. Sid was performing take-offs on Japanese films even before he ever saw one.

His gift to those of us who gathered in that room was to offer us the challenge of discovering who we were--or who we might possibly become--as writers.
Larry Gelbart