Sid Caesar, the prodigiously talented pioneer of TV comedy who paired with Imogene Coca in sketches that became classics and who inspired a generation of famous writers, died early Wednesday at 91.
Caesar died at his home in the Los Angeles area after a brief illness, family spokesman Eddy Friedfeld said.
In his two most important shows, Your Show of Shows, 1950-54, and Caesar's Hour, 1954-57, Caesar displayed remarkable skill in pantomime, satire, mimicry, dialect and sketch comedy. And he gathered a stable of young writers who went on to worldwide fame in their own right - including Neil Simon and Woody Allen.
"The one great star that television created and who created television was Sid Caesar," said critic Joel Siegel on the TV documentary Hail Sid Caesar! The Golden Age Of Comedy, which aired in 2001.
Some compared him with Charlie Chaplin for his success at combining humour with touches of pathos.
While best known for his TV shows, he also had success on Broadway and occasional film appearances, notably in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
If the typical funnyman was tubby or short and scrawny, Caesar was tall and powerful, with a clown's loose limbs and rubbery face, and a trademark mole on his left cheek.
But Caesar never went in for clowning or jokes. He wasn't interested. He insisted that the laughs come from the everyday.
"Real life is the true comedy," he said in a 2001 interview with The Associated Press. "Then everybody knows what you're talking about."
Caesar brought observational comedy to TV before the term, or such latter-day practitioners as Jerry Seinfeld, were even born.
His most celebrated collaborator was the brilliant Coca, his Your Show of Shows co-star. They performed skits that satirised the everyday - marital spats, inane advertising, strangers meeting and speaking in cliches.
Among those who wrote for Caesar: Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Simon and his brother Danny Simon, and Allen, who was providing gags to Caesar and other entertainers while still in his teens.
Carl Reiner, who wrote in addition to performing on the show, based his Dick Van Dyke Show - with its fictional TV writers and their temperamental star - on his experiences there. Simon's 1993 Laughter on the 23rd Floor and the 1982 movie My Favorite Year also were based on the Caesar show.
In 1962, Caesar starred on Broadway in the musical Little Me, written by Simon, and was nominated for a Tony.
But he later looked back on those years as painful ones. He said he beat a severe, decades-long barbiturate and alcohol habit in 1978, when he was so low he considered suicide.
"I had to come to terms with myself. 'Yes or no? Do you want to live or die?'" Deciding that he wanted to live, he recalled, was "the first step on a long journey".
Caesar was born in 1922 in Yonkers, NY, the third son of an Austrian-born restaurant owner and his Russian-born wife. His first dream was to become a musician, and he played saxophone in bands in his teens.
But as a youngster waiting on tables at his father's luncheonette, he liked to observe as well as serve the diverse clientele, and recognise the humour happening before his eyes.
His talent for comedy was discovered when he was serving in the Coast Guard during World War II and got a part in a Coast Guard musical. He also appeared in the movie version. Wrote famed columnist Hedda Hopper: "I hear the picture's good, with Sid Caesar a four-way threat. He writes, sings, dances and makes with the comedy."
That led to a few other film roles, nightclub engagements, and then his breakthrough hit, a 1948 Broadway revue called Make Mine Manhattan.
His first TV comedy-variety show, The Admiral Broadway Revue, premiered in February 1949. But it was off the air by June. Its fatal shortcoming: unimagined popularity. It was selling more Admiral television sets than the company could make, and Admiral, its exclusive sponsor, pulled out.
But everyone was ready for Caesar's subsequent efforts. Your Show of Shows, which debuted in February 1950, and Caesar's Hour three years later reached as many as 60 million viewers weekly and earned its star $1 million annually at a time when $5, he later noted, bought a steak dinner for two.
When Caesar's Hour left the air in 1957, Caesar was only 34. But the unforgiving cycle of weekly television had taken a toll: his reliance on booze and pills for sleep every night so he could wake up and create more comedy.
It took decades for him to hit bottom. In 1977, he was onstage in Regina, Canada, doing Simon's The Last of the Red Hot Lovers when, suddenly, his mind went blank. He walked off stage, checked into a hospital and went cold turkey. Recovery had begun, with the help of wife Florence, who would be by his side for more than 60 years.
