On Saturday nights in Joseph Epstein’s home
his family would watch the Rome-com of Sid Caesar,
whose root was Ziser, not a ruler Rome
elected, but Yiddish for a sweet guy, pronounced Zeeser.
Jewish comedy has been by tragedy replaced,
the zealot Mamdani its unsweet switch-hitter
whose anti-Jewish swerve has an unpleasant taste,
not zees, sweet like Sid Caesar, but like maror bitter.
In “When Caesar Was King: Live From New York,” WSJ,11/15/25, Joseph Epstein writes:
On ‘Your Show of Shows’ and other sketch programs, Sid Caesar mined a comic vein that seemed, in its time, inexhaustible…..
Like nearly every other noted American comedian of his generation, Caesar was Jewish. (His family name was “Ziser—pronounced ZEE-sir.”) Almost all of the writers on his TV shows were Jewish (best known among them were Mr. Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon and Woody Allen), as were two of his three co-stars (Imogene Coca was not). “But,” as Mr. Margolick writes, “nothing on Caesar’s show had been specifically Jewish.” On his TV show, he was wary of offending gentiles. “Yet in multiple ways,” the author adds, “Caesar’s humor was Jewish, and Jews read it as such.” In other words, he concludes: “Its point of view . . . was Jewish.”
What is a Jewish point of view in comedy? I should say it begins with finding absurdity in the ordinary, humor in the serious. How could it be otherwise in a people said to be chosen by God yet throughout history persecuted more than any other? Jews can find clouds in silver linings. Life itself, they sense, is a bit of a joke—one too often played on them. God himself, some Jews believe, loves a joke. This is reinforced by Jewish habits of thought, which include criticism, irony, skepticism. All this and more made its way subtly into Sid Caesar’s humor…..
Fred Allen, the consummate radio comedian, called television a “medium,” to which he added that nothing about it is “well-done.” Amusing but also, for the most part, true. Apart from a small number of sitcoms (those of Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Jerry Seinfeld) and a few variety shows (those of Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Carol Burnett) television during the latter half of the 20th century did not produce much in the way of first-class entertainment. The greatest comedians of the 20th century were those who made movies: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields. Sid Caesar never became a movie star, which is a pity, for at its best his comedy ranks among the very highest. As the columnist Dorothy Kilgallen wrote during his prime: “Sid Caesar is the greatest living comedian, with nobody a close second.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at [email protected].
