Decline of the Comedians

"Personally, I think Sid Caesar is the greatest, but ..." The line has been echoing all season in Radio City and on Madison Avenue, in the top-level shoptalk about NBC's Saturday night Caesar's Hour, TV's best comedy show. TV bigwigs have not let their tribute to Caesar keep them from rendering unto the sponsor what is the sponsor's: the right to expect that so costly a show ($223,000 a week, including time charges) will pay off in a far bigger audience than its sagging ratings have reflected. Last week Caesar and NBC announced that his nine-year reign on the network will end with this week's show.

The end of Caesar's reign also closes a TV era in which the comedian was king, and leaves supremacy to a new breed of blander favorites--the Perry Comos, the Lawrence Welks. the Tennessee Ernie Fords (see below). Almost all the comics have surrendered or compromised in the face of TV's terrible challenge of keeping both material and audiences from getting tired. Next fall CBS's Jackie Gleason will take a sabbatical, and NBC's George Gobel will try to salvage his popularity by cutting down his exposure. Such perennials as Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Burns & Allen have taken refuge in limited appearances or filmed situation comedies that produce greater mileage for less material. Next season Red Skelton's half-hour CBS program will be the only full-fledged weekly live appearance by a network comedian.

No comedian, even the TV Pleistocene Age's Milton Berle, has matched Sid Caesar's staying power or his grip on the loyalty of hard-core fans. More than that, by common show-business consent, he is one of the truly great clowns. Apart from sheer technical mastery of pantomime, dialect, timing and the ad lib, Caesar has a creative gift for spoofing the stuffy and the phony and for finding endless fun in universal human foibles and frustrations. His career, which began as a $10-a-week saxophonist on New York's borsch circuit, has made him a millionaire. It has brought him a $100,000 Long Island home with swimming pool and three servants; a duplex Manhattan penthouse office suite that boasts a rehearsal hall and a Rouault; seven years of psychoanalysis, and such possessions as 50 broad-shouldered suits, a $4,000 diamond-and-star-sapphire ring and a solid gold lighter for his long, fat cigars. The last time he was on somebody else's payroll (in 1954 when he split with Imogene Coca and Producer Max [Your Show of Shows] Liebman) he earned $25,000 a week. Since then, as his own producer with a payroll of 60-odd employees and other show costs, 34-year-old, Yonkers-born Caesar has been collecting $106,000 for each show.

Too Much, Too Long. What went wrong? "If somebody could tell us," says an NBC executive, "maybe even Sid's psychoanalyst would be delighted to hear it." One part of the answer is simply that he has been visible too frequently for too long a time. Caesar's Hour has been uneven in quality, has suffered from a tendency to prolong sketches and milk laughs. Sidekick Coca is still missed, say diagnosticians, both for herself and because Caesar seemed more sympathetic as a henpecked fall guy in her sketches than he has as the assertive husband of Nanette Fabray and Janet Blair. Some argue that Caesar's artful lampooning of silent films, opera, foreign movies and other TV shows goes over the heads of millions of viewers. NBC surveys have found that his popularity is heaviest in big cities and, contrary to usual TV form, greatest among college graduates. Snorts Caesar at this: "I had bananas up my ears last week and grapes in my nose. It's not a sophisticated program, but I will not play down."

Whatever the cause, while his prestige bloomed, Caesar's ratings skidded. In March the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences heaped him and his program with five Emmy awards, but ABC's Bandleader Lawrence Welk, on the air at the same hour, had already cut deeply into Ihe Caesar audience.* Last month his audience shrank by Nielsen figures to 5,800,000 TV homes. For a show that cost only $5,000 more a week, Perry Como's sponsors were getting viewers in 13,870,000 homes. Caesar had become a luxury no advertiser could afford.

When Caesar and NBC split last week, it was the comedian who forced it. The network wanted to put him into four or five spectaculars next season. Unwilling to settle for anything less than his full schedule, Caesar invoked a loophole to cancel the NBC contract that guaranteed him $100,000 a year for another seven years.

The Larger Crisis. Caesar's departure from NBC is symptomatic of a crisis affecting not only comedians but the TV industry at large. While production costs have climbed, the number of the nation's TV sets has been leveling off, and the size of the audience that any show can command has been cut down by the growing competition of the fast-rising ABC network and independent stations. Thus, advertisers will have to pay more to reach a given number of viewers in the future. It is making them nervous, safe-playing, and eager for "the sure thing." This season, a Variety rundown showed last week, they have canceled 55 of the 121 nighttime shows on the three networks. Next fall will see TV's most drastic change in program schedules--and the least promising.

Among those least likely to appear at all is Comedian Caesar. ABC wants to talk to him but is not optimistic about being able to put him to work. Says a CBS executive: "Personally, I think he's a very big talent. But audience for satire just isn't big enough to pay off. He's the living proof of George S. Kaufman's famous line that 'satire is what closes on Saturday night.' "

*In early spring, industry sophisticates were joking about the musician who listened to Welk for Lent.

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