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Abstract

In this article, I want to situate Caesar’s famously unhinged comedic art within and against the Jewish American 1950s – a response to the culture of abundance we associate with the era’s embrace of commodification. I’m interested in Caesar’s hilarious, biting social satires that focus on the obsessions and absurdities of the new middle class on display in his domestic sketches, first with Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows (called “The Hickenloopers”) and later, with Nanette Fabray, on Caesar’s Hour (called “The Commuters”). In his most original comedy Caesar saw through the pretensions, yet also recognized the underlying anxieties afflicting the new suburbanizing culture, a material world to which he was also attached. There is something profoundly unrestrained about Sid Caesar’s audacious comedy. At some level, Caesar’s comedic art was, I argue, a response to Jewish American audiences feeling ambivalent, anxious, perhaps even ashamed of their new suburban worlds. Ultimately, the figure of Caesar in these domestic sketches conjures a version of the self whose “Jewish” audacity can only be enacted through masking. In Sid Caesar we encounter what Philip Roth—who wrote about Caesar at the beginning of his own career—would later term “the unimpeded and excessive Jew.”

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