Tag: Sid Caesar

JUNE 28, 1926: IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING

Posted on by Richard Daybell

“Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you don’t laugh, you’ll die.”

     Mel Brooks, born June 28, 1926, has kept the world rolling along since he broke into the entertainment business in early TV. Director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor 01f/26/arve/g2659/024and producer, he is best known for his comic film farces and parodies.

     He began his career as a stand-up comic and writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows then teamed up with fellow writer Carl Reiner, as The 2000 Year Old Man. In the 70s he became one of the most successful film directors, producing such comedy classics as Blazing Saddles, The Producers, Young Frankenstein (numbers 6, 11 and 13 on the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time), The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, became a smash hit on Broadway. Brooks is one of the few entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.

A true funny man, no joke was ever beneath him.

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TRUE CONFESSIONS: MY DARK DAYS AS A REPUBLICAN

I used to be a Republican.  There, it’s out in the open.  It was a long time ago, and I was too young to see the error of my ways.  At the time, our family was pretty much all Republican – not avid table thumping Republicans, but Republicans all the same.  Truman was a swear word, and we all liked Ike.  Ike was like a grandfather, and my grandmother loved him.

As long as I’m confessing, I might as well admit that I probably would have voted for Nixon over Kennedy.  Fortunately, I was not old enough to vote.  It was a couple of years later  in college that I began to change.  See, the conservatives are right.  Colleges take our respectable fresh-faced Republican youths and teach them unsavory liberal things like literature and philosophy and science.

It happened to me, and I never saw it coming.  For a few days, I was just an independent.  But it’s a slippery slope indeed, and the leftward lurch was inevitable.  And by the time I graduated from the halls of propaganda, my mind had been molded into the liberal quagmire it is today.

Tomorrow: I cozy up to the Second Amendment.

 

SEPTEMBER 22, 1761: GEORGE, THE SEQUEL

Posted on by Richard Daybell

With the usual pomp and circumstance, the marriage and coronation of King George III of England and Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz took place on September 22, 1761. The couple were married on the day they met, but remained married for 50 years and 15 children.  George was a notable monarch for several reasons, the most familiar being the loss of the American colonies and his supposed madness. Although many people see a link between the two, it’s a stretch. He was also the longest reigning monarch at 60 years until the reign of his granddaughter Queen Victoria.

George didn’t really lose the American colonies any more than George Washington found them. But independence “happened on his watch” a phrase Americans in the future would delight in applying to practically anything gone wrong. Also on his watch, Great Britain defeated the French in the Seven Year’s War and once again many years later the French under Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

In his later life, George III had recurrent, and eventually permanent, mental illness. Finally in 1810, a regency was established, and George III’s oldest son, George (coincidentally), ruled as Prince Regent. On III’s death, George Jr. succeeded his father as George IV.

The subject of George III’s mental illness was explored in the play The Madness of George III which inspired the movie The Madness of King George. The name change was supposedly for other reasons, but some maintain that it was because American audiences would think The Madness of George III was a sequel and wonder what happened to the first two movies.

O Mighty Caesar

“He is blessed with a kind of magic truth, the uncanny ability to project the core and humanity of the character he is playing. Beneath the surface humor there is a wry commentary on the conventions and hypocrisies of life.”  Sid Caesar was born on September 22, 1922. He lit up 50s television with his incomparable humor on Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour as well as many movies during his long career.

JUNE 28, 1926: IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING

Posted on by Richard Daybell

“Humor keeps the elderly rolling along, singing a song. When you laugh, its an involuntary explosion of the lungs. The lungs need to replenish themselves with oxygen. So you laugh, you breathe, the blood runs, and everything is circulating. If you don’t laugh, you’ll die.”

     Mel Brooks, born June 28, 1926, has kept the world rolling along since he broke into the entertainment business in early TV. Director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor 01f/26/arve/g2659/024and producer, he is best known for his comic film farces and parodies.

     He began his career as a stand-up comic and writer for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows then teamed up with fellow writer Carl Reiner, as The 2000 Year Old Man. In the 70s he became one of the most successful film directors, producing such comedy classics as Blazing Saddles, The Producers, Young Frankenstein (numbers 6, 11 and 13 on the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time), The Twelve Chairs, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, became a smash hit on Broadway. Brooks is one of the few entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony award.

A true funny man, no joke was ever beneath him.

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Well, it got so that every piss-ant prairie punk who thought he could shoot a gun would ride into town to try out the Waco Kid. I must have killed more men than Cecil B. DeMille. It got pretty gritty. I started to hear the word “draw” in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street when I heard a voice behind me say, “Reach for it, mister!” I spun around… and there I was, face to face with a six-year old kid. Well, I just threw my guns down and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass. So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle… and I’ve been there ever since.

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Paul Revere was anti-semitic! Yelling all through the night, the Yiddish are coming the Yiddish are coming!

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

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