Milt Kamen

            On Friday I went to bed at 1:30 but woke up a little after 2:00 because there were lots of bedbugs bothering me. After going to pee I switched on the light and saw that the pests are no longer trying to climb the wall at the head of my bed to look for a nest because they are avoiding the two sided tape I put across the old exit door. They are also no longer trying to nest around the baseboards beside my bed because there is diatomaceous earth there. Instead I saw babies running around on the floor as far away as almost under the dresser at the other side of the room. I’d never seen them in that area before. Now I’m going to have to vacuum, steam, apply diatomaceous earth and perhaps carpet tape around the whole bedroom floor. I couldn’t get back to sleep. 

            After yoga I memorized the third verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. That’s half the song. 

            I weighed 90.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the first of two sessions and it went out of tune on almost every song. It’s weird how sometimes it stays in tune and sometimes it doesn’t. 

            I got a call from my upstairs neighbour David telling me that his snake has gone missing. He told me a couple of years ago that he’d given away all of his snakes. He explained that he’d recently been cleaning out a closet when he discovered another python that had been hibernating. David wanted me to make and print a “Lost Snake” poster for him. I told him I could do it that night if he came over and described what he wants. 

            I went to the hardware store to buy two more rings of carpet tape. I put fresh tape around the edge of my mattress. 

            I weighed 92.45 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.5 kilos at 18:10.

            I was still three days behind in my journal. I had a potato with margarine and a piece of roast pork while watching three interviews on Carol Burnett with Carl Reiner, Carol Channing and Don Rickles. 

            Carl heard about Carol from his friend Milt Kamen who worked as a stand-by for Sid Caesar. He would take Sid’s place in a sketch so Sid could sit in the control room to see and hear how it worked. Usually he’d also come up with two or three good lines that Sid would use later. Milt arranged to let Carol come in and watch three of the weekly rehearsals. She had tickets to a big Broadway show but didn’t use them so she could view how Sid and his crew worked. That’s how dedicated she was to learning her craft. Now she’s the single most talented person on Earth. She does everything at the highest level. 

            Carl says the only thing he added was to tell her producer that Carol’s got to have her own Rock Hudson on the show. She needed some eye candy to play against and that turned out to be Lyle Waggoner. 

            Carl says he was a real actor for years and also a very good sketch actor. He wanted to be an opera singer and an Irish tenor. When he was a kid he would listen to an Irish tenor named John Calvin who was really John Calvus. Calvin would talk and sing in an Irish accent songs “me mother taught me” but he was actually Jewish. Carl told his father he wanted to be an Irish tenor too but his father explained that he could sing Irish songs but couldn’t be an Irish tenor because he was Jewish. Carl wanted to be an opera singer and had almost a three octave range but was out of rhythm and off pitch.

            Sid Caesar was only on for 9 years compared to Carol’s 11. 

            Your brain works better with the excitement of a live audience. 

            Carl says he doesn’t know what they’re singing on American Idol but it doesn’t interest him. His father listened to Franz Lehár and couldn’t understand what anybody heard in Bing Crosby. 

            Sid was a master and only ad-libbed when things went wrong but when he did it was genius. Sid and Carl were playing two English barristers playing pool and Sid’s cue stick broke. He ended up using it like a polo mallet and knocked the ball off the table while Carl exclaimed, “Jolly good shot!” 

            At 90 Carl is just finishing a memoir called I Remember Me. The first chapter is Chapter 59.

            Lucille Ball was pretty and funny but she didn’t have as many talents as Carol. 

            Every good writer wanted to work with Sid Caesar and the same was true of Carol because of what she could do with the material and the costumes. 

            Carol Channing’s mother loved Carol Burnett. Carol Burnett is a friend when she’s a friend.

            Carol Channing was on stage in high school doing imitations of the faculty. She was vice president of the student body and when she ran for the position her father worked out the slogans “If Carol’s your vice it’s a virtue”. 

            Carol Channing’s first job was a revue called Lend an Ear. 

            In the theatre there are three balconies and the third one is way up there so you have to wear eyelashes that make you look the same from up there as you do from the first row. 

            Carol Burnett is unusually eager to push other performers forward. 

            Don Rickles says he and his wife went for dinner with Carol and she eats with her hands. “We don’t see Carol cause she lives in a shack in the desert.” Harvey Korman and Tim Conway are amazing comedians “But they know I’m the best and so they come over to my house every day to give me a hot bath”. Harvey’s dead and resting someplace nice while Tim is walking around town trying to be recognized. When Don was on her show Carol was so kind to him when she shouted, “Get over here and read your lines!” 

            Milt Kamen won a scholarship to The Juilliard School of Music. He began his career as a french horn player for The Metropolitan Opera. He was a writer and performer for Caesar’s Hour starting in 1954. His comedy album “Here’s Milt Kamen” was produced by Mel Brooks with liner notes by Groucho Marx. He discovered Woody Allen in the Catskills and got him his first writing job on Caesar’s Hour.

August 17, 1996: Nancy brought our daughter to my place.

Thirty years ago today

            On Saturday Nancy brought our daughter to my place so we could spend the weekend together. The weather was nice so we played outside.

Bill Hader

            On Thursday I killed more bedbugs while trying to sleep than I have for a while but I found fewer on the floor and wall around my bed. 

            I worked on memorizing the second verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the third verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. I should have them both nailed down tomorrow. 

            I weighed 91.2 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Martin during song practice for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune all the time. 

            I weighed 92.5 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and on the way back I stopped at Freshco where I bought five bags of cherries, a pint of blueberries, some bananas, a pack of hot Italian sausages, marinara sauce, salsa, and a lint roller. I did a price match on the cherries with the No Frills price of $8.80 a kilo. 

            I tried to show my Scene card but it disappeared again. When I first got the Scene card it was right there in my email and it was easy to access, but then it got buried by emails. AI told me I could put it in Wallet and so I downloaded that and it worked but sometimes Wallet would disappear from my apps. Then I learned I could type “wallet” in a search and it would show up. But recently all this stuff started filling up Wallet when the only thing I wanted in there was my Scene card but then I figured out that I just needed to click on my own picture and then on “Your data in Wallet” and then “Scene” again to find the card. 

            I weighed 91.5 kilos at 18:40. 

            I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had a potato with margarine and a piece of roast pork while watching two interviews about Carol Burnett with Bill Hader and Burt Reynolds. 

            The Carol Burnett Show ended just before Bill Hader was born but he saw it in re-runs. His mother and grandmother were big fans. When Bill saw the movie Annie, his mother told him “That’s Carol Burnett! She’s one of the funniest women who ever lived!” 

            He’d already seen Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles and Tim Conway in other movies. 

            Bill had a big crush on Carol Burnett and thought she’d be the perfect person to live with. From a very young age he found funny women very attractive. 

            He talks about the difference between performing and acting. Performing is projecting outward to a live audience while acting is very interior. Carol could do both. She made everyone feel like they were in on the joke. She was like the bass in a rock band holding all the crazy stuff together. 

            He loves Monty Python and Black Adder but Carol’s show was very US in that aside from the talent one got to watch people have a good time. 

            In Second City in Los Angeles he learned that you have to make the people and situations real.

            On SNL Kristen Wiig and Amy Poehler were more like Carol Burnett. Fred Armisen and Will Forte were more like Tim Conway and they could make Bill laugh during a skit. John Malaney would change the script to make him laugh. Bill says he gets very nervous before a show. If you’re a performer with tension then someone who’s more calm will take advantage of that. Fred Armisen was the king of that. On the skit The Californians he would stretch out a line and then Bill would lose it. Then Fred would give Bill a puzzled look. 

            The best way to make someone laugh is to get in their space and Tim would do that to Harvey.

            When Bill does Vincent Price on SNL he’s really doing Harvey Korman. 

            For a long time until he was in his late 20s Bill thought Carol and Vicki were sisters. 

            He loved old movies and watched them with his family. When Carol and her cast did takeoffs of vintage films he felt like it was for him. 

            Burt Reynolds appears a bit drunk in his interview. He talks about one of his own TV series that was on opposite Dean Martin, and Martin blew it out of the water. Dean sent Burt a note saying, “I told you not to take out your laundry.” 

            Burt had a good time with The Smothers Brothers and admired them but nobody could compare with Carol Burnett. She made her guests comfortable. If a guest didn’t like a joke her writers would change it. 

            Burt started the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, Florida in 1979 and invited his celebrity friends to come down and do plays. In 1980 Burt co-starred with Carol there in a production of Same Time Next Year, directed by Dom DeLuise. When Burt kissed her she acted like she used to act around Lyle Waggoner on her show as if she was about to swoon. Burt told her to stop but she said she really meant it. They played jokes on each other onstage. She nailed his loafers to the stage floor so when he slipped them on in a scene and tried to walk he fell on his face. When they were in bed in a scene he put a frog there. Burt got Carol to warm up the audience the way she did on her show. She would pretend she forgot her lines just to get Burt to ad lib. He says it was the most fun he’d ever had on stage. 

            Burt talks about how much he loved Dom DeLuise and his whole family. 

            He says Dean Martin also cracked up in the middle of skits. Dom DeLuise could make him fall apart. 

            Burt talks about his beginnings as a stuntman. All stunt people have to have an athletic background. His two best friends are stuntmen and there is no one in the movie business he loves more than stunt people. 

            He says he had a mad crush on Carol Burnett but she didn’t believe it. If he had to go to a desert island and could take one person he’d take Carol. He kept saying that in interviews until she sent him a picture of herself in a bathing suit with the caption, “When?” 

            She loved anything that made her crazy. 

            He’s scared to death to sing in public but he wasn’t when he did “Time Goes By” on Carol’s show. She kept on insisting that he could sing until he believed it. When he told her he wanted to fall down the stairs during his number she was horrified that he would break something. He did it twice to make sure they got it right. 

            It was fun to watch Harvey and Tim because it was clear that they loved each other. 

            Vicki’s timing was good from the start and she had the goods right away. 

            Lyle Waggoner was taller and Burt said if he worked with him he wanted him to be sitting down. Lyle took him seriously and tried to accommodate him until Burt told him he was joking. 

            Nanette Fabray was the perfect guest for Carol and she was very easy to work with. 

            Carol came to Burt’s dressing room ten times to make sure if everything was all right and to ask if he wanted anything. He wanted to see how far she’d go so he asked for some vodka. She brought him three bottles and afterward he pretended he was drunk. 

            Bill Hader studied at the New York Academy College of Film. He originally wanted to be a director and had no thoughts about being a comedian or an actor. he worked as a production assistant on several movies and shows. he started taking improv classes at Second City. He co-formed a sketch troupe called Animals from the Future and one of the members was Matt Offerman the brother of Nick Offerman. Nick’s wife Megan Mullaly recommended Bill to Lorne Michaels and so he was invited to fly to New York to audition for SNL. For his Saturday Night Live audition he did impressions of Al Pacino, James Mason, and Peter Falk. He was in the cast of Saturday Night Live from 2005 to 2013. On the show he did impressions of Vincent Price, Harvey Fierstein, John Malkovitch, James Carville, Julian Assange, Alan Alda, Clint Eastwood, and Charlie Sheen. He was the first male castmember to be nominated for an Emmy since Eddie Murphy. One of his most famous characters was Stefon. He co-created, co-produced, directed and starred in the HBO show Barry from 2018 to 2023, for which he won two Emmy Awards. He co-created, co-produced and starred in Documentary Now from 2015 to 2022. He was a producer for season 13 of South Park for which he co-won an Emmy. He made his film debut in You Me and Dupree in 2006. He co-starred in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Adventureland, Paul, BFG, Trainwreck, Inside Out, Sausage Party, Maggie’s Plan, Nelle, The To Do List, . He starred in The Skeleton Twins, When he saw that his girlfriend had Star Wars curtains, he knew he was going to marry her. He played Mr. Peanut in Planter’s commercials even though he’s allergic to peanuts. He hosted SNL in 2018. He discovered on Finding Your Roots that he is descended from Edward I of England and Charlemagne.

August 16, 1996: We busked enough to buy food and beer

Thirty years ago today

            On Friday Brian Haddon and I busked on Bloor Street. We made enough to go for food and beer and then busked some more before going to perform on the Spit Fridays open stage in the back room of the Cameron.

George Tibbles

            On Wednesday while in bed I killed one bedbug that had gotten across the two sided tape to get to my body. After yoga I found at least one that was stuck to the tape but there were quite a few more than usual crawling on the old exit door above the head of my futon. I still don’t know exactly where they emerge from at night. The most logical place would be under my baseboards but I’ve put so much diatomaceous earth down there it’s hard to believe they can get through. 

            I memorized the first verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian. 

            I memorized the first two verses of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. I thought that I’d nailed down just a very long first verse but then I realized it was really two. There are four more verses and no choruses left to learn. 

            I weighed 90.2 kilos before breakfast, which is the lightest I’ve been in the morning since July 29. 

            I played my Martin during song practice and as usual it went out of tune on every song. 

            I used up the last of my two sided carpet tape. I put some on the old exit door at the head of my bed and some on the floor beside the mattress. I vacuumed under my desk. 

            I weighed 92.25 kilos before lunch. I had peanut butter and five-year-old cheddar on saltines with a glass of lemonade. 

            I woke up from my siesta too late to take a bike ride. 

            I weighed 92.2 kilos at 17:25. 

            I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, wedge fries, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Bernadette Petters and another with Betty White about Carol Burnett. 

            Bernadette says her and her family used to watch Carol on The Garry Moore Show and she was the main reason they tuned in because she was the new Imogene Coca. She says The Garry Moore Show and Sid Caesar were the glory days of television. Bernadette was already performing when she was three and a half. Gary Moore’s show was very well written. On Carol’s show the old expression “The fish stinks from the head” applies because she was the head and inspired everybody else. Comedy has to be open, trusting and giving. Bernadette had appeared on The Tonight Show where Carol first saw her and went to see her off Broadway in Babes In Arms. Carol was friends with Bernadette’s manager Louis. Carol hired Bernadette more than anyone did at the time. The production numbers were theirs but they chose the ballads together. When she sang The Wiz she didn’t even know that she knew that song. And then when she sang with a French accent she hadn’t known she could do that. 

            Monday they’d do a read through, then rewrite it. You block on Tuesday. By Wednesday you’re doing a run-through of the whole musical number. Thursday you’re camera blocking and then on Friday you shoot. 

            Betty says she couldn’t keep from laughing during sketches. The only one who could keep straight most of the time was Carol. Even when Tim guest starred on Hot in Cleveland they had to take extra time because he cracked everybody up. 

            Betty first fell in love with Harvey Korman when he was on The Danny Kaye Show. He had intelligence on top of talent and there was nothing he couldn’t do. 

            On the Mama’s Family sketches when Betty played Ellen she only wore beige, which Betty never wears. 

            In 1949 Betty was Al Jarvis’s girl Friday five and a half hours a day, six days a week for four years. That was like television college. In 1952 Jarvis left the show Hollywood on Television and Betty inherited it. There was no script and so she had to be interested. 

            Her first sitcom Life With Elizabeth she produced and co-wrote with George Tibbles. Nobody ever said she couldn’t be the producer because she was a woman. 

            Everything was new for TV audiences in those days. Now it’s harder to surprise them. 

            The third week that Password was on the air they flew Betty in to New York from LA. After the show was over Bob Stewart told her that when the host Alan Ludden came off stage he said, “I’m gonna marry that woman!” Betty resisted for a year but Alan was a good salesman. 

            Betty had a great time hosting Saturday Night Live. They brought back a lot of the women who had been stars of the show to support her. The difference between SNL and The Carol Burnett Show was that they use cue cards on SNL while on Carol’s show there was a script to learn. Betty doesn’t know how to use cue cards. 

            They shot Hot in Cleveland with a live audience. 

            When Betty was 90 she hosted Betty White’s Off Their Rockers based on the Belgian show Benidorn Bastards. 

            Betty says Carol is the most accessible star in the business. Comedy is a rhythm like poetry. If you put a couple of extra syllables in you could ruin it. 

            Steve Martin was a very pleasant person to work with. One doesn’t expect a performer to be that smart. She says she’s crazy about him but he’s never looked at her twice. 

            Carol’s rendition of “Funny But Here’s That Rainy Day” can put Betty away every time. 

            Carol’s down to earth genuine sense of fun inspired the people around her. She was concerned about making herself more available to her audience. 

            George Tibbles played piano for Eddie Cantor. He co-wrote “The Woody Woodpecker Song” for the movie Wet Blanket Policy. It was nominated for a Best Song Oscar in 1948 and made it to #3 on the hit parade. He wrote 81 and produced 35 episodes of My Three Sons. He also wrote several scripts for Leave it to Beaver, and One Day at a Time. He co-created, co-produced, and co-wrote Life With Elizabeth.

August 15, 1996: I was busking when a panhandler said I was in his spot

Thirty years ago today 

            On Thursday I tried to busk on Bloor street in front of the Bank of Montreal but a panhandler came along and set himself up nearby and said it was his spot. It seemed to me it should be first come first serve and I tried to push him away. The cops came and the people in the bank said I was in the wrong so the police told me to leave. I guess it was his spot after all.

Sid Caesar

            On Tuesday morning I only saw a few baby bedbugs on the old exit door at the head of my bed and one older one crawling on the carpet tape stuck to the head of my mattress. It didn’t look to be stuck and seemed to be moving fairly easily. There were also bedbugs stuck to the tape around my futon. They seem to have diminished in number over the last couple of weeks. 

            I posted “The Legendary Era”, my translation of “L’epoque légendaire” by Boris Vian on my Boris Vian Facebook page and on my personal Facebook page. 

            I finished comparing the transcript I’d made a few years ago of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg with the one I found yesterday online. The recent one seems to be correct. I started memorizing the first verse. 

            I weighed 91 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            I put some more two sided carpet tape in places along the edge of my mattress. I sprayed more diatomaceous earth along the bottom of my baseboards near the bed. 

            I weighed 92.15 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.45 kilos at 17:50. 

            I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had a potato with gravy and a piece of roast pork while watching an interview with Carol Burnett that accompanied a mega collection of her shows on DVD. 

            When Tim Conway adlibbed it sometimes went four minutes over but it was so good they would just cut something else from that week’s show. 

            Harvey Korman had been for Danny Kaye what Carl Reiner had been for Sid Caesar. When they were preparing Carol’s show she said she needed a Harvey Korman and someone asked, “How about Harvey Korman?” 

            Carol didn’t want to be controversial. She wanted to be a clown. Political stuff becomes dated.

            Rick Hawkins and Liz Sage wrote the “Went With the Wind” sketch. Rick had done his thesis on Gone With the Wind. 

            They auditioned several male actors to be eye candy for some of their skits and it was Lyle Waggoner who impressed the receptionists the most. So they hired him but he also turned out to be very funny. He left in the 6th or 7th year to do Wonder Woman. 

            They were doing the Jaws takeoff and Tim was playing the shark hunter and tells the story to Harvey and Vickie of how his wife died. A great white got her but she would have been okay if she hadn’t been wearing her lucky ham. That wasn’t in the script. 

            The network was bound by contract to give Carol a variety show for 30 episodes if she wanted one but they had no faith that she could pull it off.

            It was the executive producer Bob Banner who suggested to Carol that she do a Q & A at the beginning of the show. She was terrified at first but then it became her favourite part of the show. The audience got to know her before they saw her do her characters. 

            Milt Kamen was Sid Caesar’s stand-in on the show Caesar’s Hour and a great comedian on his own. Carol became friends with him in New York. She told him she would love to see some of Sid’s rehearsals so he got her in on Saturdays and she sat in the balcony. She was living at The Rehearsal Club at the time, which was what the play Stage Door was written about. She would watch Sid, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris go through the dress rehearsal of their sketches. Then she would run home and watch the show to see what changes they made between rehearsal and show. One time they did a takeoff on Inherit the Wind and Sid was playing Clarence Darrel. Howie was the defendant and Carl was the prosecuting attorney. The foreman of the jury was supposed to say they find the defendant guilty and then Sid would get up and with a convoluted argument prove he was innocent. But during the show the foreman made a mistake and said they find the defendant not guilty. So Sid adlibbed and said, “You say he’s not guilty but I know you think he is!” then he was still able to do his monologue. The guy who’d played the foreman left and was running for the subway but during the commercial Sid left the studio and ran after him, grabbed him and told him, “It’s okay! You come back next week!” then Sid ran back to finish the show. Carol says, “That’s class!” 

            Carol was in summer stock in 1955 at a place called Green Mansions in the Adirondacks. At the end of the season the players got together and did a takeoff on the season. Years later at the end of The Carol Burnett Show’s first season, Carol got the crew to do a flip show and parody the season. In one skit three cameramen came out dressed in drag as Marilyn Horne, Eilene Farrell, and Carol. They were wearing the same dresses that had been worn by Carol, Marilyn and Eileen when they’d done “Hey Big Spender” and lip-synched the original voices. 

            Executive producer Bob Wright also did Lana Turner’s number in the same dress. It was especially funny because Bob Wright was the squarest person you could ever meet.

            The flip show became a tradition at the end of every season. The audience was full of CBS employees and ushers. 

            The salutes they did to various songwriters couldn’t be done anymore because the estates of those writers would charge enough money to sink the Titanic today. 

            Carol Channing always ate to stay well and never missed one of the 5000 performances of Hello Dolly. When they invited her out to dinner she would bring her own food in a cooler and it was whale blubber. One time Channing missed a rehearsal but showed up for the next one and explained that she’d eaten some bad frozen elk in Vegas. She advised Carol that if she’s ever on the road, don’t eat just any frozen elk. 

            The Three Little Pigs sketch was written by Buz Kohan and Bill Angelos. 

            Nobody had ever asked Ray Charles to be in a sketch but he did it well and enjoyed it. 

            They depended on the audience for timing and so Carol wanted the show to be as live as possible. 

            The Dolly Sisters parody was written by Ken and Mitzi Welch all with original songs. 

            It took two hours to tape Carol’s one hour show. Carol has since then done guest appearances on 22 minute sitcoms and it takes them five hours to shoot. 

            Ernie Flatt could make it look like Carol could dance. He and his dancers took a risk and pulled up stakes to move from New York to Los Angeles to do Carol’s show. 

            When Carol sang “You Don’t Have to Say You Love” dressed in Spanish costume there was a whip artist who was supposed to flick off various accessories that Carol was wearing. He clipped her shoulder in the first taping and in the second stripped her down to her underwear. 

            After Carol parodied Rita Hayworth, Rita called and asked to be on the show. Carol was surprised at how tiny she was since she looks so tall on screen. She showed up by herself with no handlers. 

            Kenny Solms and Gale Parent created As The Stomach Turns. 

            Bernadette Peters was the first performer they’d ever asked to be on Carol’s show. 

            The Carol Burnett Show was like an old vaudeville show. 

            Tim Conway was a tumbler in college. He was so strong that he could fall downstairs in slow motion. 

            Sid Caesar at the age of 14 played saxophone in the Catskills for The Swingtime Six and also performed in skits. He studied saxophone at Juilliard. He played saxophone for the orchestras of Charlie Spivak, Shep Fields, and Claude Thornhill. He made his film debut in Tars and Spars in 1946. He made his Broadway debut in 1948 in the revue Make Mine Manhattan in which he sang, acted, double talked and pantomimed his original skit “The Five Dollar Date”. He made his TV debut on Texaco Star Theatre in 1948. His first series was The Admiral Broadway Revue in 1949. The show was canceled because it was too successful and Admiral couldn’t keep up the demand that the show created for their TV sets. He starred in Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954 and Caesar’s Hour from 1954 to 1957. He starred in The Spirit is Willing, He co-starred in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, A Guide for the Married Man, Fire Sale, Silent Movie, History of the World, Airport 1975, The Great Mom Swap, The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, He hosted Saturday Night Live in 1983. He could double talk multiple languages but could only speak English and Yiddish. He said one can imitate any language by learning its rhythm and musicality. He once dangled one of his writers (Mel Brooks) from an 18th floor window. He won two Emmy Awards. He wrote Where Have I Been and Caesar’s Hours. He was married to Florence Levy for 67 years until she died.