Your Show of Shows
Encyclopedia
Your Show of Shows is a live 90-minute variety show
Variety show
A variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is an entertainment made up of a variety of acts, especially musical performances and sketch comedy, and normally introduced by a compère or host. Other types of acts include magic, animal and circus acts, acrobatics, juggling...

 that appeared weekly in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 on NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 (Saturdays, 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time), from February 25, 1950, until June 5, 1954, featuring Sid Caesar
Sid Caesar
Isaac Sidney "Sid" Caesar is an Emmy award winning American comic actor and writer known as the leading man on the 1950s television series Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, and to younger generations as Coach Calhoun in Grease and Grease 2.- Early life :Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York,...

 and Imogene Coca
Imogene Coca
Imogene Fernandez de Coca was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows....

.

Other featured performers were Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...

, Howard Morris
Howard Morris
Howard Morris was an American comic actor and director who was best known for his role as Ernest T. Bass on The Andy Griffith Show.- Life and career :...

, Nanette Fabray
Nanette Fabray
Nanette Fabray is an American actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, and activist. She began her career performing in vaudeville as a child and then became a musical theatre actress during the 1940s and 1950s, winning a Tony Award in 1949 for her performance in Love Life...

, Bill Hayes
Bill Hayes
William "Bill" Foster Hayes III, born on June 5, 1925 in Harvey, Illinois) is a long-time American actor and Billboard Hot 100 #1 artist. Following a 20 year-long career as a musician, he achieved fame once again when he began playing Doug Williams on NBC's long-running Days of Our Lives in 1970. ...

, Judy Johnson, The Hamilton Trio and the soprano Marguerite Piazza
Marguerite Piazza
Marguerite Piazza is an American soprano and entertainer.In 1935, Piazza was the first Queen of the Krewe of Virgilians, during Mardi Gras, in New Orleans. A 1940 graduate of Loyola University of the South's College of Music, she then studied at Louisiana State University, where she was a student...

. José Ferrer
José Ferrer
José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón , best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director...

 made several guest appearances on the show. The show was telecast from the now-demolished International Theatre (also known as the Park Theatre) at 5 Columbus Circle and the Century Theater now demolished in New York.

In 2002, Your Show of Shows was ranked #30 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time
TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time
TV Guides 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time is TV Guides list of the 50 most entertaining and influential television series in American pop culture...

.

Production notes

The show was created by Sylvester "Pat" Weaver
Pat Weaver
Sylvester Barnabee "Pat" Weaver was an American radio advertising executive, who became president of NBC between 1953 and 1955. He has been credited with reshaping commercial broadcasting's format and philosophy as radio gave way to television as America's dominant home entertainment...

 and directed by Max Liebman. Caesar, Coca, and Liebman had worked on The Admiral Broadway Revue
The Admiral Broadway Revue
The Admiral Broadway Revue is an American variety show that premiered on January 28, 1949, and was broadcast live simultaneously on both NBC and the now-defunct DuMont network.-Overview:...

from January to June 1949. Writers for the show included Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...

, Neil Simon
Neil Simon
Neil Simon is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that...

, Danny Simon
Danny Simon
Danny Simon was an American television writer and comedy teacher. He was also older brother to acclaimed American playwright Neil Simon....

, Mel Tolkin
Mel Tolkin
Mel Tolkin, né Shmuel Tolchinsky , was a television comedy writer best known as head writer of the seminal, live TV sketch comedy series Your Show of Shows during the Golden Age of Television. There he presided over a storied staff that at times included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and...

, and Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner
Carl Reiner is an American actor, film director, producer, writer and comedian. He has won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award during this career...

 who, though a cast member, always sat in with the writers. A common misconception is that Larry Gelbart
Larry Gelbart
Larry Simon Gelbart was an American television writer, playwright, screenwriter and author.-Early life:...

 wrote for Your Show of Shows; he in fact wrote for its successor program, Caesar's Hour
Caesar's Hour
Caesar's Hour is a live, hour-long American sketch comedy television program that aired on NBC from 1954 until 1957. The program starred, among others, Sid Caesar, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Janet Blair and Milt Kamen, and featured a number of cameo roles by famous entertainers...

, which ran from 1954 to 1957. Likewise, Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...

 did not write for Your Show of Shows, as he only worked on several Sid Caesar TV specials that debuted after it.

Carl Reiner has stated that the time he spent on Your Show of Shows was the inspiration for The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Dick Van Dyke Show is an American television sitcom that initially aired on the Columbia Broadcasting System from October 3, 1961, until June 1, 1966. The show was created by Carl Reiner and starred Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. It was produced by Reiner with Bill Persky and Sam Denoff....

. Your Show of Shows also inspired the 1982 film My Favorite Year
My Favorite Year
My Favorite Year is a 1982 American comedy film directed by Richard Benjamin which tells the story of a young comedy writer. It stars Peter O'Toole, Mark Linn-Baker, Jessica Harper, Joseph Bologna, Lou Jacobi, Bill Macy, Lainie Kazan, Selma Diamond, Cameron Mitchell, and Gloria Stuart. O'Toole was...

, produced by Mel Brooks, and the play Laughter on the 23rd Floor
Laughter on the 23rd Floor
Laughter on the 23rd Floor is a play by Neil Simon.Inspired by Simon's early career experience as a junior jokesmith for Your Show of Shows, the play focuses on Sid Caesar/Jackie Gleason-like Max Prince, the star of a weekly comedy-variety show circa 1953, and his staff, including Simon's...

written by Neil Simon.

Episode status

Most of the kinescope
Kinescope
Kinescope , shortened to kine , also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor...

s of the show were discarded by NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

, and so few copies of the show survive. A 1973 theatrical film titled Ten from Your Show of Shows featured ten sketches from the show edited together.

In 2000, original scripts from the show were found in a closet belonging to producer Max Liebman in the City Center building in New York City. The find made the front page of the New York Times. It is believed they were left there upon the death of Max Liebman in 1981.

After the program ended Imogene Coca starred in her own one-year NBC comedy and variety show, The Imogene Coca Show
The Imogene Coca Show
The Imogene Coca Show is a half-hour NBC television series starring Imogene Coca in both situation comedy and variety show formats. The program debuted on October 2, 1954, after the ending of Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, on which Coca had been a popular regular performer.The first two episodes...

. Thereafter, Sid Caesar changed his format and launched Caesar's Hour
Caesar's Hour
Caesar's Hour is a live, hour-long American sketch comedy television program that aired on NBC from 1954 until 1957. The program starred, among others, Sid Caesar, Nanette Fabray, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, Janet Blair and Milt Kamen, and featured a number of cameo roles by famous entertainers...

.

Syndication and DVD release

Reruns of surviving kinescopes aired on Comedy Central
Comedy Central
Comedy Central is an American cable television and satellite television channel that carries comedy programming, both original and syndicated....

in the early 1990s. Sketches from the show which are from Sid Caesar's personal collection are available on The Sid Caesar Collection DVD set.

External links

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