Sid Caesar once dominated American television so completely that it was hard to imagine Saturday nights without him. In the early 1950s, his live sketch-comedy program “Your Show of Shows” drew tens ...

The great silent comics—Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon—were compact men, resilient and sprung-wound yet graceful as they coped with menaces like recalcitrant umbrellas, ...

If you had a television set in the 1950s, there's a better-than-even chance that each week you were watching comic Sid Caesar. "I don't think there's anybody comparable now, and I don't think there's ...