SID CAESAR & IMOGENE COCA TOGETHER AGAIN
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His patter wasn’t any better. Although teamed here with his old Your Show of Shows partner, Imogene Coca, the former king of TV comedy takes a long solo turn consisting of gags he’s pleased to call “truths”–as in, “Now, if I may, I’d like to show you another truth.” What follows this introduction aren’t really truths, however, but shticklach so old they seem eternal: There’s the one about a baby who has to guide his bleary-eyed dad through the administration of an early morning bottle. And the one where a husband-to-be contemplates his bride’s bad cooking. And also the one where a teenage boy tries to make it through his first dance. Familiar, sure. Nostalgic, certainly. But truth? It made me wince again.
Still, I haven’t come to bury Caesar. For all his bad taste and pomposity between gags–and all the anachronism of the gags themselves–Caesar manifests tremendous skill when he actually gets around to performing. Physical skill. Clown skill. His impression of the nervous teenager, in particular, is a symphony of tics: the poor kid’s hands flutter around at the end of his sleeves like a couple of hooked trout, hilariously incapable of lying still; when he tries to talk to a girl, his tongue swells out of his mouth and down his chin until he’s forced to stuff it back in with his fingers. Likewise, Caesar’s awakening baby is a mind-boggling confluence of lip smacks, eye flutters, and cheek pops. These gambits are every bit as cornball obvious as the “truths” in which they’re set, but Caesar’s lucid body language renews them. His craftsmanship is the one genuine truth he presents.
Still, it works. It does what it’s supposed to do. Caesar closes with the hope that “we have brought back some memories,” and I know he succeeded because my mom saw Together Again with me and came out of it with her eyes glistening. That, I guess, is entertainment.
