Laughter on the 23rd Floor
by Neil Simon
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House until July 3
Review by Mark Stoyich
There was humour in the United States before the Jews, but the native humorists tended to succumb to those fiery liquors which gentiles find so necessary for life (Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley), while the mostly Jewish (and one Irish) writers on the sketch-comedy TV show that engendered all others, Your Show of Shows, wrote up a comic storm in their New York office fuelled by nothing stronger than pumpernickel bagels.
Future comedy greats like Mel Brooks, Karl Reiner and a young Neil Simon got their start writing for the comic giant of the '50s, Sid Caesar. Simon's memories of that extraordinarily fertile time and place provide the basis for this play.
Sid Caesar (Max Prince in the play) was a genius, and as a genius should, had plenty of self-destructive tics, the least harmful of which was a habit of punching holes in the office walls when he was angry, which was often (used to great comic effect by Simon).
He had enormous appetites, mostly for food and tranquillisers. He was also paranoid, but, as they say, even paranoids have enemies, especially if they work for a TV network. Caesar and his writing team had provided NBC with a hugely popular show, but one which was, by '50s US standards, rather sophisticated, reflecting the tastes and interests of Jews who lived in New York and who had in some cases grown up in Europe.
At that time, two interesting things were happening.
One is very well known: the anticommunist witch-hunt made screenwriters, especially of non-US background or tendency, very nervous (Senator McCarthy made Caesar apoplectic with rage, according to this play).
The other is that shows being made in New York, which had only been seen on the east coast, started to be networked to places like Nebraska, where the good burghers had not only never met a Jew, but probably never heard a joke.
To please this new and vast rolling plain of consumers, NBC pressured Caesar to cut the length of his show (from 90 minutes to an hour — ah, age of leisure!) but also to make it less intelligent. Simon and his colleagues would create hilarious parodies of the serious movies of the time — a snatch of their version of Marlon Brando's Julius Caesar is shown — as well as opera, "art (i.e. European) movies", and other suspiciously sophisticated interests not calculated to please the Midwest crackers.
Capitalism was ever thus. The traumas that these pressures create as the writers agonise over budget cuts (though Max Prince makes sure that none of his highly paid staff is ever fired) make for fine comic material, as do Max's bullying and towering rages, and the bickering of the staff.
Inevitably, in what should be an ensemble production, Garry McDonald is the star of the show as Max Prince. Though nothing like Sid Caesar physically — who was a bear of a man — he seems to have taken on some of his mannerisms convincingly. All the cast are fine, especially Mitchell Butel, who plays, I suspect, the character based on Karl Reiner, and Sam Wilcox, who plays the only goy among the writers (who eventually escapes to Hollywood).
Neil Simon has not been fashionable for many years, and is unlikely to appeal to young people, so the Ensemble Theatre is to be commended for producing this and many others of his plays. He reminds us of a time when writers drew on memories of the Great Depression, Nazi or Stalinist oppression and the war, so that even TV comedy had a certain resonance, unattainable by the present generation of writers, whose childhood memories are of The Brady Bunch, and who can only draw upon other, pale, fictions.