“. . . the funniest man America has produced to date.”-Mel Brooks, describing Sid Caesar in 1982.

THERE MUST be whole generations by now whose reaction to the name Sid Caesar might be summed up as “Huh?”

How describe the man’s appeal in the now distant 1950s? It may be impossible, for back in that cool, conformist postwar era, the era of The Lonely Crowd and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, there was still a social norm for a Sid Caesar-or Mort Sahl-to satirize. Pity the poor comic today, who can only repeat and compete with the inchoate vulgarity of so much of what’s called American society, not play against it.

If there’s no structure, there’s no subverting it. Without a background, there’s no foreground, either. No form, no function for comedy. All is the same indiscriminate mass, loud or soft. Today’s comic may be able to control the volume of the surrounding society he reflects, sometimes, but not its quality. Because it has so little. It’s just sound and fury, null and without form, like the world before it was created.

How hope to explain why Americans of a different generation, Americans of all classes, which at the time meant we were all middle class, would watch that tiny black-and-white screen in look-alike suburban living rooms all across the country, and begin, step by artfully timed step, to slowly collapse into a spasm of mirth? It might start with just a smile, then a small chuckle of recognition, and proceed stage by stage to the kind of uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter that leaves you doubled up and wiping away tears.

How did Sid Caesar do it? Because it’s anything but easy. Dying is easy, as an old vaudevillian once noted, it’s comedy that’s hard. And it requires art, and an all too rare artist. It took a while, but eventually it dawned on us that we weren’t laughing at Sid Caesar but at ourselves, and it was a good feeling. Cleansing, clarifying. It restored perspective. It was a kind of molting, flaking off the dead skin so we could grow, expand, see anew. And it made things new.

Sid Caesar, tie undone, cuff links off, sitting there on an already dated couch with his wingtips and lightly Brylcreemed hair, was our own Socrates (“Know thyself”), but wearing the mask of comedy. Who knew?

IT WASN’T just television’s golden age but Sid Caesar’s-those were the days, my friend, and maybe he thought they would never end. But they did, and Isaac Sidney Caesar was surely the most disappointed and disillusioned observer of all by the sad, decades-long reprise his faded-out art would later become, when the magic was gone and he was just another stand-up comedian in a cast of interchangeable thousands, as in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Maybe that’s what explains his later succession of addictions before he finally got a grip and decided to live, pulled up his clown’s socks, and became one of those Grand Old Men weighed down with worthless honors and recognitions and the knowledge in his heart of hearts that his show of shows was now far behind him. But, oh,while it had lasted . . . .

How would one of Sid Caesar’s gallery of stereotypes, the stuffier and more respectable the funnier, relay the news that one of the funniest men in the world had made his final appearance last week-in the obituaries?

The only way to break the news of his death in a way that might capture Sid Caesar’s spirit and that of his times would be to make the announcement on a small black-and-white TV screen, complete with rabbit ears on top of the set. His old partner in sketch comedy, Imogene Coca in her bangs and 1950-ish housedresses, a Carol Burnett before her time, would be suppressing a sob in the background while Mel Brooks, whose idea of comedy has always been only slapstick, would be thinking he could have done the death scene a lot funnier.

THE ONLY actor who could have handled the delicate duty of announcing Sid Caesar’s death at 91 to mordant perfection would have been Sid Caesar himself-in one of his ultra-respectable personas:

“This is Roger Stiffneck of WXYZ bringing you today’s News of the Dead,” he would have begun, tie clip just right, carnation in lapel, his John Cameron Swayze voice sweeping low, Timex in place, as he e-nun-ci-a-ted every syllable in the Standard American that was once the only dialect allowed television anchormen. Only gradually would he begin to lapse into a New Yorkese of no determinate borough somewhere out there between Queens and Yonkers. Roger Stiffneck’s peccable diction, regressing to its origins, would somehow capture the spirit of the upwardly mobile yet ever downward descending urban American middle class of his time.

“I have to tell you tonight,” our faux newscaster would intone, sober as a corrupt judge, “that one of the funniest men alive isn’t any more, that is, alive. However, he’s still funny and in the running for Best Posthumous Show of Shows for this season . . .”

And then Sid Caesar would proceed, in the manner of Dave Garroway’s man-on-the-street interviews, from one wildly different American type to another. He might start with his progressive-jazz sax man, Progress Hornsby, explaining that his group’s latest release was a whole new hi-fi listening experience. (“This is the highest they’ve ever fied. If they fie any higher, they’re gonna foo!”)

Progress Hornsby would be followed by a parade of equally improbable yet all too familiar figures. Like the distinguished guest lecturer in archaeology speaking a nonexistent foreign language that was really only doubletalk, or maybe tripletalk or quadruple talk, but with every rhythm, nuance, enunciation and accent mark in place, Ja? Like some great Herr Doktor Professor Fakegescheft, who would explain that he had just discovered the great secret of Titten-Totten’s Tomb, which he was not at liberty to reveal at the moment. And then . . . on and on to the end of your show of shows, which would leave the audience both sorry it was over and too exhausted from laughter to take any more.

At the end of the night, with work waiting the next morning, the TV screen, glowing softly like a night lite, would show nothing but a soothing test pattern. And it was all gone. Like the 1950s.

Editorial, Pages 10 on 02/17/2014