FEB 25, 1950 — AMERICA’S LIVING ROOMS — For a silent majority of Americans, it’s another ho-hum Saturday night at the radio. Just 10 percent of homes have this new-fangled thing called television. The rest listen, as they have for decades, to Jack Benny, “The Great Gildersleeve,” “Fibber McGee and Molly. . .” But at 9:00 p.m. on NBC, a revolution in American comedy is about to be televised.

For its first year on the air, “Your Show of Shows” masqueraded as just another variety show. It even opened with a half-hour musical revue from a theater in Chicago. But when the show cut to the Center Theater in New York — live on Saturday night! — comedy would never be the same. To wit:

— Doris and Charlie Hickenlooper are trying out a “health food restaurant.” When the waiter puts flowers on the table, Doris begins eating them as appetizers.

— Cut to a movie scenario. “From Here to Obscurity” or “Aggravation Boulevard.” Or for the more film literate, parodies of “Bicycle Thief” and “Streetcar Named Desire.”

— Next up, a pontifical lecture from Professor Siegfried von Sedative. . .

There are no jokes, no one-liners, no stand-up. This is a new kind of comedy — “sketch comedy” — and the sketches run for ten minutes or more. Watch:

“Your Show of Shows” aired for just four years, yet its impact has never been equalled. This month, as we celebrate 50 years of “Saturday Night Live,” remember that without “Your Show of Shows,” there would have been no SNL. Because this singular show, the New York Times wrote, “sent into the world a group of writers and performers who set the comic agenda for American mass culture for two decades to come.”

Each show was a neurotic miracle. Ninety minutes every Saturday night. All live. No cue cards or teleprompter. All written on the fly, often on that same Saturday afternoon.

At the show’s center were two gifted comedians. Both were shy offstage. Neither ever wrote a line they spoke. But Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca were the heart and soul of the show.

Caesar set out to be a musician, playing saxophone in big bands. He only came to comedy during the war when he broke up fellow soldiers in stage reviews. Big and brawny, a chameleon of characters, he was, Saturday Evening Post wrote, “a new kind of comedian.”

Mocking the ethnic babble he had overheard at his father’s Manhattan luncheonette, Caesar could improvise nonsense that sounded like several languages. He could pretend to be a gumball machine, a baby, part of a mechanical clock. TV Guide called him “a clown of majesty.” Watch:

The wiry, elfin Imogene Coca was his perfect foil. Where he was outrageous and delightfully dumb, she was smart and sassy. Pushing the limits of comedy’s limited roles for women, she “could turn a Wagnerian aria into a nightmare of brow-knitted concentration, quavering glissandos, and narrow escapes from total disaster.”

But behind the stage, still more talent lurked in a writers’ room that Neil Simon called “organized chaos.” “It was a zoo,” Mel Brooks remembered. “Everyone pitched lines at Sid. Jokes would be changed fifty times.” Along with Simon and Brooks, “Your Show of Shows” jumpstarted the careers of Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H), Carl Reiner (“The Dick Van Dyke Show”) and the future Broadway creators of “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Hello, Dolly.”

And America, haunted by McCarthyism and “the bomb,” tuned in. By 1954, when “Your Show of Shows” split into solo series for Caesar and Coca, that 10 percent of American TV homes had grown to 50 percent. Media historians often credit Milton Berle with the urge to tune in, but Sid Caesar made Berle look vaudevillian and “old school.”

“Milton was wacky funny,” remembered comedian Richard Lewis, “but something about Sid was torturously funny.”

Caesar mocked the rising rock n’ roll scene in a rock group called “The Haircuts.” He was storyteller Somerset Winterset. He led the jazz group Cool C's and Progress Hornsby. . .

“Sid would make it ten times funnier than what we wrote,” Neil SImon said.

Imogene Coca’s own show lasted just a year. Caesar’s solo shows continued for another few. Then both all but disappeared, Caesar spiraling into alcohol and depression, Coca showing up here and there on sitcoms. But “Your Show of Shows” had changed the way America laughs at itself.

Before, comedy had been cautious, cliched, predictable. Bob Hope. Abbott and Costello. After, almost anything could happen in the name of laughter. Nichols and May. Phyllis Diller. And of course, “Saturday Night Live.”

“We knew it was special,” Larry Gelbart remembered. “We didn’t realize people would continue to think so to this day.”

“Your Show of Shows” had discovered a basic truth. Quoth Caesar: “Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and put a little curlicue at the end.”

And here’s that final curlicue — dozens of “Your Show of Shows” sketches online. Enjoy!

A (COMIC) REVOLUTION -- TELEVISED