Dan Pasternack: Talk about your first show, "Admiral Broadway Revue."

Sid Caesar: Little did I understand anything about television. Who's going to write it for an-hour-and-a-half? Well, Max [Liebman, the show's producer] was used to doing it. He put on shows every week in the Poconos. I had some background from what I learned in the Catskills. And with that, I sat down with the writers, Mel Tolkin and Lucille Kallen, and then we got Mel Brooks. That was the very beginning.

DP: Talk about the first "Admiral" broadcast.

SC: We had to wait for the cameras &endash; they were shooting a baseball game....We didn't know where to put the microphones. We didn't have body mikes then. They had foot mikes and they [sound men] couldn't hear [us]. So, I put in a boom mike because that's what they use in the movies....You had to invent. Doing a show live on television is a different animal altogether than doing it on tape. That's like relaxing. That's like going on vacation.

DP: NBC's Pat Weaver was instrumental in bringing you to television.

SC: My mentor. He took me through it [television] and showed me....He was willing to experiment with you.

DP: Describe working with Imogene Coca.

SC: It was like a glove. She fit right in. We hardly had to rehearse because she knew what I was going to do, she anticipated me and she knew if I found something in the performance, she would let me ride with it. Because she knew I would come back and give her the clue. If I saw [something] great, I said go ahead. In this way we established a rapport where I wasn't trying to upstage her. If you found something, go ahead, go for it.

DP: This was on "Admiral," where you and Imogene started working?

SC: We did a couple of sketches on "Admiral" together, but we really started on "Your Show of Shows." That's where it really started.

DP: How did "Your Show of Shows" compare to "Admiral"?

SC: The sketches got longer....We started to get departments. The Professor worked. "Hey let's do the Professor! We'll do him every other week. And hey, we can do silent movies. No, we did a silent movie, let's do a foreign movie"....It grew out of its own organic. And then I got Carl Reiner and Howie Morris and boy, we worked together. It was like a well-oiled machine. And to put it on every week, 39 weeks a year &endash; an hour-and-a-half live!

DP: Rarely did you appear on "Your Show of Shows" as yourself. Why?

SC: It was hard for me to say: "Good evening ladies and gentlemen." I couldn't be myself. If I could hide behind a character, I'd do all right. But if I had to be myself in front of anybody, naked, that to me, was so scary....I couldn't talk about myself. I couldn't talk to the audience. Now I can. Before, I couldn't....I had no self-confidence.

DP: The "Caesar's Hour" writers' room is legendary.

SC: We all pitched, we all wrote together. If we had to do a musical group, do a satire on a musical, we'd send Mel [Brooks] and somebody else out to do the lyrics, and then we'd come up with a song in about an hour, an hour-and-a-half....This was a writing staff that was a dream team....You can't explain it....It's a gathering of great minds.

DP: One piece I remember, is the fur coat episode.

SC: Nanette [Fabray], as she's walking on the street, she sees this fur coat in the window....She goes in. How much is it? Twelve-hundred dollars. No, it's reduced now down to 750 dollars....So she takes the coat. And I'm coming home from work. I go, "hello, dear," and I sit down....And she comes over and she gives me a kiss that's almost two minutes long....I think, why the long kissing? Is this a love kiss? No, that was a money kiss! Then she comes in, and, I think, she gives me dinner. She serves it to me....She almost chews it for me....And when the meal's over, she lights my cigar, and she comes out with the coat on and says nothing. I look at it. And then there's a close-up of me, and slowly, I start to cry. And this was great. I just stood right there, and all of a sudden, you see these tears come up, and they're rolling down on my face. That was really a wonderful piece. They [the writers] didn't want: "Don't buy the coat because Carl and Howie would have to buy the coat for their wives." It was a marvelous piece of writing and performance.

DP: How would you like to be remembered?

SC: I brought laughter to the world.