Promotional photo of Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar from “Your Show of Shows,” August 30, 1952. Photo credit: NBC/Wikimedia Commons
For this final podcast of 2025, we begin with a clip from “The Vitality Health Food Restaurant,” featuring Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca as the recurring characters Charlie and Doris Hickenlooper; Howard Morris and Carl Reiner play bit parts. It was broadcast during the 1955 season of Caesar’s Hour on NBC: you can see the whole sketch here.
Show notes:
* Claire mentions Dick Cavett’s afternoon talk show: Cavett’s unique style was inspired by his admiration for, and study of, Sid Caesar.
* The Catskills comedy scene, also known as the “Borscht Belt,” nurtured a generation of Jewish comedians who Caesar relied on, even though he himself spent little time in it.
* David Margolick discusses how Sid Caesar navigated the heightened consciousness of antisemitism in the 1950s by downplaying the Jewish roots of his art.
* Claire mentions the historical maleness of the comedy writers’ room, a phenomenon that—according to Tina Fey—lasted well into the late twentieth century.
* The Dick Van Dyke Show was created by a Caesar writer, Carl Reiner, the father of the late Rob Reiner: the plot revolved around the antics of creatives in a fictionalized—and very cleaned up—version of the Sid Caesar Show writers’ room.
* Caesar sustained the emotionally and physically crushing schedule of putting out a weekly show with alcohol and pharmaceuticals, something that was not all that uncommon for adult creatives and professionals in the 1950s.
* David discusses the rivalry between Caesar and bandleader Lawrence Welk, who produced a more anodyne variety show aimed at middle America.
Your host:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Short takes:
* New York City Mayor Eric Adams is getting ready to hand over the reins of government to Zorhan Mamdani, but will be in the news for some time to come. Numerous Adams staffers “are still facing criminal prosecution, lawsuits in state court, federal and local investigations, or some combination of all of the above,” Noah Schachtman writes at New York Magazine. “And while Adams is all grips and ‘What, me worry?’ grins in public, he continues to have some legal exposure of his own.” (December 26, 2025)
* At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait argues that no one should defend Bari Weiss for spiking the “60 Minutes” story on CECOT. Her reasoning is incoherent, Chait argues; worse, “Weiss is following a long-standing instinct to turn every Trump abuse into a debate, a generosity she does not afford targets on the left,” Chait writes. “The Free Press, which she continues to edit while running CBS News, publishes obsessively and unremittingly negative coverage of New York Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, but holds symposia on Donald Trump. In defending the administration’s actions as debatable, she has misrepresented just how heedless it has been with the Constitution.” He has other reasons too: read on. (December 24, 2025)
* The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang has been following the debate about kids and social media since before Australia imposed a ban on the apps for youth under 16. Such a a ban is unlikely in the United States—but aren’t there other, more thoughtful approaches? The First Amendment argues that “we shouldn’t place arbitrary age limits on who gets to express themselves in the digital town square,” Kang writes, “and we shouldn’t require everyone who wants to express their opinions online to submit to an I.D. check.” In fact, the revolution has already begun by simply taking smartphones out of the hands of school-age kids without federal legislation. “The nascent anti-smartphones movement in America is decidedly nonpartisan, for the most part,” Kang writes. “It also has taken place almost entirely at the local and state level.” (December 23, 2025)
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