Mel Tolkin, 'Your Show of Shows' writer
LOS ANGELES - Mel Tolkin, an award-winning television comedy writer who served as head writer for Sid Caesar's legendary "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" in the 1950s, died Nov. 26. He was 94.
Mr. Tolkin died of age-related causes at his home in L.A.'s Century City neighborhood, said his son, writer Michael Tolkin.
In a nearly 50-year show-business career that began in Montreal in the 1930s when he wrote revues and played piano in jazz clubs, Mr. Tolkin wrote comedy for Danny Kaye, Danny Thomas, Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis and was a story editor for Norman Lear's landmark program "All in the Family."
But it is for his many years writing sketches for Caesar that Mr. Tolkin is best known - for "Admiral Broadway Revue" (1949), "Your Show of Shows" (1950-1954), and "Caesar's Hour" (1954-1957).
As head writer on the live, 90-minute "Your Show of Shows," Mr. Tolkin led a pack of writers that included Lucille Kallen, Mel Brooks, Tony Webster, and Neil and Danny Simon, among others. The show's cast included Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, and Howard Morris.
Caesar said last week that Mr. Tolkin "was a tremendous asset" to all of his TV shows and various specials.
"He was a very talented man, and he worked really hard," Caesar told the Los Angeles Times. As head writer, Caesar said, Mr. Tolkin "had to keep them in line. Of course, it got kind of crazy in the Writers' Room."
Indeed, Mr. Tolkin once described the writing process on "Your Show of Shows" as occurring "in a room full of raving madmen. And there I was at the center of it all, a Ukrainian Jew with a death wish."
Reiner, a "writer without portfolio" in the Writers' Room, said Mr. Tolkin knew what producer Max Liebman "required of a show, and he was sort of his right-hand man."
Reiner said Mr. Tolkin, who wrote the theme song for "Your Show of Shows," also was very funny writing music at the piano. That included writing the tune for a song Caesar sang on one show in which he simply repeated the words "Going crazy" several dozen times, followed by the last line: "Over you."
Larry Gelbart, who worked as a writer with Mr. Tolkin, said: "He was a very unique, very gifted writer [and] mind. He had an Old-World sensibility and a New-World hipness."
Mr. Tolkin, who was born Samuel Tolchinsky in Odessa, Ukraine, said in a 1987 Times interview: "I've lived under the czar, Lenin, Stalin, and Ronald Reagan."
His family moved to Gaisin, a small city in the Ukraine before emigrating to Montreal in 1926.
After high school, he studied accounting in Montreal and wrote left-wing musical revues, taking the name Mel Tolkin to hide his writing activities from his parents.
Mr. Tolkin served in the Canadian Army Band during World War II - he played the glockenspiel - then moved to New York after the war.
He was working summers at Camp Tamiment in Pennsylvania's Poconos Mountains when a revue he and Kallen wrote caught the attention of Liebman.
Being an "outsider,"Mr. Tolkin said in a 1996 interview with a Jewish newspaper, "is part of what made me look at the world in the way I did." And when you're able to see society with fresh eyes, he added, "it looks funnier."
"If you like what's going on with the world, if you're part of it, you'll find little comedy in life," he told the Jewish Exponent. "Happy people are idiots."
Mr. Tolkin won four Writers Guild Awards. He also shared an Emmy Award for the 1967 special "The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special" and shared a Humanitas Prize for an episode of "All in the Family."
In addition to his son Michael, Mr. Tolkin leaves his wife of 63 years, Edith; another son, Stephen, a television writer and director; and four grandchildren. 