Comedy in a Closet: Found

By Stephen M. Silverman

07/01/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

For fans of the legendary '50 TV comedy series "Your Shows of Shows," starring Sid Caesar -- and believed by many to be the medium's pinnacle -- there's astounding news this morning. (Only superlatives will do here.) The New York Times reports that the Egyptians may have had King Tut's tomb, but now the world has contents of the closet of the late producer Max Liebman ... in which 47 boxloads of long-lost scripts and other memorabilia from the Sid Caesar era have now been discovered. Liebman died in 1981 at the age of 78, and the closet was locked and painted shut for what is believed to be nearly four decades. Inside: the writings of such fabled Caesar writers as the young Neil Simon, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen. Gleeful scholars are now expected to go over the papers to discover how some of the greatest comedy shows ever were assembled. Wondered Carl Reiner (whose "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which he created, was in part based on Caesar's writers' office) about the contents of Liebman's closet: "Did they find any dead writers in there?"