Carl: Professor, what do you do if when you’re climbing a mountain your rope breaks?
Sid: [as the professor, in a German accent] When your rope breaks you immediately start screaming, and keep screaming all the way down until you hit the ground.
Carl: How does that help you?
Sid: Actually, it doesn’t help you at all. But it helps the people on the ground know where to find you.
* * *
—
The German Professor solidified my role as a valued contributor to the show. Writing the show was wonderful and terrible. The wonderful part was hearing the laughs that my jokes and sketches got from the live audience. The terrible part was I’d stay up until two or three in the morning trying to think of characters and situations that we could use on the show, which led to quite often being late for the writing sessions with Sid, Carl, and the other writers. They started at ten a.m. and I’d get in at eleven a.m. I would call the Carnegie Deli for my bagel, cream cheese, and coffee so it was waiting for me when I got there. One of the secretaries usually paid the dollar and a half, and I would reimburse them when I got there. The bagel and coffee came to about a dollar, but I always gave the delivery guy a fifty-cent tip.
One morning after being warned by Sid not to be late again, I came in my usual one hour late and gave the secretary a dollar fifty.
She said, “Sorry, Mel. It’s not a dollar and fifty cents today, it’s twenty-one dollars.”
“What! Twenty-one dollars? For a bagel and coffee?” I exclaimed.
Holding back a laugh, she said, “Yes, twenty-one dollars. Mr. Caesar paid for your bagel and coffee, and he tipped the delivery guy twenty bucks. I think he wanted to send you a message about being late every day.”
For a while after that, I was always on time.
* * *
—
Let me jump away for a minute and tell you a little story about my very first appearance on television. Even though I had been a performer in the Borscht Belt and then in the Army, I felt that I couldn’t compete onstage with the likes of a Sid Caesar, an Imogene Coca, and a Carl Reiner, and was more than happy to contribute my talents just as a comedy writer. Carl Reiner was with the William Morris Agency and his agent was Harry Kalcheim of the （at the time） well-known William Morris Kalcheim brothers—Nat and Harry Kalcheim. Harry thought I was funny and always prodded me to grab a small part on the show. I always resisted saying, “The comedy is in good hands with Sid, Imogene, and Carl.”
But one day, he told me that there was a small comedy part open on the Texaco Star Theatre hosted by Milton Berle. It was the part of a dopey stooge for Sid Stone, the famous Texaco Star Theatre pitchman. He was the guy who said, “You say you’re not satisfied? You say you want more? Tell you what I’m gonna do!” He’d slap his hands together and open his little suitcase and make his sidewalk pitch. On this particular show, I was a window washer.
Sid Stone said, “I’ve got a great job for you. It’s the Empire State Building!”
“Too many windows,” I said. “And besides I don’t like to work way up high. I’m afraid.”
“What are you afraid of? Falling?” Sid said.
“No. Pigeons,” I said. “Pigeons, they live up there.”
Anyway, it got a few laughs. The amazing thing was, when I got back to Williamsburg to visit family and friends, I was an instant celebrity. Everybody in Brooklyn had seen me on the Texaco Star Theatre as the window washer on the Sid Stone spot. I was actually signing autographs!
* * *
—
Anyway, back to Your Show of Shows. My one and only personal appearance on the show was completely offscreen and turned out to be a near disaster. Let me explain…In the sketch there is a darkened bedroom and we see a woman asleep in bed and Sid stealthily opens the drawer next to her bed and takes out a letter that can prove his innocence. Slowly he backs out of the room. In the semi-dark we see a cat asleep on the rug, its tail fully extended. Sid, continuing to back up, doesn’t know the cat is behind him. When he’s nearly out of the bedroom he is supposed to step on the cat’s tail and all hell breaks loose. The cat is supposed to let forth with a great big cat yowl—I was playing the cat. It seems that the soundman was informed by more than one person that nobody made a better cat sound than Mel Brooks. So he asked me to audition, and I did. He said, “That’s the best cat sound I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m not going to use my cat sounds, you’re it.”
He didn’t know, and neither did I, that standing there at the microphone I would get “sound fright.” Realizing that my cat sound would be heard by millions of people my mouth dried up, and when it came time to make the cat sound all I did was make big dry wheezes. Finally, I got it together and came up with the best cat sound I ever made. Sid jumped at the sound—along with everybody else in the audience. It was my first and last live performance on Your Show of Shows.