Laughter on the 23rd Floor

We Simply Loved This Movie!!! A number of the reviews here seem to miss the point…this is NOT a comedy per say….it's an homage to the greatest sketch comic to hit TV so far, Sid Caesar.

As a kid I watched "Your Show of Shows" on TV every week and I loved it! I've read about it and watched interviews with all the principles…Particularly good was an HBO (?) Special a few years back that featured most of the writers, plus at the end Sid, sitting on a stage and just discussing what it was like to work with the manic Sid and produce a live one & one half hour comedy show a week!!! The predecessor "To Laughter on the 23rd Floor" was the wonderful "My Favorite Year". In that movie about "The Sid Show"…Joe Bologna did a great job bringing the talented and wonderfully crazed Sid Caesar to life. He had the advantage over Nathan Lane because he looked and was built like Caesar… but the writers bullpen wasn't as the real writers described. When Sid wanted to apologize to someone he would send over some steaks or tires to the offended party.

"Laughter" used the same Director, Richard Benjamin, and the star, Mark Linn-Baker, as "My Favorite Year". Baker played a Young Mel Brooks junior writer in "My Favorite Year" and 20 years later the older Baker played the Head writer in "Laughter". Neil Simon used his history as a "Show of Shows" writer to make "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" feel REAL!…and although short and stumpy... Nathan Lane managed to achieve a poignancy in his interpretation of (large & muscular) Caesar with his genius performance. This movie was about the life of a comedy writers bullpen featuring the greatest group to ever work a TV show…and about their untimely end.

NOTE: The Show of Shows had only one sponsor as did most of the early TV shows and therefore the program was forced to please that sponsor if they wanted to keep working. I believe it was the Hoffman Television Co. that backed Caesar and because they were soooo successful in selling the new TV's... Hoffman couldn't keep up with the demand so they decided advertising was no longer necessary and dropped "The Show of Show's"! Caesar & Company was damned for being tooooo good!!!

Neil Simon's play "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" centered on the relationship between a 1950s television comic (based on Sid Caesar and his staff of writers, who worked out of the 23rd floor of a midtown building in Manhattan. This group would talk, confide, fight, and go for each others' throats if the situation - however absurd - warranted it. Underneath the zaniness, hostility or any dilemna, however, was a shared love and talent for creating sketch comedy. And it was this talent that bonded writers and comic together and, when all smoke cleared, made them realize that they did in fact care for what they did, and for each other. Max Prince (the Sid Caesar model), and his writers. The writers and Max Prince. He needed them, they needed him. Together they needed comedy. This play was indeed a fine ensemble. Every character is defined. None are short-changed in depth. Would have been a novel approach for the film. Understandably, a film version of a stage script needs some change and adaptation so as to not be a confined, filmed play. When this transition goes so far afield, however, changing the intention and focus of the original piece, there seems to be no point in adapting it to film at all. The film "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" plays like a sequel to an original that was never made (like maybe the play?) The film focuses on Max Prince's relationships with virtually everyone (including his dead parents in a cemetary scene), EXCEPT the writers. Characters who were not even in the play become the main supporting cast, while the writers are left as incidental characters. Considering those who are playing the writers - Victor Garber, Mark Linn-Baker, Saul Rubinek, Dan Castellaneta, among others - a fine pool of talent is genuinely squandered, with nothing to do except occassionally react to and comment on the changing state of The Max Prince show. As a result, when Max makes the heartfelt statement that his writers mean everything to him, the point is lost, because there has been little interaction with them A more fitting title for this film would be "The Travels and Travails of Max Prince". Why this instead of "Laughter on the 23rd Floor"? Because Max hardly spends any TIME on the 23rd floor!

I have always found Neil Simon's earlier works far more satisfying than his middle and later periods. It's understandable that comic writers such as Simon and Woody Allen felt the need to develop, having become tired of churning out pungent one liners. The transition from pure comic, to serious writer, albeit with a comic base, is a tricky one. Both Simon and Allen have on occasion handled this fusion of elements well, but by and large the challenge has not been well met by either.

"Laughter on the 23rd Floor" being a reminiscence of Simon's television writing days on the legendary "Show of Shows" was largely a comic piece when produced on Broadway. Since most of the characters in the play are loosely based on a group of writers famed for their wit, the play should have been a hilarious riot. While it made for an enjoyable evening in the theater, one couldn't help feeling it had somewhat missed the mark.

For the television adaptation Simon has turned "Laughter on the 23rd Floor" into a supposedly deeper and more serious work, in his portrayal of comic Max Prince. Depicting the complexities that make up the psyche of a comic is not an easy task but Simon's depiction of Max Prince does not go far beyond the clichés one would expect. Nathan Lane pulls out all the stops, but at times he seems to be unwittingly doing a Zero Mostel imitation. The biggest let down is that despite a group of fine and seasoned performers and many one liners, even the comic bits are not as funny as they should be.

Those who have a particular fondness for the period of 50's television and the tremendous talents around at the time are likely to be disappointed.

A ring-tailed wonder of a non-stop spritzer with a dynamite cast headed by the incredible Nathan Lane. One of Neil Simon's all-time best, worth seeing over and over. It ranks with the classic comedies of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.

If you aren't old enough to cherish the memory of Sid's Caesar's Show of Shows in its heyday, if you don't think Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart and the rest of his writers' room was the greatest collection of comic talent ever, and if you didn't watch most of the Army-McCarthy hearings, well, maybe this movie isn't for you. But you're just the one who should see if for its educational value. It tells us a whole lot about the golden age of television, of the country's torpor in the 50's, of the days when people who cared more for those dependent upon them than they did for themselves got run over by the corporate machine, and of the contrived and deliberate dumbing down of our national intellect. See this movie, and then rent some of the classic skits by Caesar, Reiner, Coca, Morris and company on DVD. You'll know why those of us who were there still die laughing the hundredth time we hear, "You have gespritzen on un general."