I want to elaborate on something mentioned earlier here. There have been many histories written or, more often, written and televised about the making of Sid Caesar's various TV shows: Admiral Broadway Revue, Your Show of Shows, Caesar's Hour, Sid Caesar Invites You, As Caesar Sees It and a couple of subsequent specials. Way too often, they treat the whole body of work as if it were one program called Your Show of Shows. Not true. Then they act as if anyone who was a writer on any of them was a writer on Your Show of Shows. Also not true. And, most annoyingly, they focus disproportionately on those writers who are today well-known for their other work — especially Woody Allen, who actually did relatively little work for Caesar and did it later, when Sid was generally in decline. The core of Caesar's writing staff over the years was Mel Tolkin, Lucille Kallen and Mel Brooks plus Neil and Danny Simon. To this were added, at various times — but after Your Show of Shows — Tony Webster, Larry Gelbart, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin, Aaron Ruben, Selma Diamond, Joe Stein, Lou Solomon, Mike Stewart, Woody Allen and a few others. Sid, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris were also involved in the writing process, though they did not receive credit as writers.
For what it's worth, when I worked with Sid in the eighties, he told me that, as far as he was concerned, Kallen and the two Mels had probably, between the three of them, accounted for around 75% of everything he did on TV…and Imogene Coca felt that Kallen had written most of her best material. So it was a little maddening that, when Lucille Kallen passed away, most of the obits made it sound like her great achievement was being one of the writers, along with Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen, on Your Show of Shows. (Larry spends a lot of time correcting people who think he worked on that series and also that he somehow "created" M*A*S*H, long after it was a book and a movie.)
This may all seem kinda trivial, and perhaps it is. But if we can't get this stuff right when most of the people involved are still alive and being interviewed, what hope do we have of knowing who did what, a hundred years from now?