Max Liebman

Max Liebman (August 2, 1902 – July 21, 1981) was a director, producer and writer for both Broadway theater and television.

Sometimes called the "Ziegfeld of TV". he helped establish early television's comedy vocabulary with Your Show of Shows. He additionally helped bring improvisational comedy into the mainstream as the producer of From the Second City, a 1961 Broadway revue that originated from the improvisational comedy troupe The Second City.

Early life and education Max Liebman was born in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the United States during childhood. He attended Boys High School in Brooklyn, New York City. where his extracurricular activities included the debating society and school theater, including shows with classmate Arthur Schwartz, the future Broadway composer.

Career In 1920, Liebman entered vaudeville as a sketch-comedy writer, and in 1924 or the Log Tavern Undaunted by the short run, he went on to co-write, with Allen Boretz, the comedy play Off to Buffalo, featuring Hume Cronyn. This ran seven performances beginning February 21, 1939, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.

Back at the Tamiment Playhouse, Liebman recalled, "I was doing all the writing myself" until 1938, when he began working with Sylvia Fine. whose talent Liebman immediately realized.

He placed Kaye and comedian Imogene Coca in a Tamiment musical, The Straw Hat Revue, Yet another Tamiment discovery was Carol Channing, who said of Liebman: "He was the oracle. If he approved, you were in show business."

In 1948, he directed the sketches for the revue, Make Mine Manhattan, starring Sid Caesar in his Broadway theatre debut and later a star of Liebman's Your Show of Shows. Under his longtime guidance, Caesar emerged as one of TV's first superstars, a "comic genius." And as biographer David Margolick has written, "More than anyone else, Max Liebman made Sid Caesar Sid Caesar." Liebman also introduced to Broadway such Poconos performers as Betty Garrett and Jules Munshin, and the choreographer Lee Sherman, with whom he worked on Make Mine Manhattan.