The inimitable Cy Saks passes on.

ROBYN SASSEN

Pictured Cy Saks

PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED

 Durban in the 1950s was a very popular starting point for many South African musical thespians: it was a burgeoning holiday resort; each hotel featured a live band and a comedian, said veteran performers Annabel Linder and Sue Kelly Christie. This arena was an incubator for Saks’ career. A talented singer, pianist, drummer and mimic, he was born on December 10, 1935.

Noticed by talent scouts, Saks, who was equally at home playing jazz and performing ballads as he was making people laugh, was the first South African to be granted his own half hour comedy show on SABC television, in the mid-1970s.

“It was hysterically funny,” remembers South Africa’s longest standing fulltime stand-up comic Mel Miller, “but it wasn’t good for his career.”

At that time, advertisements were not yet flighted on television and a full half hour of Saks’ shtick was fabulous for audiences, but not for Saks who had to work really hard at developing fresh material.

Headhunted from the South African comic scene, Saks spent time in America, where he got to collaborate with comedians of the ilk of Bob Hope. Friends Roy and Sue Kelly Christie remember him “for his originality, musicianship and his flair for improvisational humour”.

“He was such a funny guy,” remembers veteran performer Linder, commenting on his “crazy, off beat sense of humour. I knew him since the early 1960s and did many comedy shows with him. In 1992, he ran the little theatre upstairs at the Astor Hotel in Norwood.”

Miller worked with Saks from about 1970. “What a comedian! He could rocket those one-liners out, and always had a better hit rate, which measured how many times he could make an audience laugh in a minute, than anyone else. No one could better Cy.

“If he was ‘dying’ on stage, he would turn to us and mouth the words ‘they love me’, which would have us all in stitches. He was a real gentleman. I don’t think people realise the debt of gratitude the industry owes him. He constantly raised the bar for South African comedy.  

Another comedian, Tony King, who was with him on the day before he died, met him in 1983. “I think there were 10 comedians in the country at the time,” he recalls. “Cy never lost his sense of humour. He had a fairytale romance relationship with his wife Norma,” he adds, speaking of how Saks had resided at Jaffa, the Jewish home for the Aged in Pretoria, for the past three years, because of increasing frailty. “I really loved him. He had a heart of gold.”

Saks is survived by Norma, his son, David, daughter-in-law Carol and two grandsons.