I've been collecting comedy records as long as I can remember. There was a time when if you went to the Comedy section in any record store — this is back when there was such a thing as a record store — you found albums by Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Nichols and May, Bob Newhart, Stan Freberg, maybe Lord Buckley…and Shelley Berman. This would be a record store in a mostly-white neighborhood. In mostly-black areas, you also found a lot of "party records" and a ton of Redd Foxx.
Freberg was my favorite but he was singing and doing musical numbers. For just funny talking, I loved Shelley Berman, especially that first record of his, Inside Shelley Berman. Here, on a TV show of the sixties, he performs one of the best cuts from that album…
This is so good…every word, every inflection is just perfect. It's all the more impressive though when you consider that when Shelley first began doing this routine on stages, there was almost no one else doing acts like this. Performers had done this kind of thing, though not as well, in vaudeville. Shelley was the guy who modernized it and introduced it into his generation. Others, most notably Newhart, picked up on it…and yeah, there was some bitterness there. Newhart had greater success and Shelley was always rankled when someone would mention the two of them in the same paragraph without noting who'd imitated who.
Shelley was a sweet man but a nervous, paranoid man. There's a joke about two psychiatrists passing each other in a hall. One says, "Good morning" and the other thinks to himself, "Hmm…I wonder what he meant by that." Shelley always made me think of that joke. You could tell him how good you thought he was and absolutely mean it (as I did) and you could almost read the comic book thought balloon form over his head. It said, "Does he really mean that or does he want something from me?"
I got to know him through a comedians' social group I'm part of called Yarmy's Army, and also because I had him in once to do a voice on a Garfield cartoon. Yarmy's Army sometimes does shows for charity and they learned to put Shelley on stage last. There were two reasons for this. One was that he was so funny, no one could follow him. The other was that if the show ran long (or even if it didn't), Shelley would get pissed-off at having to wait so long to go on…and he was even funnier when he was pissed-off.
His peers — to the extent he had peers — worshipped him. Whereas he sometimes accused others — Newhart, especially — of stealing from him, no one ever accused Shelley of stealing from anyone. He was an absolute original with an act that clearly built out of his own worries and frustrations and angers and inability to understand why some people do some things he thought were so insane.
The New York Times obit on him is quite good and I'm going to quote a few paragraphs from it…
In 1963, at the height of his success, Mr. Berman was the subject of an NBC-TV documentary, "Comedian Backstage," which portrayed him as excitable and demanding and captured him losing his temper after a telephone rang backstage during his "Father and Son" monologue. The reviews were mostly favorable (although Jack Gould of The Times called the documentary a "portrait of disagreeableness"), but Mr. Berman nonetheless said that the unflattering picture painted by "Comedian Backstage" made him a "pariah" in the industry, and that his comedy career never fully recovered.
That documentary — which one dared not ask Shelley about — might not have harmed him ten or twenty years later when America got more accustomed to seeing the dark side of stars. In '63, when celebrities came packaged with carefully-controlled images, it was a jolt, though not as big a one as some recalled. Folks who saw it claimed they'd seen him — with their own eyes! — rip the phone right off the wall when it rang, interfering with his performance. He did not rip it off the wall. He merely took it off the hook but people remembered what they remembered. Comedy writer Pat McCormick once told me, "Shelley was a pain-in-the-ass to club owners and other people who booked him because he was always worried about the sound and the lighting and every little thing that could go wrong on stage. His complaining got exaggerated like he was way crazier than he actually was, and then the documentary validated the exaggeration."
His focus shifted back to acting. He appeared in numerous regional and summer-stock productions and played Tevye in a 1973 touring production of "Fiddler on the Roof." In the 1960s he was in movies like "The Best Man" (1964) and "Divorce American Style" (1967); from the '70s through the '90s he was on numerous TV shows, including "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," "St. Elsewhere" and "L.A. Law."
Shelley was a superb actor. He also appeared in numerous productions of The Odd Couple, sometimes as Oscar, sometimes as Felix. He got rave reviews as both and you have to be a real good actor to manage that.
It is said though that the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show originally wanted him for the role of Lou Grant, and when they called his agent to try and arrange an audition, Shelley's own agent talked them out of it. He then guested in one of the early episodes of the series and after that week of rehearsals and filming, the producers called the agent and said, "Thank you for talking us out of making him a regular." Finally…
A few years later he began teaching a course in humor writing at the University of Southern California, which he continued to teach until 2013.
That sentence exaggerates how long he taught at U.S.C. and when he did stop doing it, the person who replaced him was me. Several students the first semester I did it had signed up for Shelley's class and quit before they completed it because, they said, he was becoming snappish and too critical when they asked what he thought was a foolish question or handed in a writing assignment that he did not understand. Some of that was because he increasingly felt out-of-sync with the current world of entertainment.
We talked about it once and he told me, "I made a mistake. I taught the class as the Shelley Berman who performed 'in one' [as a solo performer] all those years. I should have taken the toupee off and taught it as the comic actor on Curb Your Enthusiasm. That guy was more in tune with young people and their comedy today."
I don't think Shelley was ever truly out-of-sync with comedy. He may not have known all the current references but I saw him performing many times up until Alzheimer's slowed his timing and he knew it was time to stop. He was always funny and his work was so organic and built on common human foibles that it reached across all generations. Just check out any record or any video of him talking to an audience. You'll agree.