"When two people are holding hands, can you ever
really be sure whose hand is doing the sweating?" –Shelley
Berman, “Alvin and Shirley,” on his album The Edge of Shelley Berman (1960)
When comedian Shelley Berman passed away at age 92 last week, the height of his fame was long
behind him—1963, to be exact, with three gold records under his belt.
That was
also the year when a documentary, broadcast on network TV, showed him backstage
after the show, blowing a gasket over a phone ringing at an inopportune time in
his act, saddling him with a reputation--probably overblown in the world of show business--for being unreasonable.
(A bit of context might have made his rage more understandable: this was the second time that the phone had gone off.)
(A bit of context might have made his rage more understandable: this was the second time that the phone had gone off.)
I think that a person deserves to be known for
something more than a single mistake. You can read the obits about Berman, but
you will be hard-pressed to find a better appreciation of the nature of his
comedy—and the impact of his neuroticism on his career
offstage—than in the chapter devoted to him in Gerald Nachman’s Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.
Nachman gives Berman
his full due as “founding father of the school of persecuted comedians—the
first of the method comics”—a performer less given to one-liners than to comic
acting. One also emerges with greater admiration of Berman as a husband in a seven-decade relationship, for crediting his wife in helping him survive his career downturn (so precipitous that he had to file for bankruptcy) and the death of his son.
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