Shelley Berman, Stand-Up Comic Who Skewered Modern Life, Dies at 92

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/obituaries/shelley-berman-dead-comedian.html?action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

Remember?

[catesta]

I enjoyed his parts on Curb Your Enthusiasm. RIP

[JSngry]

Maybe you have to be of a certain age/demographic, but I remember this cat being everywhere for a while, in person, on radio/TV, records. Then I think maybe he pissed some/enough people off by being "difficult" and hit a slow spell. But I always found him funny, even if his tone got a little, uh..."strident"? at time. The bits were always funny and the timing always on.

I guess he had an eternal beef with Bob Newhart about the phone call thing, but hell, a premise is just a premise, a premise doesn't work itself. Those were two different minds running in two different directions. They're both champs in my book!

"Stewardess, how long does it take to get to Los Angeles?" "I don't know, we've never made it."

RIP.

[Larry Kart]

3 hours ago, JSngry said:

Maybe you have to be of a certain age/demographic, but I remember this cat being everywhere for a while, in person, on radio/TV, records. Then I think maybe he pissed some/enough people off by being "difficult" and hit a slow spell. But I always found him funny, even if his tone got a little, uh..."strident"? at time. The bits were always funny and the timing always on.

I guess he had an eternal beef with Bob Newhart about the phone call thing, but hell, a premise is just a premise, a premise doesn't work itself. Those were two different minds running in two different directions. They're both champs in my book!

"Stewardess, how long does it take to get to Los Angeles?" "I don't know, we've never made it."

RIP.

Never to my taste back then, though one had to acknowledge his skill,  Berman was neurotic as hell. I had a sad encounter with him much later on, when he was doing dinner theater -- in this case a comedy where the "star" was the young actor who had played "Horshack" on "Welcome Back, Kotter." The production was pretty bad, almost certainly because the "Horshack" kid was a punk who was interested in more or less horsing around, not putting over the Neil Simon-like comedy (don't recall whether it was an actual Simon play, but like any piece of theater, the performers had to pay attention to what they were doing to put it over). In any case, I got an agonized letter from Berman a few days later, admitting that the show was not very good but that it wasn't his fault -- and it certainly was not. But boy was that letter agonized.

P.S. Oddly enough, of all the many comics I got to talk to in my time at the paper, the most un-neurotic one was Bob Newhart.

[JSngry]

1 hour ago, Larry Kart said:

 Berman was neurotic as hell.

Yeah, I've gone back and forth with that about him many times over the years, at first finding it "cool"  then obnoxious and then ping-ponging in-between/all over the place until finally just accepting that it was whatever that "was", it was not just shtick. It was real, and it was funny (because people be who they be, so take it all in and laugh - and THAT'S the lesson right there, take it all in and whatever else you do, LAUGH). If it had not have been funny...

And I really freaked out the first time I saw the credits and found out that it was him playing Larry David's dad on Curb. I didn't recognize him in any way, but was laughing my ass of wondering who IS this guy, and then I saw "Shelly Berman" and I was like, oh shit, NO WONDER!

Some of those bits, though...I can still LMAO, like Kafka on the phone. Funny premise, funny execution, just funny, period.