Shelley Berman
US comedian who played the little man in a hostile world
SHELLEY BERMAN, who has died aged 92, was an American comedian in the vanguard of those who turned late-fifties stage performances from a series of gags into vignettes about life’s struggles; often with a telephone as a prop (visible or invisible), he became the incarnation of the small man beset by a malign universe.
Berman himself had known struggle, going in the space of two years from near-penury to earnings of $500,000 a year in such venues as Carnegie Hall and on nationwide television. He was to know it again in the 1960s as comic turns lost favour. He remained resilient, so much so that, in his eighties, he became known to new generations as Larry David’s hugespectacled father in the television series Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Born as Sheldon Berman on February 3 1925 to a Chicago tavern owner, he grew up in a crowded household containing several generations of his family. After being invalided out of the US Navy in 1947 owing to breathing problems, he studied in Chicago at the Goodman Theatre, where he met his wife-to-be, Sarah Herman. Together they toured the country, taking any work, sometimes in theatre, but also in shops or (in Berman’s case) as a taxi driver.
In 1956, they returned to Chicago where Berman joined the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret revue group. Without a sparring partner, he devised confrontations over a telephone line, his only other prop being the stool on which he perched. Little by little he attracted a small club following and eventually signed with Verve Records. An album, Inside Shelley Berman (1958), sold 500,000 copies.
He began to appear on Jack Parr’s television show, and on Ed Sullivan’s, though one critic spluttered about his use of “such unnecessary shock words and phrases as bad breath, stinky, assorted hells and damns, rotten, bedamned” and gags including “a discourse on functional irregularity, an unzippered fly joke, pimples, throwing up, broad (for girl), a nose-blowing jape and more”.
In the early 1960s, however, the American taste for cabaret – comic and musical – faded. Some performers turned to political activism (Mort Sahl), drugs and death (Lenny Bruce), or films (Woody Allen). Berman’s hopes of forging a new career, however, were somewhat handicapped by a reputation for arrogance.
His 1959 remark, “I am an egregiously disgusting nouveau riche … I’ve got money in my jeans, and if you don’t want me here, I can go elsewhere”, had been widely quoted, and in 1963 he was the subject of an unflattering fly-on-the-wall television documentary Comedian Backstage. The cameras showed him barking commands at a servile crew and recorded the moment when, after coming offstage after a performance, he tore into a terrible rage over a real telephone which had rung for a split second backstage during his climatic monologue.
With bankruptcy looming, he fell back on general acting skills which had already brought him appearances on Broadway and guest spots in television series such as The Twilight Zone. He appeared in numerous touring productions, television shows, and some films, including Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (1964). For many years he also taught aspiring humorists and comedians. “Spontaneous humour is there for the taking,” he maintained, providing performers did not “fall into the trap” of imitating themselves and treated each night afresh.
In 2002 Larry David brought him back from relative obscurity and he became father Nat on Curb Your Enthusiasm, on which he was often able to revisit the surreal twists of his Fifties act. He is survived by his wife, and by a daughter; a son predeceased him.
Shelley Berman, born February 3 1925, died September 1 2017