Word: berman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Shelley Berman's closet, a dozen $325 suits hang in a row, the right sleeve of each bent at the elbow, recalling a cocked arm holding a telephone. Short of a medieval armorer, no tailor could keep a jacket from taking on the prime characteristic of its owner, the comedian who has risen to fame by talking to imaginary people on imaginary telephones...
Ordering new clothes in $1,000 lots, Berman fights the problem with money. His nightclub dates, his cross-country tours of one-night stands, and his three long-playing, long-talking records, which have sold over $1,000,000 worth of copies, round out an income of $500,000 a year. Currently playing (at close to $10,000 a week) the enormous Empire Room at Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria, where a joke can get lost as easily as a cough in a wind tunnel, he is financially the most successful of the New Comedians...
...milk, TV commercials, a dentist ominously taking X rays. Perhaps best known is his airline routine ("Coffee, tea or milk?" chirps the stewardess, although the wing is on fire); because of the recent disasters, the sketch has been retired, but many airlines still use the record during stewardess training. Berman builds his long routines forward and backward from initial jokes, as in his newest piece, which grew around a forlorn conventioner who is afraid that if he loses his name badge, no one will talk...
...Beneath Berman's gentle, familial humor and his brilliantly controlled voice, there is the constant hint of tension. Like a sort of Everymanic-depressive, Berman offstage-and sometimes even Berman onstage-rapidly moves from patience to anger, from caution to bravado, from hilarity to gloom. Every line of his rough-weathered face ("Isn't it awful," he says, "to be 34 and look 90?") is on the defensive. He blinks, cracks his knuckles and pulls his hair as he chases worries across his mind: Will the talking records choke off his popularity in clubs? Should he order...
Many of his monologues are autobiographical "confessions." During Prohibition, on Chicago's West Side, he recalls tearfully, his Russian-born grandmother made bathtub gin to support the family, and one of Sheldon Berman's first memories is of being held by his mother (now dead) in a tight clutch of terror while police raided their home. His father Nathan was a tavern owner, and he appears, in one of Berman's best routines, as a militantly bourgeois delicatessen keeper who rough-talkingly tenders a chunk of his life savings so that his son can go to acting...