Word: berman
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Brief, well-structured and without bravura effects, Wallant's novel compresses whole chapters about the sorrowing man and his marriage into a few sentences. Plumber Joe Berman, the hero, packs a quarter-century into a single moment of nostalgia as he daydreams about his wife on their 25th anniversary: "He knew the little collapses of her body, the age-ugly folds and wrinkles, and he loved and revered her all the more for the neat, attractive exterior she was still capable of. He was her proud ally in the public appearance...
More bizarre than Berman and more emotionally engaging than Sahl are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who brilliantly exaggerate sophistication until it bursts with humor. A dentist and his patient fall in love ("I knew it when I looked into your mouth and saw you were English clear through"). In a sequence called Bach to Bach they are two symphonic phonies comparing sensitivities in bed ("I can never believe that Bartok died on Central Park West"). Newest of the offbeat generation is Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind opens up some odd pockets of history-Khrushchev getting a head spray...
...removed from the old standup, joke-book comedians, they mostly do set pieces that are almost playlets. Using the telephone as a trademark prop, Shelley Berman prefers to find his material in the living room rather than the newspaper. Now a father talking to his daughter before her first date, he tells her that a car is a motel room on wheels; now Dr. Sprocket, child psychologist, he tells a patient's mother: "I know your little boy. His name is Oedipus." (While Sahl's four published recordings have sold only 125,000 copies, the closer...
...Hope, Pa., Bucks County Playhouse: Shelley Berman joins Frances Reid and Philip Bourneuf in a new play, The Mirror Under the Eagle...
Known as the University of Illinois Committee on School Mathematics, Be-berman's nine-year-old project is an effort to give new life to the most irksome subject in U.S. high schools. Supported by $600,000 in grants from the Carnegie Corp., Beberman's system was taught this year to 8,000 students in 95 secondary schools across the country. Next year it will reach 120 schools. The only problem is a shortage of teachers versed in the method. At 34, Beberman has a full life's work cut out for him training them...