Shelley Berman

SE: How are you doing?
SB: I’m doing fine. Thank you.

SE: Now aside from your performances, you mentioned to me the other day that you also do writing for friends of yours. It was for a judge that you recently wrote for?
SB: Oh yes, that was fun. I do help with speeches.. I help find humor. I help them structure speeches. It’s one of the things that I do.

SE: I’ve never seen a judge with a sense of humor. Was he trying to be funny?
SB: No, he’s not trying to be funny. He’s trying to make a speech. And in this case he has a roast to do and so I helped him with that. But most of the time I just help him make serious points and if he wants to be humorous I help him find the humor without schlepping some joke in from outside like some people do. They’ll find some silly joke and they’ll put the name of one of the known figures into the joke and it’s very phony, and it’s very corny, and it’s never funny. But generally the humor is right there in front of the guy. All you have to do is avail yourself of it. Anyway, that’s one of the things I do.

SE: I don’t believe I’ve ever seen any albums of comedy sell as many copies as yours have! Aside from your albums that I have at home, as a kid I bought every copy I saw and now have boxes of them in my parents’ basement.
SB: (Laughs) That’s good, well… your family meant some dollars to me I guess in the old days.

SE: When I was three or four years old my aunt and uncle would always play your records and even though I was too young to understand the routines, your delivery was very funny to me.
SB: I guess that’s part of it, thank you. I guess the actor in me does a lot of the humor. I like that part of it.

SE: You grew up in Chicago?
SB: Yes..On the west side of Chicago.

SE: Was it right after you were out of school when you started acting in stage plays?
SB: Yes… well it wasn’t right after high school no. There was World War Two when I was in the Navy. Then I got out of the Navy and went to school to study the theatre..to have formal education of the theatre. I went to the Goodman Theatre in Chicago which was right behind the Art Institute which was a real school! It was a great school. I was there for three years and I came back on a fellowship and then went into stock companies…one stock company right outside of Chicago called The Woodstock Players. And in that company there were some people who’s names might be familiar to you… Geraldine Paige, Tom Bosley, Betsy Palmer, ultimately Paul Newman. We all got our sea legs there doing a play a week! A new play every week. (Laughs)

SE: Was it during a break while doing those plays that you decided to do some… I want to say stand up comedy, but you sat down most of the time.
SB: (Laughs) No, it wasn’t like that. I stayed with the theatre, purely with the theatre and with television at that time and was a struggling actor. I would work stock companies around New York, around Chicago.. in Chicago and in New York just trying to get steady work. It was very hard for me to do that. I was always too tall, or too short, or too funny, or too funny looking, or not funny looking enough and I would tie up at auditions. I just… when I would read I’d just fall apart. And then I went out to the west coast to try my luck and nothing happened on the west coast. So I taught ballroom dancing to make a living, my wife was supporting me. We got married right out of school, right out of Goodman Theatre. Then I joined a group in Chicago called The Compass Players. We did improvisational Theatre. It was very fast, whatever was thrown at us we did an improv. The company eventually was called The Second City. We were the originals of that group in that company. That company… we had Andy Duncan, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Severon Darden, Bobby and Mark Gordon.  Paul Sills was our director. It was a great company! We were doing some really genuine, beautiful pieces of work. And when that company moved on to St. Louis I stayed there and auditioned at a nightclub and eventually became a comedian. They went to St. Louis and I stayed in Chicago. I got a job at a club on Rush street called Mr. Kelly’s.

SE: Is that where the “Inside” album was recorded?
SB: No, “Inside” was recorded about a year later when my friend… I made a good friend of another comedian by the name of Mort Saul and he suggested that I record my material. But at that time I was working at the Hungry i in San Francisco and that’s where my first record was made and I had no idea that it was going to be a hit. It just was tremendous! But there were three cities we worked. We worked San Francisco at The Hungry i, Chicago at Mr. Kelly’s, New York at The Blue Angel… this was our circuit.

SE: I wish I had been old enough at the time to go to the Hungry i!
SB: (Laughs) Yeah I know. I was fortunately (Laughs).. or unfortunately.

SE: I had no idea that “Inside” was done here at the Hungry i.
SB: Yes, it was done at the… as a matter of fact, much of the first three albums that I did was done at the Hungry i… the first three albums that went gold. Then the rest, they were all recorded in performance, in concert. You never did it in the studio.

SE: Not even “The Sex Life Of The Primate”? That was done live also, but not inside a studio?
SB: “The Sex Life Of The Primate” was done with a live audience in a theatre.

SE: On the album “Let Me Tell You A Funny Story” you did all of the intros to the bits from other albums…
SB: Yeah, but I never made that album. Those were all old pieces, which was supposed to be called “My Favorites”, but somebody changed that. So it was just… I don’t know, it was a novelty album that I regard as having made.. I didn’t make it.  It was just pieces that they put on the record.

SE: Val Valentine produced the “Personal Appearance” album. Did he also produce the first three albums?
SB: I don’t know who produced most of the early records. They were done on Verve…

SE: I was guessing that he did the first three because there was no production credit on them.
SB: No, I don’t know. I really don’t remember who did the producing on those albums.

SE: Did you do any of the editing of the material on those albums?
SB: No, there wasn’t that much editing. I mean, we just sort of did it. I winged it, we did it, and pieces went on as done! No editing really, except for “The Sex Life Of The Primate” when I was working in kind of a different technique. Actually there were four people on that: Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Lovelady Powell, and myself. There, because it was all improvisational, I had to edit all of that.

SE: There were very few comedians at that time that gave everyone the real feeling that everything you were talking about on the phone was really happening! I can say that people like Bob Newhart were always funny, but when they did those phone routines, it seemed like they were just reading a teleprompter.
SB: (Laughs) Well, it was a different technique.

SE: There were Mike Nichols and Elaine May and yourself…
SB: Well… yeah, Nichols and May worked in that style because we came out of that same sort of milieu you see. We were similar, at least in our deliveries.

SE: Another contemporary of yours at that time that I’m also a huge fan of is Lenny Bruce.
SB: Well Lenny… yes, but Lenny had his own special brand of humor… and yes he was a contemporary. We got to know him.

SE: He did a couple of bits about you or…
SB: Yes! He certainly did.(Laughs) He had me tagged!

SE: On a couple of his different albums.
SB: Yes, I know, I know, but we used to do that to each other a lot. I mention him…

SE: You mentioned him on the “Outside” album.
SB: Yes, I talk about him on that. But he has me pegged, boy. He did a lot of funny stuff! On me and a few others.

SE: Did you two ever work the same club?
SB: No, we wouldn’t work the same clubs together because we had different.. I think different audiences and different techniques. I think that I would’ve been afraid to work in the same club with him at the same time.(Laughs) Because he really… he had a whole different way about going to an audience.. then I had mine.

SE: So was it Norman Granz that saw one of your early shows and decided to make sure that you were a Verve artist?
SB: Well, what happened was that Mort Saul talked me into it. I’d never met Norman Granz, but I just went there and signed up, and I made a record. I didn’t know that I signed for three records, but they made the second album and that went and then they wanted a third album and I said, “The material isn’t good. I haven’t got enough material. Can you give me another year?” They said, “No, we’ve got to have it now. You’re contracted to us.” And what do they do? They made… that third album was all out takes. All of it was out takes and they did it without my knowledge!

SE: That was “The Edge Of” album, huh?
SB: Yes, I remember Don Rickles saying, “The next one is going to be called ‘Up Shelley Berman‘.” (Laughs)

SE: (Laughs) “The Edge Of” had I believe four tracks on it… That was another thing that confused me as a little kid. Verve would never list any titles of the tracks on the label.
SB: No, you just had to listen to the record.

SE: It’s a great album! It’s just as funny every time I listen to it.
SB: Thank you. Well, we did what we did. And at that time it was about as true as you could get. Then you had Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. They did a whole improv and it developed into the most beautiful, funny record! I’m trying to think of some of the others… a lot of records, that was a big time for comedy records. And I’ll tell ya, I must say that it was my record that broke the ice! And I got a Grammy for that one. It was the first non-musical album to get a Grammy.

SE: That’s great!
SB: Yep, spoken word.

SE: You’ve still got the gold records and all that hanging up?
SB: Yeah, I’ve got things hanging on my wall collecting dust but…

SE: (Laughs)
SB: But I’m very proud of them.

SE: I remember hearing about the fact that you also got the first gold record for a comedy album.
SB: That’s correct, yes. It was the first one and it was a big seller, very big! And then I got to be the first stand-up at Carnegie Hall. There were a lot of firsts in my life, but we were… a lot of comedians had broken away from the type of techniques of their predecessors. And it wasn’t that we were alike, none of us were alike with each other. It was just that we were slightly different from the other comedians. We weren’t telling jokes. We were doing other stuff.

SE: Were there any other comedians at that time that you were a fan of? Who’s work you admired as well?
SB: Well, I admired my contemporaries.. the ones we’ve been talking about here, but certainly in terms of our predecessors… the ones who at least had recognition before… I mean, they weren’t dead once we came around. They were still going and still going strong. Milton Berle was still going strong. Red Skelton was still going strong. These were people we loved! When we watched these comedians we were thrilled. These were very good men.. and Henny Youngman, my god! We worshiped these guys! So it didn’t stop when we got started, it kept going.

SE: The last album you did for Verve was in 1966 of 1967?
SB: Oh please, don’t give me years. That’s so upsetting! (Laughing) I don’t know.. I really don’t know when I did the last record.

SE: (Laughs) The “Personal Appearance” album sounds huge! Where was that one recorded?
SB: In a personal appearance. It was about two or three theatres on tour where they kept recording my show and then found what I liked the best, and then they put it out.

SE: It sounds like it was done at Carnegie Hall or somewhere.
SB: I’m not sure if we recorded anything at Carnegie Hall… I know I was there, but we recorded at many auditoriums, big auditoriums. Full houses came and I was pretty thrilled with that so, we did alright with that… with “A Personal Appearance”.

SE: Right after that album you started doing stage plays again?
SB: Well, I didn’t start to go back to do… I’ve been doing stage plays all along, and I just did more that’s all. When I could I would do a stage play whenever I could because that was the beginning and I really figured that comedy was really a stop gap. So, yes I started doing other things. I wanted to do other things, and I did.

SE: What were some of the plays you were working in at the time?
SB: Well, I did a Broadway show… I got to do two Broadway shows, a musical called “A Family Affair”. It was a really marvelous thing. I had fun doing that. And then I did stock.. I did touring companies.. I did “Two By Two” the musical of “Flowering Fish” that was the Noah’s ark musical, and then I did the national tour of “Prisoner Of 2nd Avenue” a Neil Simon play. I was doing very well, very well with that and I’m still doing that.

SE: I’ve always wondered if you wrote a play because “The Sex Life Of The Primate” album lists you as the writer.
SB: Well, I didn’t write all that. That was all improvised. Stiller and Meara.. they did improv in that thing. I mean, I guided it. I told them what they had to do and the points they should make and then I edited. But they created that piece you know. But then when we got together and did the sex in the classroom thing, then it was an improv in which I sort of controlled a lot of it. But, none of that was written. None of my first three records were written. I’ve done six records and none of them were written. I mean, I got writers credit because it was transcribed and then we went to BMI to register. But I never wrote that comedy stuff. I think I wrote maybe out of all the things I’ve ever done… maybe three routines where I felt I had to sit down and put it together because it was complicated. But no, these were not… I used to have a secretary who transcribed my material after it was already done! But they call it improv and it’s a real art form. It’s a true art form.

SE: I was just looking at the back of your last CD and noticed that it was produced by Stanley Ralph Ross, the man who gave us the “Batman” TV show in the 60’s.
SB: Yeah, well Stanley Ralph Ross passed on about a year ago. We were buddies and I hated to lose him, but he got sick and he couldn’t make it.

SE: That’s a shame to lose a guy like him. Is there any chance of you maybe licensing the tapes for all of your earlier albums… I guess that Polygram owns the master tapes to all of them…
SB: Yes, they have the masters and I can’t get them. We’ve been trying to get the masters so that I could sell them. We could all make money if they’d just let me have the damn masters! I don’t own the masters. Polygram has them. I don’t know, we’ve been trying for a long time… it just doesn’t work. It’s very frustrating. It’s very upsetting because I know people who want that and I can’t get them to let me do it!

SE: And I’m the type of guy who’d love to see bonus tracks on the CDs of bits that might’ve been edited out.
SB: (Sigh) Alright, let’s not dwell on it…(Laughs) I’ll get too upset.

SE: The CD you recorded in 1995 at The Improv… was there a lot of material recorded at that show to make a second album?
SB: No, no. And incidentally that couldn’t possibly sell because they had too many names on it. It just killed me. It was originally agreed that the title would be “Shelley Berman Live Again” and that’s all! But when people went and tried to buy it they would get “Shelley Berman At The Improv”, “Shelley Berman Live At The Improv”, “Shelley Berman Live Again”, “Recorded At The Improv”… Nobody knew what the title of the record was and it fell through the cracks.

SE: What is your opinion of some of the comedians nowadays who are trying to make it?
SB: Well, they’re not trying, they’re working. Some of them are doing extremely well. But comedy… what’s funny really hasn’t really changed, the delivery has changed and the packaging has changed. I guess during my heyday what you did was going to be to do a television shot, and so your routines were very carefully structured in terms of time and in terms of the kind of language you would use. It was very strict when you did a… say an Ed Sullivan Show, or a Steve Allen Show, or an Andy Williams Show. It was very strict. You couldn’t really talk the way that comedians talk today. Today because of cable comedians can let go! There’s a kind of difference in packaging. So, I don’t have an opinion about that. My feeling is only.. is it funny? Are you being funny? And there are comedians who are being very funny today. So, my opinion is if he’s really good, really funny I will enjoy him and if he’s using a lot of language that I find unpleasant or uncomfortable, and he’s not funny, forget him anyway!

SE: (Laughs)
SB: So, I really don’t categorize the newer comedians and put them into one monolithic lump. They’re different and some of them are very, very good. All I know is if they’re working well and they’re being funny, that’s good enough for me.

SE: I recall seeing you on a talk show.. I think it was the Dick Cavett Show… and you were chatting about that one problem you had in one club where the phone on the wall behind the curtain would always ring loudly during your father and son on the phone routine… and their phone would always ring during the quiet moments in that bit.
SB: I may have talked about that.

SE: And on that talk show they even showed a brief clip of that performance when you walked backstage and merely removed the phone receiver from the hook and asked your road manager, “Why couldn’t we just do this?”
SB: Yeah. Oh isn’t it interesting that you say that, but for years the only thing that’s been said is that I tore a phone off a wall.

SE: (Laughs) What happened to you from that filmed incident?
SB: Oh I suffered greatly. Well what happened is that my career took a terrible bounce. People didn’t want to work with me. People didn’t want to hire me and it was easy enough for everybody to exaggerate every damn thing I did from that point. So, yeah, it was horrible! I did my best to get out of this… out of the comedy thing because I couldn’t work! People wouldn’t let me work! People would hire me, but you couldn’t ask for a certain light, you couldn’t ask for a proper microphone, because everything you did was amplified to the degree where people just thought that you were impossible to work with! And it was a great talking thing. People could converse about it… I suffered greatly, my wife, my children. We suffered greatly.

SE: It did seem that from watching that clip that whatever story got passed along about that show, it just grew and snowballed into this huge eruption of your temper.
SB: Yes, and no reporter who ever interviewed me would ever skip it. They would always tell me, “Well, people must’ve forgotten it by now.” But no interview since that time ever passed up this problem. So when people tell me, “Well, by now for god sakes everyone has forgotten it so, what are you worried about?” But the truth is that if they have forgotten it, even now as we’re talking, it’s going to be reminded. So it isn’t going to go away and I’m not complaining about it, but it’s the truth. It won’t go away.

SE: What club did that happen at by the way?
SB: It was at the… oh god, it was in Hollywood, Florida and I cannot remember what hotel that was. I really can’t. I mean, I would’ve remembered five minutes ago, but tonight I just can’t think of the name of the hotel. They made it look like an opening night. It wasn’t an opening night.. it was two nights, three nights later. The phone rang backstage on a previous night and I just couldn’t figure that out because there was another phone call. But we handled it nicely, but the phone call that got me the big problem was the second phone call happening. That’s why I was so angry.

SE: But like I said, when I saw the clip it didn’t seem like you were too angry…
SB: I was angry!

SE: But it wasn’t as people described it. You seemed a little irate and I’d think that I’d be a little irate also!
SB: Well, you know… but a lot of people didn’t figure that I was lacking forbearance and that I was arrogant, and… oh god, (sigh) it was… but we love a bad guy so that we can throw stones… It’s very good. It clears us of our own conscious and…

SE: (Laughs)
SB: I try to understand it. I try to be not bitter, but I was hurt! I was very seriously hurt.

SE: Right after that you started doing TV shows, and sitcoms?
SB: Well, I never even had a steady sitcom, but I got some roles on sitcoms, yeah. But I worked, you know… I kept working.

SE: I remember seeing you on The Mary Tyler Moore Show…
SB: Oh I did guesting on a lot of shows. But getting a series was going to be hard for me because if you’re selling soap, or you’re selling cars, you want to have somebody with a nice clean nose. You don’t want to have somebody who’s known to be temperamental and angry. So it became very hard for me to find a good opportunity. And there were people who wouldn’t touch me, just wouldn’t touch me.

SE: Today you do a lot of your shows in Nevada?
SB: I get to do Vegas, yeah. I do two appearances a year in Vegas. I go to Harrah’s and I have a wonderful time there and I make the young people laugh without using contemporary urban language. And so I have the young people, I have the older people, and uh… it’s the best of both worlds. I’m really enjoying that.

SE: The “Live Again” CD that you released in 1995, do you own the rights to that album?
SB: Yes I do. “Shelley Berman Live Again”. Yeah, I’ve got the rights, but that album is no longer in print. It was on K-Tel/Chuckles and it isn’t there anymore.

SE: Is there a chance that you will be re-releasing it anytime soon?
SB: Yes, I’m trying to do that right now. We’re trying to get that album out.

SE: When you started acting and making comedy albums and doing shows at the clubs were you also a fan of music?
SB: I’ve always been a music fan. I’ve always been a jazz fan. One of the guys I used to listen to all the time was Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond. That was the first time I’d heard “Take Five”. They were sitting in at The Hungry i and I came into town and I went there to watch, and by god, I was smitten! “Take Five”, I’ve never heard anything like that, never saw that. when I first did my few concerts I was just one of the characters, one of the acts with a jazz band or a jazz group. So yes, we did a lot of that because Norman Granz was pushing jazz concerts and his brother was doing some jazz concerts.

SE: Well, I hope that you get a hold of those masters at Verve and release those great early albums soon!
SB: I have people trying, been trying and Polygram is just keeping them buried. God knows why. I don’t know why. I would buy them in a second! I can’t have my own… I would share it with anybody who gave me the rights to produce!

SE: In my opinion the albums would still sound as brilliant if you were to record those same routines today!
SB: But I can’t re-record really old material. It sounds like I can, but you can’t do that old airline routine and expect people to laugh at it today. You can’t. It sounds like you can. And you can’t do a phony record in which people are just gonna laugh, and you try to imitate yourself. I can’t impersonate myself. I will re-record a lot of things. I am planning to re-record much. But you can’t… it just doesn’t work.

SE: A lot of material on your records sound so personal. Were those routines put together by things you saw, or people you know? Like the bit about the guy who got too drunk the night before…
SB: Oh no, no, no, no. It’s never literal. When you talk about having a problem with a department store you make it rather extreme. We’ve all had problems dealing with a department store, any kind of petty bureaucracy. We’ve had these experiences. So you don’t do it literally. You do a translation, but it’s a different translation of the event. So it’s never actually what happened. It’s with considerable artistic license that you create these things.

SE: And the phone conversation between your father and yourself?
SB: Well, that’s a little different… now that’s different. There’s still license in there of course, it’s drama. You have to be careful that you don’t bore the audience with your life story. You have to make it humorous. You have to make it touching. That’s another matter… That is different… That is a single different matter.

SE: Yeah, one thing I’ve always noticed about your material on the albums was that it gets to be so deep and serious, and then you’ll turn around and twist it, and make it funny for awhile. And then close the routine with the seriousness. It’s great!
SB: Well, that’s the boy who isn’t invited to the party… Sammy and Davy, and the guy who tries to borrow money because he needs money. (Laughs) Yes, these are interesting pieces because they deal with loneliness, or they deal with poverty. They deal with other matters… Yes, I do have some serious pieces. They’re funny, but they’re serious.

SE: After buying multiple copies of your albums, I once noticed that during one of those serious closures to one of the pieces on “The Edge Of Shelley Berman” album, that the character gets really frustrated and says “God damn it!” and on some copies of the album you can hear that, and on others it seems that Verve records censors that word out of the routine. What gives?
SB: Well it’s… people took great liberties, many took enormous liberties with my work. And… you just can’t beat em’. You just can’t.

SE: There were so many changes done with your albums, “Inside & Outside” in a gatefold sleeve 2-record set, and then they started to make the first three Hi-Fi albums stereophonic… lots of changes.
SB: (Laughs) Well, there were some on a positive side, yes.

SE: Recently I found that you starred in an original episode of “The Twilight Zone” which was a great show and has a huge cult following.
SB: Oh yes, that was one of the classics.

SE: Yes, it is a classic show! What was that experience like doing an episode for a show like that? How did it come about?
SB: It was super! Rod Serling wrote it for me and I was very honored. Imagine this guy sitting down and writing a show for somebody! I don’t know if you recall it or ever saw it, but it was about me being a kind of a fussbudget who wanted everybody to be like me. And I was able to learn a magic incantation and I got everybody to be me. So, everybody… I mean, on the ads in the subway, the pictures looked like me, the people getting onto the subway train looked like me, and things got very, very bad because all the me’s in the world became too hard for me to handle. And then I prayed I’d be myself again and that everybody would be who they were and it worked out. I was a much better human being afterwards.

SE: I’m gonna have to find a tape of that. It sounds like a great episode!
SB: But it was marvelous to do, just marvelous to do. Except of course at that time we didn’t have the great kind of artistry of special effects that we have today. So they made a life mask of me and then they made rubber masks for all these people to wear… to be me. It just looked like a lot of people wearing Shelly Berman masks.

SE: (Laughs) Every once in a while I see the collectors with the trading card of your picture from that episode.
SB: (Laughs) Buzz Kulik directed and he was magnificent. The writing was magnificent. I loved doing it and I still get an awful lot of action on it. And when people send me things to sign, I know that every time I sign it it’s not for them personally… (Laughing) They’re going to sell it.

SE: So Rod Serling wrote that one with you in mind huh?
SB: Not with me… he wrote it for me specifically.

SE: Well, before we go I just want to say that your albums are probably the greatest comedy records I’ve heard… always hilarious, always perfect!
SB: Very good to hear, thank you. I certainly appreciate that, absolutely appreciate that.

SE: I spent the other day putting them all onto CD myself.
SB: (Laughing) Good! That’s a labor of love let me tell ya! Because that’s a lot of time, a lot of hard time.

SE: Well, thank you so much for all your time. It’s great to get to speak with you!
SB: I’m honored that you think enough of me to do this.

SE: Well, thank you.
SB: Okay, we’ll talk. Bye.