After a half-century in comedy and 81 years on earth, comic legend Shelley Berman has accumulated a host of awards, including the first Grammy for a non-music record. But no lifetime achievement prize, until last Saturday night at the Boston Comedy Festival. And Berman, lately seen as Larry David’s father on Curb Your Enthusiasm and as a slightly senile judge in Boston Legal, is feeling a bit ambivalent about the whole thing.
“I’m not finished yet!” he jokes. “Every once in a while, I’ll get the compliment, ‘You were a great comedian.’ Wait a minute! Take out the ‘were’ and we’ll talk.”
Berman isn’t one to coast. He’s an author, an actor, a professor of humor writing at USC and, of course, an acclaimed comedian. But he says for a long time, he “didn’t even dream of becoming a comedian.” In between his serious dramatic work, Berman fell in with the Chicago-based improv troupe The Compass Players, a group that would eventually become the Second City and serve as a breeding ground for three generations of trailblazing comedy. One night in 1957, Berman happened to see Mort Sahl performing at a nightclub. It was his eureka moment.
“Comedians always had to do mother-in-law jokes,” he says of the time. “To see somebody get up and make an audience laugh not by telling jokes –just by making comments — that was remarkable for me to see that.”
Sahl would later give Berman the idea of recording a comedy album of his own, a legendary, still hilarious record called Inside Shelley Berman. It’s an album filled with masterfully constructed one-sided conversations and Berman’s astounding, without-a-net comedy style.
“I made six albums, beginning with that one. Not one word was written. It was all the result of improv,” he explains. “I never know at the beginning where those [routines] are going. You can’t lock yourself into a story if you’re doing an improv.”
Of course, one of the premier showcases for Berman’s considerable skills as an improviser, comedian and actor has been on HBO’s critically acclaimed Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show has no formal script, and the actors, which include fellow comedians Richard Lewis, Jeff Garlin and Susie Essman, are merely given descriptions of their motivation or action and then play it from there.
“I got called in [to work a scene out] with Larry David,” Berman says, of his audition. “I came in and was handed a piece of paper that said, ‘His mother — your wife — has died, but you don’t want to tell him.'”
After cracking up David and his producers with his improv, Berman was hired on the spot, and that scene became his first episode of the show. His character has since smoked pot with Larry and a prostitute, watched his son deliver a shockingly incompetent wedding vow and comforted Larry on his deathbed, shortly before Larry died and was then kicked out of heaven for being too much of a nuisance. It is a show that has made awkwardness hilarious and reminded audiences, as Shelley Berman has throughout his career, that comedy is an art form.
“I don’t understand anyone not appreciating comedy as an art form,” he says.
“Then what the hell is it? Are we plumbers?”
Berman received his Lifetime Achievement Award at a gala comedy event at the Cutler Majestic Theatre that also honored Bill Dana and, appropriately enough, Mort Sahl, who was in absentia. Following a standing ovation from the audience, Berman gave a typically self-deprecating, obsessively self-confessional acceptance speech, joking that he felt like a VIP but wondered why he wasn’t too busy to be there in person. Judging by the reaction and adoration of his fellow comics and people in the crowd, it’s a good thing he made the trip.