There is nothing like a creepy alien, and Ub Iwerks’ Stratos-Fear (1933) has a bunch of them. Willie Whopper floats toward a weird planet where a scientist with a ray gun turns a cow (with a broom for a tail?!) into dairy and leather products.
A pig becomes ham and pigskins.
Here’s another one who’s a voyeur. His eye is a telescope. He ejaculates smoke from his head when he becomes excited (and the lower part of his body rises up). Could this be any more Freudian?
The other characters use his ears to see through his telescopic eye.
Alas, the ending is a cop-out. It’s all a dream. I thought the idea behind Willie Whopper was he was supposed to make up stories that he insisted actually happened to him.
A mouse dancing with a banana peel? Sounds like something from an early ‘30s cartoon where everything inanimate came to life. But it’s not. It’s from the 1956 Cinemascope cartoon Muscle Beach Tom. There’s no reason for the peel to be dancing, which is fine by me. The animation’s pretty attractive.
On the other hand, we have 1940s incidental character meeting 1950s incidental character. The designs for Butch and the girl cat don’t seem like they belong in the same cartoon.
Ray Patterson has his own animation studio now, so Lew Marshall has replaced him in the Hanna-Barbera unit, along with Irv Spence, Ed Barge and Ken Muse.
It might be news to you, but there were troubles in the Golden Age of Radio.
You wouldn’t know it by listening to those old broadcasts today. People still laugh at Fibber McGee and Molly, Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen, Red Skelton (to the right), Jack Benny and so on. But according to a number of critics and columnists, they had been on the air so long that no one would be able to replace them when the time came.
As it was, the fear turned out to be for nought. That’s because the Golden Age petered out in the ‘50s, the big network shows killed off by television, where audiences became larger and larger, advertisers put their money. There were some stragglers into the early ‘60s, but radio turned into a medium of information and disc jockeys. A number of the big variety/comedy stars of radio moved right into television, and there were newcomers to take the places of those who didn’t. New replacing old. It’s not only the cycle of life, it’s the cycle of entertainment.
Herald Tribune writer John Crosby was one who was concerned about the future of radio, though he really only deals with the comedy and variety formats. The following is a two-part column. Several of the ideas mentioned in Crosby’s column did become reality—in television. For a while in the ‘50s, stars rotated in time slots, meaning they didn’t appear every week. The 39-week season hasn’t existed in decades. And live broadcasts ended even in the radio days for sitcoms.
One thing Crosby doesn’t seem to understand is that it wasn’t necessarily the sponsors wanting to stick with the tried and true that kept the stars on the air. It was the audience. They wanted Benny and Fibber and McCarthy. If they hadn’t, sponsors would have dropped them just like they did Phil Cook, Baron Munchausen, Joe Penner and Al Pearce.
Radio Review Talent Gets No Younger
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Nov. 6.—Bing Crosby's successful transcription series on the American Broadcasting Company, a revolution in more ways than one, has uncovered some of the original errors committed by the broadcasters 10 and 20 years ago and has uncovered the precarious framework on which radio has uneasily rested for the last 10 years. Radio's great names are all getting older—most of them are in their fifties; they are almost all rich men and many of them would like to get out of the business and take it easy. There isn't any one to take their place.
How did this come about, anyhow? Well, radio is a strange and unyielding mixture of oil and water, of show business and advertising. Although advertising became the economic base on which radio has rested since the early 1920's, broadcasting remained essentially show business. Its greatest stars were comedians, orchestras and singers. Advertising brought into the business the precise evaluation of profit land loss. The object was to sell soap or laxatives and to do so to get the largest possible audience.
Before the networks became established, independent radio stations had to dig up their own talent and they found it in the local vaudeville houses and night clubs. The result, to take one example, was Amos ‘n’ Andy, both experienced, though certainly not famous, in show business. They were young enough to bring in their own concepts of what a non-visual, highly personal entertainment medium should be. Amos ‘n’ Andy were and still are pure radio showmen.
When network advertising became the big thing in radio, the audience expanded enormously and the advertising agencies instinctively turned to personalities from other branches of show business who were most widely known. That result was Eddie Cantor, a motion picture and Follies star, and Ed Wynn, a well-known stage entertainer. These men brought along the most familiar hallmark of the older branches of show business, the audience. Gradually the listening public, scattered over 3000 miles in individual homes, learned to accept studio laughter and studio applause as the measure of their talent.
But while this debatable innovation might measure their talent, the sponsors had to have some better way to measure the listening audience. Previously show business had but two ways to judge success, the pounding of palm on palm and the jingle of gold in the box office. The listening public could neither applaud nor by tickets, so the Crossley rating came into being.
Originally, the Crossley ratings were the secret of the advertising agencies who paid for them. The ratings were needed to show the sponsor he was getting his money's worth, but were also a handy device to needle the talent. A comedian, say Jack Benny, would be approached by his advertising agency and told he had slipped a point or two in his last show. This was all Greek to the comedian whose prior criterion was applause. Somewhat bewildered, he would promise to do better next time and frequently did.
After awhile, the talent, and you could buy bushels of it for a couple of thousand dollars a week, grew highly inquisitive over these ratings, and insisted on being shown these figures to determine not only his own profit and loss but also his standing in relation to the competition.
Presently, the Bennys and Allens and Amos ‘n’ Andys noticed they were way on top of the parade and when their contracts expired, they demanded more money. A price for a leading comedian shot up as high as $25,000 a week. The Crossley rating became a, device for inflating their salaries and prestige and resulted in skyrocketing all salaries in radio. A top show now costs anywhere from $700,000 to $1,000,000 a year to produce.
Naturally a sponsor, when he's spending that much money, wants the widest possible audience to justify it. He demanded not a five or six rating but a 20 rating, and the only talent that could produce ratings like that were the established stars. This tended to freeze the talent picture about where it was. It takes time, effort, and a lot of money to groom a new comedian and to accustom 20,000,000 people to listen to him every Tuesday night. The sponsors preferred competing for the old ones, and the Amos ‘n’ Andys ceased entering radio.
Yet, without any reflection on their ability, the Hopes, Allens, Bennys, and Charlie McCarthys owe their success to the vast publicity radio has given them far more than to any unique powers of their own. They got in early and monopolized the field. There might be dozens of potential Bob Hopes in the theater, night clubs and elsewhere, but they are not in radio and, under the current system, never, will be. (This is the first of two articles on the growing obsolescence of the top radio stars. Copyright, 1946, for The Tribune).
By JOHN CROSBY
NEW YORK, Nov. 7.—The wear and tear of a weekly radio program has produced a lot of grumbling among radio stars in the past but little was done about it. Curiously enough, it was a comparatively young man who brought the revolt into the open. With a vast and already unmanageable income from movies and records, Bing Crosby could well afford to quit entirely. This gave him a strong bargaining position when he insisted on a transcription rather and a series of live broadcasts.
The success of transcription programs—that is, other than Crosby’s—is a matter of debate, but it’s causing plenty of that. Crosby’s program is almost entirely vocal and orchestral. It's not difficult to turn out six such programs in a matter of days, releasing the singer to his own pursuits. This situation is true of few other radio entertainers. Fred Allen and Bob Hope depend on topical material. Their shows simply couldn't be cut six weeks in advance. As a matter of fact, many Allen programs have to be changed at the last minute because a joke written on Wednesday is out of date by Sunday night.
In a different way, transcription is not the solution for character or situation comedy of the Jack Benny or Charlie McCarthy type. Both comedians could sidestep topical allusion without any great difficulty, but they can’t sidestep the plain hard work involved in putting out one half-show show a week. It just takes a week to put out a smooth half hour of comedy.
Nevertheless other comedians and entertainers are eyeing the Crosby series with great interest, as a partial solution to their problem, and it has had the added effect of stirring up new ideas.
"The top radio stars ten years ago are the top stars today," Edgar Bergen said in an interview a few days ago. "Are we going to give them a rest or are we going to kill them quick? A 39-week season is too tough a grind. There should be some relief.”
Bergen, the guardian, tongue and brain of that little imp Charlie McCarthy, has two ideas that might help reduce the strain of weekly shows. First, if transcription were allowed on N.B.C. (which it isn’t), he thinks it could cut a few shows during his summer vacation, enough to give him, say, a week off in January, another in February and one in March. Three Sundays, he says, would do much to relieve the strain of appearing for 39 consecutive weeks.
His second idea is more radical. Bergen said he planned to approach Allen with a plan to pool their talents and appear on the same half hour for alternating weeks. That would give each comedian two weeks to prepare a show. Or, as an alternative, he would like a 26-week season, with Allen taking the other 26 weeks of the year. The Allen-Bergen combination is a natural because both have the same sponsors, and Allen follows Bergen on Sunday nights.
I don't know what reaction Allen has had to this proposal, but chances are he listened readily. Allen is not happy with his weekly chore. He has threatened to retire for years and is still threatening to step down at the end of the current year.
One more plan is receiving some considering on the west coast. Two of Jack Benny’s cast, Phil Harris and Dennis Day, have their own programs now. If Harris and Day are strong enough to support their own programs, would they and the rest of the Benny cast be strong enough to carry the program without Benny for a week or so while the comedian took a rest?
Another potent factor in the changing picture in radio is the growing obsolescence of entertainers. He and Benny are 52. Charles Correll, the Andy of Amos ‘n’ Andy, is 56. Eddie Cantor is 54. James E. Jordan, better known as Fibber McGee, is 50. The similarity of their ages indicates that when these entertainers leave radio the exodus will not be a gradual proposition ever a period of years but sudden and startling.
All this, the transcription show, the doubling up of talent, the aging of the stars, is part of the same thing. All other branches of show business by sheer instinct of self-preservation have groomed substitutes to take the places of the top talent. Radio, apart from Alan Young and Ed (Archie) Gardner, has borrowed the talent from other media. Most of the best ones came from vaudeville, but that great reservoir dried up long ago. Few persons in motion pictures have the talent to run a half hour radio program and the stage has little to offer either. Radio will have to train its own talent or there won’t be any. (This is the second of two articles on the growing obsolescence of the top radio stars. Copyright, 1946, for The Tribune).
How do you save money on animation? Easy. You don’t animate.
In watching the very first episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you’ll notice how little animation there is. Jay Ward Productions had little choice. For one thing, the cartoons were being made in Mexico by an inexperienced crew. For another, each Rocky half-hour was initially budgeted at $8,530. By contrast, the 30-minute Huckleberry Hound Show was being made by Hanna-Barbera for $21,000.
That meant a lot of masking and short cuts. Below are drawings that don’t move. Either the camera moves into or out of them, or there’s a quick cut so you don’t notice how static the action is as Bill Conrad narrates.
There’s also that old Hanna-Barbera trick: the mouth moves while the rest of the drawing doesn’t. An interesting Ward style choice (by Al Shean?) was to colour-in parts of a character.
Note the similarity of the drawings of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Put a few body parts on cels and you save some more artwork.
To be honest, the designs are not exactly cutting edge. Still, this was only the first go at it (Ward was said to be mortified at the results) but the scripts got funnier and funnier and even though the animation improved, that wasn’t the reason people were watching.
Punny switches highlight the 1939 Warners cartoon Believe It Or Else, a spoof on Robert Ripley’s popular Believe It Or Not newspaper cartoons and radio series.
“Now last year while travelling through India,” says our narrator over a background pan, “I came upon this Hindu snake charmer.
And, indeed, it is a snake charmer.
Fade into the next scene. “This man’s hobby is building ship models in bottles,” the narrator informs us.
Another pan to the right. The narrator proves to be correct.
Keith Scott has revealed the narrator is voiced by Cliff Nazarro, who specialised in double-talk routines. In thinking about it, it sounds like Nazarro is doing an impression of Bob Ripley. Young writer Dave Monahan helped Tex Avery gag this cartoon, while Virgil Ross was given the screen animation credit.
In 1956 Capitol Records, under the supervision of John Seely and Bill Loose, put together a library of stock music cues called “Capitol Hi-Q” designed for use in industrial films and television shows. We’ve written about it extensively in this post on the other blog.
You’ll hear it in the earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons, on the original Gumbys and, infamously, on six Warner Bros. cartoons which gave credit to Seely, though he composed few of the cues. It provided one of the themes for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Donna Reed Show (the theme for Dennis the Menace written by Loose and Seely was a Sam Fox cue). And it seems to have been very well used by industrial producers.
One example is in the training film, The Front Line, produced in 1965 by Fred A. Niles Communications and funded by Reader’s Digest in co-operation with something called the Super Market Institute. It’s a nice little time trip to the days when my mother could pay $20 for a week’s groceries, and supermarket chains had different sized paper bags in slots at the end of the checkout counter (They stopped using paper bags to save trees and the environment, and switched to plastic. We know how well that’s saved the environment).
There’s a little bit of humour with a dyspeptic shopper in this industrial short, which won an Honorable Mention at the 1966 San Francisco International Film Festival. But it’s chock-full of Capitol Hi-Q goodness. The opening and closing theme is PE-283 Bright Beautiful by Phil Green, Ken Thorne and Geoff Love, a trio of English composers who worked for EMI. Green wrote a lot of stock music on his own. A partial list of cues:
6:20 – TC-430 Happy Day (Loose and Seely, the Donna Reed theme)
7:44 – GR-63 The Giraffe (Green)
7:56 – TC-431 Light Activity (Loose and Seely)
9:33 – TC-437 Light Activity (Loose and Seely, a Yogi Bear cue)
11:02 – PE-289 Whistling Boy (Green-Thorne-Love)
11:39 – TC-436 Domestic (Loose and Seely, a Yogi Bear cue)
Checkout counters at supermarkets have changed since this film was made (as lines get clogged by people whose debit cards don’t work) and, of course, so has background music. Hi-Q continued to add albums until the late ‘60s and finally discontinued it. But it’s still around and turns up in the most unexpected places if you like industrial films of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
My thanks to Tim Lones for inadvertently suggesting this Sunday Theatre entry.
If you had to name the two biggest radio/TV comedians of the 20th century, you couldn’t go wrong picking Jack Benny and Bob Hope.
Both had long careers that were ended only by ill health. Benny started and finished earlier than Hope, while old Ski Nose was long past his prime when he finally stopped broadcasting specials.
The two were extremely close. Hope appeared on the Benny radio and TV shows, quite content to toss away the script and see if Jack could keep up (at best) or fit a word in (at worst). It was Hope who finished the eulogy at Benny’s funeral when George Burns broke down and couldn’t carry on.
Hope gets a mention in a rambling syndicated column about Benny by Margaret McManus, who had been a writer for the New York World-Telegram and Sun.
Perhaps the column’s rambling because of poor editing. It opens talking about an actor who isn’t even the focus of the story and quickly disappears. There are some comments about Hope and then the article veers off in a completely different direction before coming to a sudden stop.
I’ve found two versions of the column, both of which contain the middle piece about Hope, and working, so I’ve mushed them together. They’re from two different papers of March 1969.
You also get an idea of the huge amounts of money Jack Benny had. Who else could buy a house, have it re-decorated, and then sell it because the décor wasn’t right? Not me.
Jack Benny Very Proud Of Friendship With Bob Hope
By MARGARET McMANUS
Pope Hadrian was about to leave. He had been calling on Jack Benny, in Benny's suite at the Sherry Netherlands in New York. The Pope is currently portrayed on Broadway by the English actor, Alec McCowen, in "Hadrian VII."
McCowen is one of the comedian's most enthusiastic and vocal admirers. He thinks Benny is one of the great comedians of his day and a great actor as well. He says Benny is the only comedian who seems to be thinking while he is performing.
Jack Benny was obviously delighted with his visitor. He had first met McCowen in London when he was playing Hadrian there, and he was genuinely happy to see him again in Manhattan. Benny, at 75, is a warm and kind man, who responds to friendship. Affection and loyalty have real significance to him. He relishes talking about his friends, smiles to himself when he's recollecting.
"When you add up this many years, you do take count of what you're proudest of. You know what I'm very proud of? My friendship with Bob Hope. He's a wonderful man and I'm very proud that he's one of my closest friends. He says we're the two biggest hams in the world but he's worse than I am.
"I came in by train this time. I hadn't come by train in 12 or 14 years. I wanted to try It one more time. I thought I'd practice my fiddle on the way, but I didn't. You know Hope could never come by train. He couldn't stop working for four days. Now George Burns doesn't want to work at all anymore. You can't get him to work. All he wants to do is play bridge."
Benny doesn't know how to play bridge. He plays a little gin rummy and he says if he played better golf, he is sure he would work less.
"I play such a lousy game of golf, I get discouraged, and I have to go right back to work," he said. "I like to play with Gary Morton (Lucille Ball's husband). He's a terrific golfer, but he's so nice to play with. He can even make me feel good about my game. That takes talent."
Were he the Ely Culbertson of bridge, and the Jack Nicklaus of golf, Jack Benny would still continue to work. It makes his heart beat and he knows this too well. He enjoys traveling, but he enjoys it much more if he is working at the same time.
“I won’t do more than one show a night, but it’s more fun to come into a strange city if you’re working. All your friends come to see you, and they come back stage, and you have someone to go out to supper with.
“You come into a city as a tourist, and you check into a hotel, and you sit there by yourself. Nobody even knows you’re in town. What else would I be doing if I weren’t performing? I wouldn’t want to go over to somebody’s house for dinner every night. I’d rather do a show.”
His violin concerts are what he most likes to do as a performer.
“I just love to play with symphony orchestras. I love that background. It has such dignity.”
Two years ago Benny and his wife, Mary Livingston, sold the house in Beverly Hills where they had lived for 30 years and moved into an apartment.
“Mary thought she’d love it and she did a beautiful job decorating it. Mary always buys the best. She spent a fortune and two weeks after she had it all finished. I looked at her face one night and I said, ‘you don’t like it, do you?’ She said, ‘I hate it.’ I knew I was dead.”
Now the Bennys have bought another house, in Holmby Hills, and Mary is off to the decorator’s.
“It’s a smaller house than we had but it’s a solid, well built house and it lovely setting, lovely grounds. When Mary gets finished with it, it’ll be a beautiful house. Absolutely nobody can spend money like my wife. Gracie was pretty good at it, but nothing like Mary.
Mary is also his best critic.
“When Mary tells you it’s good, you know it,” he said. “She’s the acid test.”
The Benny’s only daughter, Joan, married to movie producer Robert Blumofe, lives just a few minutes from them, in Beverly Hills. She has four children, two boys and two girls.
The most popular cartoon character just before the advent of sound cartoons was likely Felix the Cat. Songs were written about him and there seems to have been a fair bit of Felix merchandise. He displays a nice arrange of emotions in his pantomime shorts and the various writers of the cartoons came up with interesting and funny ways to morph drawings on screen.
A book called Masters and Masterpieces of the Screen (1927) includes a short section of making animated cartoons, and Felix is the one highlighted. It would be nice to know who the animator is in the picture accompanying the article.
Sound crippled Felix. The Sullivan studio dallied on talking cartoons and soon Felix lost his distributor. By the time music and tacky vocal effects were added to some silent Felix cartoons, he was distributed via states’ rights and soon disappeared from the screen, his place taken by a host of new talking/singing characters.
Animating Hand-Made Pictures As in Early Experiments, the Cast is Sometimes Manufactured
"ANIMATED DRAWINGS" are a form of moving picture that has several uses. In educational and scientific work, diagrams and other drawings are animated to furnish explanations, as, for example, in portions of the astronomical picture on the eclipse of the sun. Important news items are also sometimes explained on the screen with the aid of animated drawings. The most common form, however, is the animated cartoon comedy, a short film, in which all the action was originally drawn, and in which each frame (separate little picture of the original film) was taken separately by the camera man.
When it is remembered that there are sixteen frames to one foot of film, or one second of time, in an ordinary moving picture, it will be seen that the studio that prepares one of these small movies has a good bit of work cut out. The studio that puts out Pat Sullivan's "Felix, the Cat" pictures, one each two weeks, states that it requires the labor of fifteen people for that time to make one of the little pictures that occupy about seven minutes' time on the screen.
Different studios have adopted special devices for holding their drawings in absolutely exact position and for using cameras and lamps to the best advantage. In general, the method is something like this : The scenario is finished. The artist hands a schedule of scenes to be made to each of the various animators employed. In addition, he gives them sketches of each scene, showing the action started which they are to continue. The sheets on which the sketches are made are punched with two or more holes, so that they are held in exactly a certain position by pegs on the drawing board. All the other sheets used, including the celluloid pictures and backgrounds finally photographed, are so punched and can be fastened in exactly the same position.
Each animator carries on the action given him, first reading his sequence over carefully to see if he can plan any additional funny business to make it more entertaining. The next sheet following the first will show the action slightly advanced from the first position, say a quarter of an inch if it is supposed to be slow, or half an inch if it is faster. It is necessary that each of them make from one hundred to two hundred a day. When these are finished, they are handed to a tracer, who traces on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) of the same size the outline of the drawing. Another tracer follows and fills in the blacks. The celluloid is then turned over and the whole figure is painted in with a gray opaque water color. The celluloid sheet will be photographed over a sheet which carries a background for the picture, and the blocking in of the whole picture with water color is necessary to prevent the background from showing through.
When finished, these celluloid sheets are sent to the camera man, together with a chart showing how many exposures are to be made of each. The background to be photographed with the scene is fastened down just as the sheets have been in the drawing. This will remain in place through the scenes where it is used. Then the celluloid sheets are taken, one at a time, fastened down over the background, and photographed, each being removed to make place for another.
The motion-picture camera is suspended at about three feet above the picture, and strong Cooper Hewitt vapor lamps, so arranged that the light is concentrated on the picture, are employed. Everything ready, the camera man presses a foot pedal, automatic and motor-operated, and takes one picture. The sheet must be removed, another put in its place and another picture taken. It takes a long time to complete a movie in this fashion, and the photography occupies a large part of the time.
There are many varieties of combinations of animated drawings with other things, as with a regular photographic movie film, such as one sees in the clever "Out of the Inkwell" pictures, and it is easy to fancy a vast number of uses for them aside from these straight cartoons.
Germans are reported as deploring the comparative failure of what they consider the chief film of the season, made by cutting out the figures to be photographed in silhouette, and occupying an artist for years. Of that, we can judge if it is shown here. C. W. Taylor.
His first big TV break came in 1949 as the star of a musical comedy series called “The Adventures of Homer Herk.”
You know him better as a stand-up comic. He’s Shelley Berman.
Berman passed away today from complications of Alzheimer’s at age 92.
He was from Chicago, the home of WGN-TV, which signed him for the ambitious local show we just mentioned. Maybe it was a little too ambitious. Critics weren’t kind.
The Billboard’s Cy Wagner wrote on April 23, 1949 (the half-hour show debuted March 31 at 7:30 p.m.)
Inaugural program of Chicago’s first musical comedy TV series indicates a bright future for the programs providing the script is improved, direction becomes more exact and the acting loses some of its awkwardness. The original songs and musical background by Gordon Pace showed the greatest promise. Sets and costumes did much to strengthen the dramatic impact.
Program’s basic idea, altho not new, is effective and constitutes a good TV vehicle. Each week, Homer Herk, a dreamer, whose surname should obviously begin with a “J,” projects himself via day dreams into historical situations in which he plays a major role. Initial program was woven around his supposed transition into the character of Marc Antony and featured love scenes with Cleopatra, fights with the real Antony and intrigues with Cleopatra’s adviser, Olympus. Show was hurt by hammy, amateur acting which made situations that were supposed to be comedy just low burlesque. Doras Smith as Cleopatra, Everett Clarke as Antony, Dick Bull as Olympus and Shelley Berman as Herk were all guilty of overplaying their lines.
All of Pace’s music was good, with the toppers being Whatever I Do a solo by Miss Smith and So Compelling, a duet by Miss Smith and Berman.
With the suggested improvements listed, above program could be definite network material.
Variety’s “Mart” was more dismissive, saying “ ‘Adventures’ is apparently beamed at family circle, but misses by a mile. Script and situations are childish for adults, and too oversexed for children...It seems a shame to waste production money on such trivia.”
Berman obviously recovered from the experience. Here’s a feature story outlining his post-Heck career, published in the Bristol Daily Courier on August 12, 1962. He may have been at the peak of his stand-up (or “sit-down”) career at this point, leavened by several comedy records that had done very, very well. Of course, he reached a new generation years later as an actor, playing Larry David’s father on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Life Writes Shelley Berman’s Acts
Ten Hard Years Aided ‘Overnight Success’ By EDGAR PENTON Hollywood
Shelley Berman is an honest man.
Really. Ask Shelley.
The famed comedian, he of the anguished, one-sided conversation and the imaginary telephone, says so.
Berman will star — for the first time to an American television audience — in his own one-man, hour-long special, “The Shelley Berman Show” (of course), Tuesday, Aug. 14, on ABC-TV (10-11 p.m., EDT).
“Of course I’m honest,” said Berman. “But in the sense of comedy, truthful would be a better word choice.
“I deal in the common, the truthful experiences—the anguish, the embarrassing moments, the television commercials — the usual.”
Take his famed routine of the slightly gruff father trying to give his 15-year-old daughter a bit of long-overdue advice as she prepares for her first date. You can feel the embarrassment, the agony he goes through, you feel for him, you laugh, but the laughter is a thing borne out of memory. It is something recalled.
“There,” says the only sit down comedian in the world, “is the basis for my performance.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Shelley’s manager and the executive producer of his upcoming special, Harry C. Bell, puts it in this way: “His routines are definitely in the realm of probability and possibility.
“They are made up of things, of bits, of those incidents which have happened to all of us — or at least we’ve heard about it happening to someone else.
“On occasion he’ll toss in his own satirical touches, but mainly it’s truth which makes Berman’s entire act a believable, understandable and very acceptable comic commodity.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The public which came to know Shelley Berman through his many night club appearances and on television shows (including 12 appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show), has always been sure of the overnight success of this master of the monologue.
But others, like Geraldine Page, Betsy Palmer and Tom Bosley, know of the 10 long and hard years he spent working for his overnight success, trying to get a foothold in the theater — all this before he turned to comedy.
♦ ♦ ♦
In 1945, after a Navy discharge, Berman enrolled as a student in Chicago’s Goodman Theatre. He was intent on a dramatic career.
Four years later, after studying his chosen craft and being partially supported by his wife (he married Sarah Herman, an aspiring actress in 1947), actor Berman set out on a cross-country hitch-hiking jaunt in search of theatre work.
“Those were the ‘jinx years’,” recalls Shelley.
There were, among other things, a stint as social director of a Florida resort hotel. But the hotel manager had no liking for the Berman brand of humor and the stay was a short one.
“After Daytona Beach,” said Shelley, “Sarah and I once more made use of our thumbs and headed for Hollywood.”
♦ ♦ ♦
His west coast efforts were sadly rewarded. Shelley was first a speech, voice and diction teacher, then a cab driver, a third assistant manager of a drug store and finally, a ballroom dancing instructor.
Each of these experiences has contributed to the success that is today Shelley Berman. The people he met, argued with, was frustrated by, laughed at and with have found a place in his comedy.
“My thanks,” he says, “are for a vibrant memory. Believe me, without it . . . well, you know what I mean. Drawing from life is vital for my performances.”
Before he came upon his unique comedy style, Berman wanted nothing less than to be an actor— and a good one.
He was still trying when old friend Geraldine Page (a Broadway and film success) badgered him until he agreed to leave California and try summer stock work in New York. He got several parts and things started looking up.
Roles in television plays such as “Suspense,” “Goodyear Playhouse,” and “Philco Playhouse” came his way and odd jobs, his unemployment checks, and his wife’s department store earnings kept the Bermans going.
♦ ♦ ♦
It was at this point, with a bit too much free time on his hands, that Shelley took a try at writing and turned out comedy material for Steve Allen.
The opportunities were slim and Shelley returned to Chicago, joined a group doing improvisations and after a year and a half, decided to try solo improvisations.
For the first time, he used his now-famous high stool and imaginary telephone.
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It was at this point that Shelley Berman started being “an overnight success.”
“Actually,” Shelley points out in his magnificently rhetorical voice, “this was the beginning. Perhaps the comedy style I had come up with was right—at that time. Who knows what would have happened if I’d tried it a few years before?
“Anyway the engagements came in rapid succession.”
New York’s Blue Angel and then 12 Ed Sullivan shows. In 1957, he “did” a Jack Paar show and the reaction was near staggering. As in the cases of many entertainers, people began the routine of having discovered him. Actually, Berman discovered Berman.
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He toured the night club circuit to uniformly rave reviews. He set attendance records at The Blue Angel, Mister Kelley’s in Chicago, the hungry i and the Venetian Room in San Francisco, and the Empire Room at New York’s Waldorf Astoria. At the Venetian Room and the Waldorf he broke records held jointly by Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne.
“Everything was finally coming Shelley’s way,” Harry Bell recalled, “but the big break came when Shelley cut his album, ‘Inside Shelley Berman.’
It sold enough to become the first non-musical album to get the Gold Record. His next two albums —‘Outside Shelley Berman’ and ‘The Edge of Shelley Berman’ — were also Gold Record best-sellers.
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“In fact, Shelley’s latest, ‘Shelley Berman—A Personal Appearance,’ looks like it’ll match the sales of the other three.
“Shelley’s record sales” said Bell, “actually opened the record field for almost all comedians and it also opened the concert stage— those one-man shows—to comedy.”
Once Berman was established as a comedy star, that not-too-deeply-hidden desire to act came forth again. He was critically praised for his dramatic efforts in Chicago (in “The Mirror and the Eagle” in which he played 22 different roles, and as the devil in “Damn Yankees”), in Boston and Los Angeles (“Where’s Charley?” and “Guys and Dolls”), and for his first starring Broadway role in the musical play, “A Family Affair.”
Up to the week that Berman presents his ABC-TV special, his famed monologues, hilarious pantomime and anguished mannerisms will be “in work” about the country. In fact, the night after he finishes his first Las Vegas appearance, his first TV show will be on. Not Berman-type magic; just tape.
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“The Shelley Berman Show” will contain a series of monologues, a couple of sketches utilizing a young boy and, according to Bell, there’ll be some familiar material used but “there’ll also be some striking new material.”
And it is Shelley Berman’s material—never blue and never sick —plus his particular style of presentation which prompted a question which has teen asked of him many times.
What about the difference in the kind of comedy you use in clubs and on television?
“I don’t believe,” said Shelley, relishing the question because his ideas on his comedy profession are indeed strong, “that any humor is designed or actually intended for any particular type of audience. “In my case, I have found that audiences are pretty much the same be they in the intimate surroundings of a Blue Angel-type club, the huge show cases such as the 6,000-seat Purdue University Field House Theatre or the unseen millions who listen and catch on a national television show.
“I have always tried to base my material on the things that happen to the average person. I’m not concerned with sickness, deformity, satire on government and the like.
“Therefore, if I am successful, an audience, whether it is watching me on television or in a small club, will relate to my material.
“All they expect — and rightly— is that the material, the content, the presentation and the surroundings be such that they can enjoy themselves.
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“And it really makes no difference whether they’re laughing at me, at themselves or with me.
“In my special show, where I will have the luxury of a big stage, I will have the opportunity to do things I have never been able to attempt in clubs or on my recordings, only because of the physical limitations.”
One trivia note: the voice of Fibber Fox on the Yakky Doodle cartoons belonged to the late Daws Butler, who said it was a takeoff on Berman’s. I still can’t hear the resemblance, but I’m not going to disagree with Daws.
