A Few Choice Words From Shelley Berman

Nobody ever drew more of a bum rap from show-biz history than Shelley Berman.

When he first came up during the mid-to-late ‘50s, he was still too young for the Maniacal-but-Established category, which embraced people like Red Skelton, who once climbed a tree outside his Bel-Air home and waved a pistol at anyone approaching, and Sid Caesar, who once dangled Mel Brooks by his ankles outside a 10th-story window.

And later he was too old for the generation of rockers and other touring talents who, owing to the combustible mix of drugs, extreme youth and overnight success, routinely trashed entire hotel suites (Berman’s wrath, quaint in comparison, was restricted to tossing unneeded bath soap into the wastepaper basket and then complaining to management).

He was part of a new wave of comedians--Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce among them--who were embarking on an all-new course of social commentary. Their material didn’t simply amuse and divert; it held up a mirror; it was dark and edgy and a little dangerous. And when Berman was seen angrily ripping a telephone off a wall in a famous 1963 documentary, people realized something about the new comics that they hadn’t seen in the old reliables like Jack Benny and George Burns: They weren’t just telling truths about pain and embarrassment and a kind of universal post-war confusion--they were implicated in those truths. The tummler had chilled the party.

“I wish to hell we could all be comfortable working together in this world,” Berman would say in an interview 20 years later, “but I can’t be comfortable.” Berman was an angry man. Anger only works in show business if you’re very young or very dead, or if you can send the surreptitious signal to your interviewer or the viewing public that underneath it all you’re a sweet guy and it’s really an act.

Berman will work two one-man shows Sunday at North Hollywood’s Academy Plaza Theatre, a plush state-of-the-art venue that seats nearly 600 (the theater is now home for the “Show of the Month” celebrity series, of which Berman is a part).

He’ll perform a couple of his telephone routines, two of his classic sketches--the painfully evocative “Insomnia” and the poignant routine about a Jewish father reluctant to surrender his son to the sure pain of an acting career in the big city--and perhaps one segment about a forgetful man calling his doctor in a panic.

“ You can call them classic. Won’t the audience just think they’re old?” Berman said, challenging his interviewer. At 68, he still likes to stir the waters. But clearly the plaintive combativeness of old has at last been banked.

“I don’t dislike being a comedian,” he says. “I love it. But people tend to forget that I started out (at the Goodman Theater) as an actor. The most comforting thing for me is to be working in an ensemble of good actors in a well-written play, or even a medium play. I was happy putting on age makeup and leaving off my rug to play a movie mogul in ‘L.A. Law.’ You don’t mind going broke, just so long as you can do what you’re meant to do.”

And Berman has done well as an actor, playing around the country through the years in musicals such as “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Rothschilds,” the national company of “Two by Two,” and “La Cage aux Folles.” He’s done a lot of Neil Simon. He was critically well-received in the Chicago (his theatrical home base) production of Jeff Sweet’s “The Value of Names,” and was a 1990 Joseph Jefferson Award nominee, also in Chicago, for his role in “I’m Not Rappaport.” Last year he played in “Love, Dreams and Lost Uncles” at the Court Theater in Hollywood. There have been film parts and the usual run of guest star TV shots available to “names” in the business.

Berman’s success as a comedian was, however, spectacular. Three gold records. A Grammy. Carnegie Hall. It’s been his relationship with the public as a person who takes emotional risks that has bedeviled his career. In the end, people like their comics cuddly.

“Something has happened to stand-up comedy. It’s set-up and punch that begins ‘Didja ever . . .?’ or ‘I don’t know about you, but my mother . . .’ People laugh at the punch line. They have a good time. But it has nothing to do with the material. It’d be easy to blame the comedians, or even the audience, but I don’t think that’s the ticket.

“What has happened, I think, is that the heirs of the tradition of outspoken comedy have adopted the trappings--the raunch, the language, the outrageousness--without understanding their content.

“Every comedian articulates his time. An unpopular war and a Supreme Court decision that said there’s no such thing as separate but equal--which led to no action--created a climate of deep skepticism and anger. Then you had a George Carlin to come along and examine language, and a Richard Pryor to come along to show the edge of racism. And Steve Martin and Robin Williams the young to play up the nonsense of the period.

“What we’re not addressing is the fears of our time, the new self-censorship, the damning of the intellectual. I believe that comedy is still found in the real world, like the fear of carjacking or being killed. I’m worried that we’ve given up the awareness of the world around us.”

These are some of the concerns he’ll discuss. Not the career. Not anymore. He’s still ahead of the curve.

* Shelley Berman performs Sunday at 5 and 7 p.m. at North Hollywood’s Academy Plaza Theatre, 5230 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hollywood, (818) 785-8885. $15.50 and $21.50.