Uncle Miltie’s Comedy Class

At 91, Milton Berle can still finish off a joke--even if the punch line still isn’t his.

“The best joke I heard recently is about Mother Teresa. You heard it? So clever. She’s dying. They’re all around her, crying, consoling, giving her compliments: ‘There’ll never be anyone like you ever. You’ve done so much for humanity. You’ve helped the poor, you’ve helped the sick, you’ve done so many great things, Mother Teresa. We want to do something for you, Mother Teresa. What is your wish? Any wish that you want, we’ll give. Any wish. What is your greatest wish?

“She says, ‘Well, my greatest wish is . . . I’d like to direct.’ ”

It is 3:30 in the afternoon, and Berle is having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the den of the spacious Westside condominium he shares with his second wife, Lorna. Berle is dressed in a robe tied at the waist, pants, no shirt, reclining on a sofa. He is aged but not addled--in fact, he’s a little ornery, greeting his visitor with: “So what’ya wanna know?” The question is daunting. Where do you begin, with the man who was television’s first superstar, and whose life spans virtually a century in comedy, from vaudeville and silent movies to Adam Sandler and gross-out comedy?

Berle’s ubiquitous, unlit cigar is never far away as he talks about Jack Benny (“Jack Benny was not afraid of silence. That’s very important”), vaudeville (“They weren’t ready for me, because I was too flippant, too fast”) and the way comedians still mismanage audiences (“Whatever happened to ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen’?”).

Since suffering a stroke in December, Berle hasn’t performed in public--a kind of purgatory for comedians, who as a species tend not so much to retire as to do their routines to smaller and smaller audiences. Berle’s stroke has left him iffy on his feet, with failing eyesight--in the kind of condition that suggests he will never perform again, though Berle would like to get back on stage.

“I’ve been taking it easy since last Christmas. I’m resting up. There’s nothing wrong with my mind at all, but it seems that just before I had the stroke, I was doing my concert for my 90th birthday, and I slipped on the stage and fell, fell on my back. Of all things, that fall made me wobbly, off balance, off focus.”

Off balance on his feet, perhaps, but not comedically.

“Whatever you want, I’ll give you a joke on it,” he says. “But to give it to you on the spur of the moment, that’s the trick. That means the noggin’s working.”

A week ago, on a Saturday night in his honor at the Friars Club in Beverly Hills, Larry King, Jan Murray, Irving Brecher, Hal Kanter, Steve Allen and others paid tribute to Berle, who turned 91 on July 12. It was a night from another era--Ed Ames on stage singing while actual cigarette smoke drifted forward from the bar in the back of the room. The audience included a smattering of celebrities--singer Tony Martin and wife Cyd Charisse, comedian John Byner, Monty Hall, actor Eric Roberts and porno king Al Goldstein, founder of Screw magazine--and a lot of people who had paid $100 a plate to be a part of the evening. Berle had sold exclusive rights to the event to the tabloid the National Enquirer, preventing photographers from shooting the proceedings.

Brecher, hired as a radio comedy writer by Berle in 1933 and whose career as a screenwriter included two Marx Brothers movies, “At the Circus” and “Go West,” looked out over the crowd and said: “Milton, you can still pack ‘em in. Nibblers must be empty tonight.”

Murray recalled the awe he felt as a young, aspiring comic watching Berle perform in New York vaudeville houses, doing countless shows but making each audience feel as though they were seeing Berle’s outrageous, rapid-fire moves for the first time. Kanter, the longtime television writer-producer, lamented that some of Berle’s colleagues couldn’t be here tonight, “due to previous commitments, such as death.”

Throughout, there were roast-like references to Berle’s stinginess, to his womanizing habits, to his egomania, but the jabs were flicked, not delivered.

“You have not an enemy in the world,” Brecher said. “They all died.”

Finally, after two hours of this, Berle stood up. He was handed a microphone.

“I’ll be brief,” he told the crowd. “And if you believe that you believe there’ll be a Richard Simmons Jr.”

Berle, the club’s abbot emeritus, is still a fixture at the Friars, where he has lunch and holds court with fellow members. (“We tell jokes, but Milton’s heard them all,” Tony Martin says. “Every time we tell a story Milton’ll say, ‘No no, that’s not the way it goes’ ”).

Happy to Give Lessons in Comedy History

The Friars, with about 400 members, are in need of new blood; Saturday night, the youngest comedian on the bill was Larry Miller, who came up in the late 1970s and ‘80s with the likes of Jerry Seinfeld and Garry Shandling. These days, younger comics are hardly flocking to the club to become members--or to soak up what Berle might teach them, though Berle has given classes in the past.

“More young people should be aware of what he did to make this business what it is,” says Kanter, whose new book, “So Far, So Funny,” includes a brief chapter on the somewhat tortuous season he spent guiding Berle’s 1958 television show “Kraft Music Hall.” Today, Kanter says, “I have a great deal of residual affection for him. . . . Milton has always been very kind to new talent, and supportive of new talent. It’s a shame they don’t see him the way he once was able to perform.”

But in person, on a lazy afternoon in his house, Berle is more than happy to give lessons in comedy history.

“Who was the greatest non-sequitur comic?” he quizzes, and when you don’t answer right away he gets impatient. “Get with it now, be hip. Youngman,” as in the late Henny Youngman.

Next question: “What are the three standard opening lines of every stand-up comic? Ninety percent of the stand-up comics. I want to know the three opening lines.”

“How are you feeling tonight?” you try.

“Wrong,” he barks. “ . . . The opening lines are this, look it up and see if I’m wrong. ‘How ya doin’ out there?’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘This your boyfriend?’ ‘What town you from?’ That’s the first four. Standard. Why? Ask me why.”

“Why?”

“They have no material. They have no opening, no middle, no end. . . . You cannot do, you should not do, non sequiturs. Because it just looks like you have no faith or honesty in your monologue. . . . Today the stand-ups, they talk so fast. . . . There’s a reason for that, you can’t blame them all, because they get just a certain element of time. They get 10 minutes. Eight minutes. I don’t know how good they can be in eight minutes--where’s the opening, where’s the middle, where’s the end?”