R.I.P. Shelley Berman, sit-down comic and Curb Your Enthusiasm actor
Shelly Berman—who helped transform stand-up comedy from a string of Borscht Belt-ready gags toward observational monologues, and did so while sitting down—has died at the age of 92. Berman broke out in the late ’50s alongside a new generation of neurotically investigative satirists like Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart, and Lenny Bruce, garnering widespread popularity with his 1959 album Inside Shelley Berman, the first comedy record to go gold and the first non-musical recording to win a Grammy. After a publicity scandal derailed his career in 1963, Berman, a longtime theater actor, found a new life in movie and TV roles; he’s probably best known to modern audiences as Larry David’s father on Curb Your Enthusiasm. According to a statement from his publicist, Berman died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Known as a “sit-down comic”—or, as referred to in a Time article that its subjects largely rebuked, a “sick comic”—Berman distinguished himself from the one-liner slingers of his day by sitting on a barstool, talking in terms both cerebral and absurdist about life’s everyday little anxieties. He was also known for his long, one-sided phone conservations, a bit that, in an interview with Marc Maron, he later accused his fellow Chicago comic Bob Newhart of stealing from him. (Newhart has long admitted that Berman did the routine before him, but points out that the “telephone monologue” has been around nearly since its invention.) And while Berman somewhat bitterly noted that it made Newhart a star, he certainly did all right for himself too: The success of Inside Shelley Berman blazed a trail for comedy albums to follow, and it landed him on the era’s biggest variety shows and inside huge venues like Carnegie Hall—the first comic to headline there.
