The Telephone Hour. 2.

A fascinating thing, at least to me, happened as I was continuing my research for the second part of this article about Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart.
I went to Shelley Berman's Wikipedia page, and found this:

On his website, comedy writer Mark Rothman discussed the history of comic "telephone" monologists:
"As far back as the 1920's George Jessel was doing phone conversations with his mother in vaudeville, with the opening line "Hello Mama? This is Georgie." In the 30's and 40's there was this radio comedienne named Arlene "Chatterbox" Harris, who did telephone monologues to one of her "friends." ...She was featured doing one of them on an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show that featured many old radio entertainers... In the 50's, a great comedienne, Betty Walker, made about a zillion appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, doing essentially the same kind of act as Arlene Harris, talking to her friend Ceil. Only it was intensively Yiddishified... Whereas Arlene Harris was white bread, Betty Walker was challah... All of this pre-dated Shelley Berman. Even Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who were contemporaries of Berman's at Second City, engaged in telephone dialogues, with very similar styled material. And who's more brilliant than them?"

I found myself being quoted.
The day after I posted the first article.
I didn't do it.
I wouldn't know how to do it.
Boy, things get around fast these days.
Anyway, Shelley Berman was never destined to have the kind of success that Bob Newhart has had on television.
He could never have carried a sitcom, the way Newhart carried three of them.
Newhart was always unflappable.
A cool performer in a cool medium.
Berman was and is an insecure, somewhat mean-spirited hothead.
Not the kind of performer you'd want to invite into your homes on a weekly basis.
There is evidence to back this up.
Evidence that I saw firsthand at the time.
Evidence that Marc Maron was too young to see, or maybe even know about.
Because he was either an infant, or still a gleam in his father's eye.
So he didn't ask Berman about it.
In March of 1963, there was a documentary run on NBC on a Sunday Night, as part of the Dupont Show of the Month series.
It was called "Comedian Backstage"
Shelley Berman allowed a camera crew to follow him around for 24 hours on a day when he was working in a nightclub in Florida.
Everything was going swimmingly until they showed him, in the middle of his act, doing one of his telephone monologues, when, of all things, a telephone rang offstage.
You could see the brutally pained look on Berman's face as he gallantly finished his monologue.
He left the stage to enthusiastic applause, and in the wings, threw the biggest hissy fit I have ever seen.
He took that cradle of the wall phone and nearly smashed it to bits.
He immediately started yelling at every member of the backstage crew mercilessly.
It was a better show than the one he put on stage.
He looked like the world's most awful human being.
As I, a fifteen year old, maybe Thirty Seconds Over Show Business, was watching, my first thought was "His career is over."
Apparently, he had total approval as to the documentary's content.
But he was so short-sighted that he didn't see any problem with airing that part of it.
Remember Vaughn Meader?
The comedian who had an act handed to him because of his uncanny resemblance to, and impression of John F. Kennedy?
When Kennedy was assassinated, his career was officially over.
This alone eliminated him from a long list of suspects.
This was only months after Berman's documentary aired
And Berman experienced an almost similar fate.
His career took a major hit.
One he never really recovered from.
Oh, he got work, but mainly as a straight actor on TV dramas.
Nothing major.
And he was still welcome as a panelist on game shows.
But he was no longer any kind of major comedy draw.
With some comedians, it's better to hide your personality.

The only consolation is that nobody could seriously consider him to have shot JFK.

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