Shelley Berman, a Grammy Award-winning comedian whose nervous, fidgety style of humor influenced Jerry Seinfeld and other standup comics, and who had a late-career resurgence playing Larry David’s dotty father on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died Sept. 1 at his home in Bell Canyon, Calif. He was 92.
A spokesman, Glenn Schwartz, announced the death. The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Berman was among a group of comedians who emerged in the 1950s and early 1960s, including Mort Sahl, Bob Newhart and Elaine May and Mike Nichols, who built their humor around topical storytelling rather than the traditional setup and punchline.
His routines about the frustrations of modern life, including pieces about airlines or about the difficulty of dealing with businesses and other institutions, were wildly popular and made him one of the first comedians with best-selling recordings.
His 1959 debut album, “Inside Shelley Berman,” won a Grammy Award, hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts and became a gold record, with more than 500,000 copies sold. He appeared frequently on television, including “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Jack Paar Show.”
“Shelley revolutionized stand-up comedy,” Jeff Garlin, a producer and actor on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” told the New York Times in 2003. “He was one of the first people to just get up there and talk.”
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Mr. Berman — who called himself a “sit-down” comic because he usually worked while sitting on a stool — said in 1959 his comedy was about “people and their foibles — their embarrassing moments, their fears and frustrations.”
Amid all the laughter, there was often a desperate, even melancholy edge to Mr. Berman’s humor.
“That’s where you will find the comedy,” he told a class he taught at the University of Southern California in 1990. “You can’t avoid it. Comedy is the manifestation of conflict.”
One of his early routines was said to have changed the way flight attendants went about their business.
As a frightened passenger looks out the window at a burning engine, a flight attendant chirpily says, “Coffee, tea or milk?”
“We haven’t time for coffee, tea or milk,” the passenger says. “We are doomed!”
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“Well, then,” the attendant counters, “how about a martini?”
Some airlines reportedly changed their serving style when passengers started to laugh at the words “Coffee, tea or milk?”
Mr. Berman often structured his comedy around a telephone call, including a routine in which he played a man calling a department store to report a woman clinging to the outside of the building — only to be put on hold and shunted from one department to another.
“There is a woman hanging from your window ledge about 10 flights up — Hello? Hello?” he says. “Describe her? What for? You won’t have any trouble finding her, she’s hanging out of a window ledge. I’m looking at your building right now, and she’s the only one hanging out of a window!”
But Mr. Berman was proprietary about his material and later accused Newhart, his fellow Chicagoan, of stealing his telephone act. Newhart and comedy historians pointed out one-sided phone calls had been a staple of comedy since at least the 1920s.
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“If nobody answers that telephone,” comedian Jack E. Leonard once joked about Mr. Berman, “he’s got no act!”
Mr. Berman’s career was at its height in 1963, when he was featured in an NBC-TV documentary, “Comedian Backstage.” Washington Post critic Lawrence Laurent called it “the most revealing, most realistic and most satisfying program of its kind ever produced.”
Parts of the show, however, were more revealing than Mr. Berman wanted. The camera followed him after one performance in which a backstage telephone could be heard ringing. Mr. Berman flew into a rage, yelling at his manager, pulling the phone off the hook and pacing in anger.
Deservedly or not, he acquired a reputation as a temperamental, highhanded performer who was difficult to work with.
Share this articleShare“March 3, 1963,” Mr. Berman said more than 40 years later, recalling the date of the documentary. “On March 4, I was a goner.”
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He eventually declared bankruptcy. Once a headliner at Carnegie Hall, he found himself booked at second-rate nightclubs.
In 1974, Mr. Berman was appearing in Queens, where he was accosted in his hotel room after a performance, tied up with sheets and robbed of his wristwatch and $60 in cash. The thief was apparently incredulous that such a famous person didn’t have more money on him.
“I’m supposed to be a star, and stars are supposed to have money,” Mr. Berman said afterward. “Well, I’m a broke star.”
Sheldon Leonard Berman was born Feb. 3, 1925, in Chicago, where his parents ran a tavern. He served in the Navy during World War II, then studied acting at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and later performed in summer stock.
While trying to build a career as an actor, Mr. Berman drove a taxi, worked in a clothing store, managed a drugstore chain, managed social activities at a Florida hotel and, for more than two years, taught dancing at an Arthur Murray studio in Los Angeles.
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He returned to Chicago in the 1950s and joined an improvisational comedy group, the Compass Players, where he performed with Nichols and May. The Compass Players later evolved into the Second City comedy ensemble.
By 1956, Mr. Berman was writing sketches for Steve Allen’s network TV show and soon appeared on camera, performing original routines. He gained national attention as part of a new comic generation that included Sahl and the confrontational Lenny Bruce.
After his standup career hit the skids, Mr. Berman developed ideas for TV sitcoms — none of which worked out — and took jobs as a character actor in television and the movies, including "The Best Man," a 1964 political film starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson and both the 1967 movie "Divorce American Style " and the vapid TV series "Love, American Style."
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He appeared on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and in many regional stage productions, including "I'm Not Rappaport," "La Cage aux Folles" and "Fiddler on the Roof," playing the lead role of Tevye.
Beginning in 1990, Mr. Berman taught comedy writing at the University of Southern California for 23 years. His acting and standup careers picked up at the same time, with recurring roles on "L.A. Law," "Boston Legal " and especially "Curb Your Enthusiasm." For the role as Nat David, Larry's father, Mr. Berman had to sacrifice his vanity.
“I have to work on ‘Curb’ without my hairpiece,” he told the New York Times in 2003. “And I wear my rug to take out the garbage.”
In zany, often improvised scenes with David, Mr. Berman suddenly became famous all over again. He recorded several new comedy albums and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2008.
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He retired from performing in 2014, after announcing he had Alzheimer’s disease.
Survivors include his wife of 70 years, the former Sarah Herman of Bell Canyon; a daughter, Rachel Berman of Oak Hills, Calif.; and two grandsons. A son, Joshua Berman, died of brain cancer in 1977 at age 12.
From his earliest days in comedy, Mr. Berman sometimes adopted an oblique, philosophical approach to comedy, sometimes even drawing on the ideas of Zen Buddhism.
"You know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand clapping?" he said in "Inside Shelley Berman" recorded in 1959. "Well, I know that sound. I've heard it frequently enough, God knows, and I'm not going to dwell on it, because I'll cry, and a comedian should be jolly."
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