MILTON BERLE
Name: Milton Berlinger
Born: 12 July 1908 Manhattan, New York, United States
Died: 27 March 2002 Los Angeles, California
Milton Berlinger (July 12, 1908 - March 27, 2002) was an Emmy-winning American
comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater from (1948-1955),
he was the first major star of television and as such became known as Uncle
Miltie or Mr. Television to millions during TV's golden age.
Born in a five story walkup at 68 West 118th Street in the Morningside Heights
neighborhood of Manhattan, he chose Milton Berle as his professional name when
he was 16. His father was Moses Berlinger, a paint and varnish salesman. His
mother, Sarah (Sadie) Glantz Berlinger, eventually became stagestruck and
changed her name to Sandra Berle when Milton became famous.
Berle appeared as a child actor in silent films, beginning with The Perils of
Pauline (1914), filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with Pearl White. The
director told Berle that he would portray a little boy who would be thrown from
a moving train. In Milton Berle: An Autobiography (1975), he explained, "I was
scared shitless, even when he went on to tell me that Pauline would save my life.
Which is exactly what happened, except that at the crucial moment they threw a
bundle of rags instead of me from the train. I bet there are a lot of comedians
around today who are sorry about that."
By Berle's account, he continued to play child roles in other films: Bunny's
Little Brother (1914) with John Bunny; Tess of the Storm Country (1914) with
Mary Pickford; Birthright (1920) with Flora Finch; Love's Penalty (1921) with
Hope Hampton; Divorce Coupons (1922) with Corinne Griffith and the serial Ruth
of the Range (1923) with Ruth Roland. Berle recalled, "There were even trips out
to Hollywood--the studios paid--where I got parts in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
with Mary Pickford; The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Tillie's
Punctured Romance, with Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler."
However, Berle's claims to have appeared in many of these films, particularly
the 1914 Chaplin Keystone comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance, are hotly disputed
by some, who cite the lack of supporting evidence that Berle even visited the
West Coast until much later. The newsboy role often claimed by Berle in "Tillie"
was unquestionably played by resident Keystone child actor Gordon Griffith.
In 1916, Berle enrolled in the Professional Children's School, and at age 12 he
made his stage debut in Florodora. After four weeks in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
the show moved to Broadway. It catapulted him into a comedic career that spanned
eight decades in nightclubs, Broadway shows, vaudeville, Las Vegas, films,
television and radio.
By the early 1930s, Berle had become a successful stand-up comedian. In 1933 he
was hired by producer Jack White to star in the theatrical featurette Poppin'
the Cork, a topical musical comedy concerning the repeal of Prohibition. Berle
also co-wrote the score for this film, which was released by Educational
Pictures.
Berle continued to dabble in songwriting. With Ben Oakland and Milton Drake,
Berle wrote the title song for the RKO Radio Pictures release Li'l Abner (1940),
an adaptation of Al Capp's comic strip, featuring Buster Keaton as Lonesome
Polecat. Berle wrote a Spike Jones B-side, "Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma."
In 1934-36, Berle was heard regularly on The Rudy Vallee Hour, and he got much
publicity as a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing, a Sunday night
comedy-variety program broadcast on CBS from September 6, 1936 to August 29,
1937. In 1939, he was the host of Stop Me If You've Heard This One with
panelists spontaneously finishing jokes sent in by listeners.
Three Ring Time, a comedy-variety show sponsored by Ballantine Ale, was followed
by a 1943 program sponsored by Campbell's Soups. The audience participation show
Let Yourself Go (1944-45) could best be described as slapstick radio with studio
audience members acting out long suppressed urges (often directed at host Berle).
Kiss and Make Up, on CBS in 1946, featured the problems of contestants decided
by a jury from the studio audience with Berle as the judge. He also made guest
appearances on many comedy-variety radio programs during the 1930s and 1940s.
Scripted by Hal Block and Martin Ragaway, The Milton Berle Show brought Berle
together with Arnold Stang, later a familiar face as Berle's TV sidekick. Others
in the cast were Pert Kelton, Mary Schipp, Jack Albertson, Arthur Q. Bryan, Ed
Begley, and announcer Frank Gallop. Sponsored by Philip Morris, it aired on NBC
from March 11, 1947, until April 13, 1948.
His last radio series was The Texaco Star Theater, which began September 22,
1948 on ABC and continued until June 15, 1949, with Berle heading the cast of
Stang, Kelton and Gallop, along with Charles Irving, Kay Armen, and double-talk
specialist Al Kelly. It employed top comedy writers (Nat Hiken, brothers Danny
and Neil Simon, Aaron Ruben), and Berle later recalled this series as "the best
radio show I ever did... a hell of a funny variety show." It served as a
springboard for Berle's rise as television's first major star.
In 1948, NBC decided to bring Texaco Star Theater from radio to television, with
Berle as one of the show's four rotating hosts. For the fall season, NBC named
Berle the permanent host. His highly visual, sometimes outrageous vaudeville
style proved ideal for the burgeoning new medium. Berle and Texaco owned Tuesday
nights for the next several years, reaching the number one slot in the Nielsen
ratings and keeping it, with as much as an 80% share of the recorded viewing
audience. Berle and the show each won Emmy Awards after the first season. Fewer
movie tickets were sold on Tuesdays. Some theaters, restaurants and other
businesses shut down for the hour or closed for the evening so their customers
wouldn't miss Berle's antics. Berle's autobiography notes that in Detroit, "an
investigation took place when the water levels took a drastic drop in the
reservoirs on Tuesday nights between 9 and 9:05. It turned out that everyone
waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theater before going to the bathroom."
Berle is credited for the huge spike in the sale of TV sets. (Other comedians
turned this into a punchline: "I sold mine, my uncle sold his...") After Berle's
show began, set sales more than doubled, reaching two million in 1949. His
stature as the medium's first superstar earned Berle the sobriquet "Mr.
Television." He also earned a slightly more familiar nickname after ending a
1949 broadcast with a brief ad-libbed remark to children watching the show: "Listen
to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed."
Berle asked NBC to switch from live broadcasts to filmed shows, to make possible
future reruns and residuals, and he was not happy when NBC showed little
interest. NBC did consent to make a kinescope of each show -- a reference copy
filmed directly off of a TV screen.
He also risked his newfound TV stardom at its zenith to challenge Texaco when
the sponsor tried to prevent black performers from appearing. In his
autobiography, Berle recalled the incident:
Another thing that was a constant anger to me was that I didn't have approval on
the acts and performers I wanted on the show. I remember clashing with the
sponsor and the advertising agency and the sponsor over my signing the Four Step
Brothers for an appearance on the show. The only thing I could figure out was
that there was an objection to black performers on the show, but I couldn't even
find out who was objecting. "We just don't like them," I was told, but who the
hell was "we"? Because I was riding high in 1950, I sent out the word: "If they
don't go on, I don't go on." At ten minutes of eight--ten minutes before show
time--I got permission for the Step Brothers to appear. If I broke the color-line
policy or not, I don't know, but later on I had no trouble booking Bill Robinson
or Lena Horne."
NBC signed him to an exclusive, unprecedented 30-year television contract in
1951. The problem with Berle's 30-year deal was that NBC could not have realized
the relatively short lifespan of a comedian on television, compared to radio,
where some careers had thrived for two decades. In part, this was due to the
more ephemeral nature of visual comedy (those who don't adapt quickly don't
survive), and a single television appearance could equal years of exposure on
the nightclub circuit. It has also been said that Berle had less appeal with
audiences outside the Borscht Belt as television expanded from big East Coast
markets to smaller cities. In any event, Berle wore out his welcome on
television almost as quickly as he had built it.
Texaco pulled out of sponsorship of the show in 1953. Buick picked it up,
prompting a renaming to The Buick-Berle Show, the program's format retooled to
show the backstage preparations to put on a variety show. Critics generally
approved the changes, but Berle's ratings continued to fall and Buick pulled out
after two seasons. By the time the again-renamed Milton Berle Show finished its
only full season, Berle was already becoming history – though his final season
was host to two of Elvis Presley's earliest television appearances, April 3,
1956, & June 5, 1956.
NBC finally cancelled the Berle show in June 1956, after the controversy caused
by Elvis Presley's uninhibited performance of "Hound Dog." Berle later appeared
in the Kraft Music Hall series, but NBC was finding increasingly fewer showcases
for its one-time superstar. By 1960, he was reduced to hosting a game show,
Jackpot Bowling, delivering his quips between the efforts of bowling contestants.
In Las Vegas, Berle played to packed showrooms at Caesar's Palace, the Sands,
the Desert Inn and other casino hotels. Berle had appeared at the El Rancho, one
of the first Vegas hotels, in the late 1940s. In addition to constant club
appearances, Berle performed on Broadway in Herb Gardner's The Goodbye People in
1968.
He appeared in numerous films, including Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) with
Virginia Mayo and Bert Lahr; Let's Make Love, with Marilyn Monroe and Yves
Montand (1960); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963); The Loved One (1965);
The Oscar (1966); Lepke (1975); Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and
Driving Me Crazy (1991).
Freed in part from the obligations of his NBC contract, Berle was signed in 1966
to a new, weekly variety series on ABC. The show failed to capture a large
audience and was cancelled after one season. He later appeared as guest villain
Louie the Lilac on ABC's Batman series. His other TV guest appearances included
The Jack Benny Show, Make Room for Daddy, The Lucy Show Here's Lucy, The Big
Valley, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Muppet Show, What's My Line?, Get Smart, I
Dream of Jeannie, I've Got a Secret, The Mod Squad, Ironside, Mannix, McCloud,
The Love Boat, CHiPs, Fame, Fantasy Island, Gimme a Break, Diff'rent Strokes,
Matlock, Murder, She Wrote, Beverly Hills 90210, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,
The Nanny, Roseanne and Sister, Sister.
Like his contemporary Jackie Gleason, Berle proved a solid dramatic actor and
was acclaimed for several such performances, most notably his lead role in "Doyle
Against The House" on The Dick Powell Show in 1961, a role for which he later
received an Emmy nomination. He also played the part of a blind survivor of an
airplane crash in Seven in Darkness, the first in ABC's popular Movie of the
Week series, and was often seen on The Hollywood Palace variety show on ABC.
During this period, Berle was named to the Guinness Book of World Records for
the greatest number of charity performances made by a show-business performer.
Unlike the high-profile shows done by Bob Hope to entertain the troops, Berle
did more shows, over a period of 50 years, on a lower-profile basis. Berle
received an award for entertaining at stateside military bases in World War I as
a child performer, in addition to traveling to foreign bases in World War II and
Vietnam. The first charity telethon (for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund) was
hosted by Berle in 1949. A permanent fixture at charity benefits in the
Hollywood area, he was instrumental in raising millions for charitable causes.
On April 14, 1979, Berle guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the comedian
saw this as a chance to revisit his live-TV "Texaco Star Theater" glories of
three decades before. Whatever his intention, he seemed to spend as much time
trying to upstage the show's youthful cast members as he did trying to work with
or complement them. Berle's long reputation for taking control of an entire
television production—whether invited to do so or not—was a cause of stress on
the set. One of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster, described the rehearsals for
the Berle SNL show and the telecast as "watching a comedy train accident in slow
motion on a loop." Upstaging, camera mugging, inserting old comedy bits, and
climaxing the show with a maudlin performance of "September Song." complete with
pre-arranged standing ovation (something producer Lorne Michaels had never
sanctioned), resulted in Berle being banned from the show. In the weeks that
followed, Berle's household in Beverly Hills received rambling, stoned phone
calls from John Belushi, loudly proclaiming that Berle was the greatest comedian
in history.
Another well-known incident of upstaging occurred during the 1982 Emmy Awards,
when Berle and Martha Raye were the presenters of the Emmy for Outstanding
Writing. Berle was reluctant to give up the microphone to the award's recipients,
from Second City Television, and interrupted actor Joe Flaherty's acceptance
speech several times. After Flaherty would make a joke, Berle would reply
sarcastically "Oh, that's funny." However the kindly, smiling Flaherty's
response "Go to sleep, Uncle Miltie" flustered Berle who could only reply with a
stunned "What...?" SCTV later created a parody sketch of the incident, in which
Flaherty beats up a Berle look-alike, shouting, "You'll never ruin another
acceptance speech, Uncle Miltie!"
One of his most popular performances in his later years was guest starring in
1993 in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a womanizing, wise-cracking patient. Most
of his dialogue was improvised and he shocked the studio audience by mistakenly
blurting out a curse word.
Berle appeared in drag in the video for "Round and Round" by the 1980s metal
band Ratt (his nephew Marshall Berle was then their manager).
Berle was again on the receiving end of an onstage jibe at the 1993 MTV Video
Music Awards where RuPaul notoriously responded to Berle's reference of having
once worn dresses himself (during his old television days) with the quip that
Berle now wore diapers. A surprised Berle replied, "Oh, we're going to ad lib? I'll
check my brain and we'll start even."
Name: Milton Berlinger
Born: 12 July 1908 Manhattan, New York, United States
Died: 27 March 2002 Los Angeles, California
Milton Berlinger (July 12, 1908 - March 27, 2002) was an Emmy-winning American
comedian and actor. As the manic host of NBC's Texaco Star Theater from (1948-1955),
he was the first major star of television and as such became known as Uncle
Miltie or Mr. Television to millions during TV's golden age.
Born in a five story walkup at 68 West 118th Street in the Morningside Heights
neighborhood of Manhattan, he chose Milton Berle as his professional name when
he was 16. His father was Moses Berlinger, a paint and varnish salesman. His
mother, Sarah (Sadie) Glantz Berlinger, eventually became stagestruck and
changed her name to Sandra Berle when Milton became famous.
Berle appeared as a child actor in silent films, beginning with The Perils of
Pauline (1914), filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with Pearl White. The
director told Berle that he would portray a little boy who would be thrown from
a moving train. In Milton Berle: An Autobiography (1975), he explained, "I was
scared shitless, even when he went on to tell me that Pauline would save my life.
Which is exactly what happened, except that at the crucial moment they threw a
bundle of rags instead of me from the train. I bet there are a lot of comedians
around today who are sorry about that."
By Berle's account, he continued to play child roles in other films: Bunny's
Little Brother (1914) with John Bunny; Tess of the Storm Country (1914) with
Mary Pickford; Birthright (1920) with Flora Finch; Love's Penalty (1921) with
Hope Hampton; Divorce Coupons (1922) with Corinne Griffith and the serial Ruth
of the Range (1923) with Ruth Roland. Berle recalled, "There were even trips out
to Hollywood--the studios paid--where I got parts in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
with Mary Pickford; The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Tillie's
Punctured Romance, with Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Marie Dressler."
However, Berle's claims to have appeared in many of these films, particularly
the 1914 Chaplin Keystone comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance, are hotly disputed
by some, who cite the lack of supporting evidence that Berle even visited the
West Coast until much later. The newsboy role often claimed by Berle in "Tillie"
was unquestionably played by resident Keystone child actor Gordon Griffith.
In 1916, Berle enrolled in the Professional Children's School, and at age 12 he
made his stage debut in Florodora. After four weeks in Atlantic City, New Jersey,
the show moved to Broadway. It catapulted him into a comedic career that spanned
eight decades in nightclubs, Broadway shows, vaudeville, Las Vegas, films,
television and radio.
By the early 1930s, Berle had become a successful stand-up comedian. In 1933 he
was hired by producer Jack White to star in the theatrical featurette Poppin'
the Cork, a topical musical comedy concerning the repeal of Prohibition. Berle
also co-wrote the score for this film, which was released by Educational
Pictures.
Berle continued to dabble in songwriting. With Ben Oakland and Milton Drake,
Berle wrote the title song for the RKO Radio Pictures release Li'l Abner (1940),
an adaptation of Al Capp's comic strip, featuring Buster Keaton as Lonesome
Polecat. Berle wrote a Spike Jones B-side, "Leave the Dishes in the Sink, Ma."
In 1934-36, Berle was heard regularly on The Rudy Vallee Hour, and he got much
publicity as a regular on The Gillette Original Community Sing, a Sunday night
comedy-variety program broadcast on CBS from September 6, 1936 to August 29,
1937. In 1939, he was the host of Stop Me If You've Heard This One with
panelists spontaneously finishing jokes sent in by listeners.
Three Ring Time, a comedy-variety show sponsored by Ballantine Ale, was followed
by a 1943 program sponsored by Campbell's Soups. The audience participation show
Let Yourself Go (1944-45) could best be described as slapstick radio with studio
audience members acting out long suppressed urges (often directed at host Berle).
Kiss and Make Up, on CBS in 1946, featured the problems of contestants decided
by a jury from the studio audience with Berle as the judge. He also made guest
appearances on many comedy-variety radio programs during the 1930s and 1940s.
Scripted by Hal Block and Martin Ragaway, The Milton Berle Show brought Berle
together with Arnold Stang, later a familiar face as Berle's TV sidekick. Others
in the cast were Pert Kelton, Mary Schipp, Jack Albertson, Arthur Q. Bryan, Ed
Begley, and announcer Frank Gallop. Sponsored by Philip Morris, it aired on NBC
from March 11, 1947, until April 13, 1948.
His last radio series was The Texaco Star Theater, which began September 22,
1948 on ABC and continued until June 15, 1949, with Berle heading the cast of
Stang, Kelton and Gallop, along with Charles Irving, Kay Armen, and double-talk
specialist Al Kelly. It employed top comedy writers (Nat Hiken, brothers Danny
and Neil Simon, Aaron Ruben), and Berle later recalled this series as "the best
radio show I ever did... a hell of a funny variety show." It served as a
springboard for Berle's rise as television's first major star.
In 1948, NBC decided to bring Texaco Star Theater from radio to television, with
Berle as one of the show's four rotating hosts. For the fall season, NBC named
Berle the permanent host. His highly visual, sometimes outrageous vaudeville
style proved ideal for the burgeoning new medium. Berle and Texaco owned Tuesday
nights for the next several years, reaching the number one slot in the Nielsen
ratings and keeping it, with as much as an 80% share of the recorded viewing
audience. Berle and the show each won Emmy Awards after the first season. Fewer
movie tickets were sold on Tuesdays. Some theaters, restaurants and other
businesses shut down for the hour or closed for the evening so their customers
wouldn't miss Berle's antics. Berle's autobiography notes that in Detroit, "an
investigation took place when the water levels took a drastic drop in the
reservoirs on Tuesday nights between 9 and 9:05. It turned out that everyone
waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theater before going to the bathroom."
Berle is credited for the huge spike in the sale of TV sets. (Other comedians
turned this into a punchline: "I sold mine, my uncle sold his...") After Berle's
show began, set sales more than doubled, reaching two million in 1949. His
stature as the medium's first superstar earned Berle the sobriquet "Mr.
Television." He also earned a slightly more familiar nickname after ending a
1949 broadcast with a brief ad-libbed remark to children watching the show: "Listen
to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed."
Berle asked NBC to switch from live broadcasts to filmed shows, to make possible
future reruns and residuals, and he was not happy when NBC showed little
interest. NBC did consent to make a kinescope of each show -- a reference copy
filmed directly off of a TV screen.
He also risked his newfound TV stardom at its zenith to challenge Texaco when
the sponsor tried to prevent black performers from appearing. In his
autobiography, Berle recalled the incident:
Another thing that was a constant anger to me was that I didn't have approval on
the acts and performers I wanted on the show. I remember clashing with the
sponsor and the advertising agency and the sponsor over my signing the Four Step
Brothers for an appearance on the show. The only thing I could figure out was
that there was an objection to black performers on the show, but I couldn't even
find out who was objecting. "We just don't like them," I was told, but who the
hell was "we"? Because I was riding high in 1950, I sent out the word: "If they
don't go on, I don't go on." At ten minutes of eight--ten minutes before show
time--I got permission for the Step Brothers to appear. If I broke the color-line
policy or not, I don't know, but later on I had no trouble booking Bill Robinson
or Lena Horne."
NBC signed him to an exclusive, unprecedented 30-year television contract in
1951. The problem with Berle's 30-year deal was that NBC could not have realized
the relatively short lifespan of a comedian on television, compared to radio,
where some careers had thrived for two decades. In part, this was due to the
more ephemeral nature of visual comedy (those who don't adapt quickly don't
survive), and a single television appearance could equal years of exposure on
the nightclub circuit. It has also been said that Berle had less appeal with
audiences outside the Borscht Belt as television expanded from big East Coast
markets to smaller cities. In any event, Berle wore out his welcome on
television almost as quickly as he had built it.
Texaco pulled out of sponsorship of the show in 1953. Buick picked it up,
prompting a renaming to The Buick-Berle Show, the program's format retooled to
show the backstage preparations to put on a variety show. Critics generally
approved the changes, but Berle's ratings continued to fall and Buick pulled out
after two seasons. By the time the again-renamed Milton Berle Show finished its
only full season, Berle was already becoming history – though his final season
was host to two of Elvis Presley's earliest television appearances, April 3,
1956, & June 5, 1956.
NBC finally cancelled the Berle show in June 1956, after the controversy caused
by Elvis Presley's uninhibited performance of "Hound Dog." Berle later appeared
in the Kraft Music Hall series, but NBC was finding increasingly fewer showcases
for its one-time superstar. By 1960, he was reduced to hosting a game show,
Jackpot Bowling, delivering his quips between the efforts of bowling contestants.
In Las Vegas, Berle played to packed showrooms at Caesar's Palace, the Sands,
the Desert Inn and other casino hotels. Berle had appeared at the El Rancho, one
of the first Vegas hotels, in the late 1940s. In addition to constant club
appearances, Berle performed on Broadway in Herb Gardner's The Goodbye People in
1968.
He appeared in numerous films, including Always Leave Them Laughing (1949) with
Virginia Mayo and Bert Lahr; Let's Make Love, with Marilyn Monroe and Yves
Montand (1960); It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963); The Loved One (1965);
The Oscar (1966); Lepke (1975); Woody Allen's Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and
Driving Me Crazy (1991).
Freed in part from the obligations of his NBC contract, Berle was signed in 1966
to a new, weekly variety series on ABC. The show failed to capture a large
audience and was cancelled after one season. He later appeared as guest villain
Louie the Lilac on ABC's Batman series. His other TV guest appearances included
The Jack Benny Show, Make Room for Daddy, The Lucy Show Here's Lucy, The Big
Valley, The Jackie Gleason Show, The Muppet Show, What's My Line?, Get Smart, I
Dream of Jeannie, I've Got a Secret, The Mod Squad, Ironside, Mannix, McCloud,
The Love Boat, CHiPs, Fame, Fantasy Island, Gimme a Break, Diff'rent Strokes,
Matlock, Murder, She Wrote, Beverly Hills 90210, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,
The Nanny, Roseanne and Sister, Sister.
Like his contemporary Jackie Gleason, Berle proved a solid dramatic actor and
was acclaimed for several such performances, most notably his lead role in "Doyle
Against The House" on The Dick Powell Show in 1961, a role for which he later
received an Emmy nomination. He also played the part of a blind survivor of an
airplane crash in Seven in Darkness, the first in ABC's popular Movie of the
Week series, and was often seen on The Hollywood Palace variety show on ABC.
During this period, Berle was named to the Guinness Book of World Records for
the greatest number of charity performances made by a show-business performer.
Unlike the high-profile shows done by Bob Hope to entertain the troops, Berle
did more shows, over a period of 50 years, on a lower-profile basis. Berle
received an award for entertaining at stateside military bases in World War I as
a child performer, in addition to traveling to foreign bases in World War II and
Vietnam. The first charity telethon (for the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund) was
hosted by Berle in 1949. A permanent fixture at charity benefits in the
Hollywood area, he was instrumental in raising millions for charitable causes.
On April 14, 1979, Berle guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. Perhaps the comedian
saw this as a chance to revisit his live-TV "Texaco Star Theater" glories of
three decades before. Whatever his intention, he seemed to spend as much time
trying to upstage the show's youthful cast members as he did trying to work with
or complement them. Berle's long reputation for taking control of an entire
television production—whether invited to do so or not—was a cause of stress on
the set. One of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster, described the rehearsals for
the Berle SNL show and the telecast as "watching a comedy train accident in slow
motion on a loop." Upstaging, camera mugging, inserting old comedy bits, and
climaxing the show with a maudlin performance of "September Song." complete with
pre-arranged standing ovation (something producer Lorne Michaels had never
sanctioned), resulted in Berle being banned from the show. In the weeks that
followed, Berle's household in Beverly Hills received rambling, stoned phone
calls from John Belushi, loudly proclaiming that Berle was the greatest comedian
in history.
Another well-known incident of upstaging occurred during the 1982 Emmy Awards,
when Berle and Martha Raye were the presenters of the Emmy for Outstanding
Writing. Berle was reluctant to give up the microphone to the award's recipients,
from Second City Television, and interrupted actor Joe Flaherty's acceptance
speech several times. After Flaherty would make a joke, Berle would reply
sarcastically "Oh, that's funny." However the kindly, smiling Flaherty's
response "Go to sleep, Uncle Miltie" flustered Berle who could only reply with a
stunned "What...?" SCTV later created a parody sketch of the incident, in which
Flaherty beats up a Berle look-alike, shouting, "You'll never ruin another
acceptance speech, Uncle Miltie!"
One of his most popular performances in his later years was guest starring in
1993 in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a womanizing, wise-cracking patient. Most
of his dialogue was improvised and he shocked the studio audience by mistakenly
blurting out a curse word.
Berle appeared in drag in the video for "Round and Round" by the 1980s metal
band Ratt (his nephew Marshall Berle was then their manager).
Berle was again on the receiving end of an onstage jibe at the 1993 MTV Video
Music Awards where RuPaul notoriously responded to Berle's reference of having
once worn dresses himself (during his old television days) with the quip that
Berle now wore diapers. A surprised Berle replied, "Oh, we're going to ad lib? I'll
check my brain and we'll start even."