Confession Comedy

The skinny, green-eyed guy with the hurt, hesitant frown looked like a loser --the kind of character who can never quite cope with life's ludicrous little defeats. Wherever he slouched in front of an audience--last month on the bare bandstand of a Chicago nightclub, this week before the unforgiving cameras of Ed Sullivan's TV show--it seemed hardly probable that sad-sack Monologuist Shelley Berman could deliver.

Shelley scarcely seems to try. He merely offers solemn, almost sorrowful comments on some of the irritating incongruities of modern life. Take air travel, says Shelley, with the carefully controlled tension of a man who has already taken altogether too much. "I never have the slightest doubt about my safety in a plane until I walk into an airport terminal and realize that there is a thriving industry in this building selling life insurance policies . . . What they do by this power of suggestion is that they plant the seed of doubts into an already chicken human being."

"In Here, Slob." Something about the way Shelley speaks--a profession of diffidence, a perfection of timing--suggests that everyone in the audience shares his feeling. And as simply as that, Shelley puts Mister Kelly's Chicago nightclub or Mr. Sullivan's fans in his pocket.

"Going further with that power of suggestion," Shelley continues, "you recall the little slot behind the seat in front of you? There's one item in this little slot which is the most ominous item in the whole damn plane. It's a little, innocent-looking white bag. There are instructions on the back in three different languages, French, Italian and Hebrew. And all they're saying, freely translated, is Tn here, slob. In here.' "

From that uneasy airplane flight to the occasion "when you get that subtle secret message that says, 'Go!' and you plunge, and it's a passionate kiss, and it's off center, and you wind up with the tip of her nose in the corner of your mouth," Shelley Berman's humor is all composed of life's familiar anxieties and embarrassments. He has been recording them for as long as he can remember.

"I've Got Money." Born and brought up in Chicago, Shelley, 32, says that even in his early days he played to the crowd. "As I grew older, I became more proficient at being a showoff. I was a pretty good loudmouth. I was the guy at parties. You know--that clod who determines the mood of the gathering. My whole act is confession. Every word I say, I'm admitting something."

Shelley is willing to confess that the act he originally planned for himself was never meant for the likes of The Ed Sullivan Show. When he was discharged from the Navy as an asthmatic in 1943, he was 17, and he entered Chicago's Goodman Theater to study acting. "I was pretty damn good," he confesses further, but he would end up working at a Daytona Beach, Fla. hotel. ("I ran around with a volleyball bothering people who didn't want to be bothered.")

After that, a couple of tours of duty as an Arthur Murray dancing instructor, and a stint in TV drama kept him going until he got a chance to show some of his improvised monologues in a small Chicago cabaret. He was a success. But it was a guest spot on the Jack Paar television show, just 17 months ago, that really settled his career.

Ed Sullivan gave him a contract for six performances, and he went home to Chicago last month, a $50,000-a-year hotshot. Only the year before, he did not have the money to buy a winter coat.

"In the first year that I have money," confesses Shelley with the honesty that audiences find disarming, "I am an egregiously disgusting nouveau riche. I'm being a sport. The other day I slipped an aunt a $100 bill and said, 'Buy yourself a hat, honey.' Most important thing is the feeling of strength. The feeling that I've got money in my jeans, and if you don't want me here, I can go elsewhere."

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