Radio Gagsters Won’t Laugh By Jack Sher

Sunday, January 7, 1940           THE MILWAUKEE OURNAL –SCREEN and RADIO       11                 

Radio Gagsters Won’t Laugh

By Jack Sher

MILTIE BERLINDER, aged 7, stood in front of the mirror in the Berlinger’s Bronx apartment making faces. He knitted his eyebrows furiously. He seriously studied his image in the mirror. He knitted his eyebrows furiously. He decided it was pretty good.

Papa Berlinger put down his paper, pointed a long finger at Miltie and addressed Mama Berlinger.

“Lookit our boy.” He wagged his head disapprovingly. “All day he’s gonna stand there and make monkeyshines in the mirror?”

Mama Berlinger wagged a finger back at papa. “So if Miltie wants to make faces, it hurts you? Leave him alone. Something will come of this.”

“From such foolishness comes nothing,” Papa Berlinger replied and went back to his paper.

Miltie turned from the mirror and shuffled across the room. Mama Berlinger began to chuckle. “Miltie,” she laughed. “Just like Charlie Chaplin.”

“Yeah,” Miltie said. “I been practicing it. Mama, look. I want to cut off the curls. They don’t go with my face.”

“The curls you don’t cut off, Miltie,” she said firmly and patted his blond head. “Tomorrow we’ll go already to the moving picture people. Maybe you’ll be that Little Lord Fontleroy, who knows?”

And early the next morning Mama Berlinger trotted her Miltie over to the studios in Fort Lee, N. J. There they stood all morning, mama straightening his Buster Brown suit every now and then, waiting to see the director of the picture. The curls did the trick and Miltie Berlinger—whom you now hear on the radio as Milton Berle was launched in show business.

That was over 25 years ago, before Baby Peggy, before Jackie Coogan. Milton Berle was probably the first kid star in pictures. He made “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” worked with Pearl White in the “Perils of Pauline” pictures, with John Bunny in “Bunny’s Little Brother.” And Papa Berlinger, who owned a paint and hardware store on 14^th st., lived to see Mama Berlinger’s perdiction come true. Something came of Miltie’s faces.

HE’S been making them ever since. And along with the faces, he’s acquired a file od over 385,000 gags, most of which he’s chanted in night clubs and vaudeville houses all over the country. As the years have changed the style of humor,  Milton Berle  has streamlined his gags and routines until today, along with Bob Hope, he is rated A-1 as a modern American comedian.

Humor is a very serious business to Mr. Berle, I learned as I ate breakfast with him the other morning at Louis & Armand’s on 52^nd st. The first 15 minutes of our conversation was not serious, it was downright belligerent. It seem that, even as your reporter, Milton is a grouchy gent before the morning ham and eggs sweeten his disposition. We mumbled and glared at each other until the meal was over. Then he sat back and grinned. “Now I feel better,” he said.

“Me too,” I answered.

“This morning,” he said, “I had no sooner got one eye open when my manager says, ‘Milt, what numbers do you want played on next week’s show?’ ‘Joe,’ I yelled at him, ‘ before breakfast I can’t think of numbers.’”

Milton was ready to open up about the humor business.

“You can’t tell a joke now that you could tell five years ago,” Milton said before I even asked him. “That’s why there are so few comedians making a living. The days of playing down to an audience are over. Jokes have to have a modern setting and a tempo that has the pace of a swing tune. Five years ago, if I told the jokes I tell today, nobody in the audience would have laughed.”

“A dire situation,” I said. “Give me an example.”

“Give me a subject,” Milton said.

“You mean you can tell a joke on any subject ?” I asked. He nodded. “All right.” I said, “the Yankee stadium.”

“Uh-huh,” he screwed up his face “Here it is. A panhandler came up to me on the street the other day. ‘Gimme $1.75 for a hot dog,’ he said. ‘Go away,’ I said, ‘hot dogs cost only a dime.’ ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but I want tot this one in the Yankee stadium.’”

I laughed. “Why wouldn’t that gag have been good five years ago?”

“Because,” Milton explained, “five years ago very few people would have known what the Yankee stadium was or that it cost $1.65 to get in there.”

Frankly, readers, that explanation didn’t satisfy me. But I’m passing it along, anyway. Maybe it will satisfy you. You’ll have to admit that the way he made up a joke on the spur of the moment is pretty good. I tried him on a variety of subject and he had a gag for every one. And a face, too. After sitting with Milton Berle for a while he had had me making faces and talking like he does. I asked him about this.

“My friend,” he grinned, “you have the makings of a gag writer”

“Heaven forbid,” I said.

“I’m sure of it,” he said. “Every gag writer who has worked for me ends up talking like I do and making the same gestures and faces. Jack Rose, the boy I hired just two weeks ago, is now more like me than me.”

“I know him,” I said. “He’s beginning to look unhappy. After a while all gag writers become morose or unhappy—or just plain batty.”

“No they don’t,” Milton said. “They just get like comedians. You can’t make them laugh.”

“Isn’t that dandy,” I grinned. “Well, I don’t want to get that way.”

“It isn’t really that they don’t laugh,” Milton said, thinking it over. “It’s just that they don’t laugh at jokes or gags or things that other people laugh at.”

“Normal people, you mean?”

Milton grinned. “Maybe so. If you’ll come over to Lindy’s restaurant tonight I’ll introduce you to a fellow who gives me a laugh every minute.”

“I’d like to see that ,” I said. “What time?”

“About 11 after the show.” Milton wasn’t referring to his radio show, but the Broadway show in which he’s playing the lead, an opus called “See My Lawyer.”

WE LEFT it at that and switched to other subjects. Berle confessed that he wanted to direct and write Broadway shows and movies. That didn’t interest me much. All performers want to do that. We kidded around, not getting anywhere, but having fun.

“Say an ad in Variety,” Milton was saying. “It read. We guarantee to give you Berle-proof jokes. So, naturally, I wanted to see what a Berle-proof joke was.”

“Naturally.”

“Yeah. So I sent for the two guys who had put the ad in Variety. One of them was this tall, skinny guy. Irving Brecker. I liked him. He was with me for quite a while. Started out writing gags for me on a small scale 5 or 10 bucks a gag. Then I got my Community Sing Show and he went into the money 150 250 350 a week. Kept getting him more and more.

Then he went to the west coast with me and worked on my picture. I took him out to Mervyn Le Roy’s house one night. Mervyn liked him. He just wrote ‘At the Circus’ for the Marx brothers.”

“Looks like you did all right by him,” I said. “If I hear of anybody who wants to write gags, I’ll let you know. Say, who writes these parodies on popular songs you do I like them but very much.”

“I write them,” Milton beamed. “The best one I ever wrote I knocked off in 15 minutes coming home from a football game at the Yankee stadium.”

“You’re not building up to another gag”

“No, it’s a fact. My brother was working in a clothing store down on 14^th st. and asked me to work up a routine for a stag birthday party they were tossing for the boss. The boss first name was Sam.”

I was startled. “You don’t mean that number ‘Sam, You Made the Pants Too Long’?” Milton said yes, and then I said I heard a certain well known comedian do it. Milton smirked.

“I’ll tell you a story about that,” he said. “That comedian sort of lifted it from me. We were both doing it at rival theaters in Chicago one week. My mama and I went over to catch this guy’s act. He came out, started to sing the song, saw us in the front row and hung his dead. He kept his head down all through the song and that business of keeping his head down sold the song better than anything he possibly could have done. It’s still in his routine.

THAT night, around 11, I dropped into Lindy’s on Broadway. I spotted Berle at a table with a dark complexioned little guy. Then Berle saw me and waved me over and introduced the little guy as Chuck Green. He winked, indication that this was the guy who dished out a laugh a minute.

In inquired about Chuck Green’s occupation and found out that he was a jewelry salesman. He was pretty belligerent about it. After I had been there for a while I discovered he was belligerent about everything. That was his way of bring lovable. I wasn’t there very long before I discovered why this little gent could make comedians laugh. He has a language all his own. He was telling about a poker game when I had so rudely interrupted his monolog.

“The movie of that thin little stick,” says Mr. Green. “He gets into our game with a tuboicular 20” Berle began to double over his laughter. As Green went on in his colorful way, Berle kept laughing harder and harder.

“Don’t make me laugh,” he howled at one point, holding his sides. “It’s killing me”

So there you have it That’s all. You may laugh your head off at one of those “Berle-proof” gags, but a simple little phrase used by a guy to disparage a $20 bill can transport a connoisseur like Milton Berle into a laughing icky.

I wonder what it takes to make Fred Allen laugh. I happen to know it’s not Jack Benny.