Ask Milton Berle if he`ll ever retire and he quotes George Burns. (Who else? How many other performers have been telling jokes longer than 83-year-old Uncle Miltie?)
”Someone asked him about retiring,” says Berle, ”and he replied,
`Retire to what?` That`s the way I feel. I started in this business when I was 5. I was a model, the Buster Brown boy with the dog. I know nothing else other than taking bows, hearing applause, flopping, singing, dancing, playing it straight, getting laughs.”
So that pretty much addresses the retirement question. And now Berle is off to Montreal and Saturday night`s Just for Laughs Comedy Festival. There he`ll become the first inductee into the Comedy Hall of Fame, with the ceremony televised live over Showtime at 9 p.m. Mary Tyler Moore is the host.
”I`ve had a lot of honors,” says Berle. ”But there`s a great feeling about this one because the people who voted me in were the entertainers: young kids, some of them 19 or 20 years old.
”It makes me feel like I`m in there punching for the new laugh-getters, and that`s what it`s all about. Comedy is an art, though some people don`t believe that, and we need to pass it on.”
Truth is, Berle worries a bit about comedy`s future: ”Making people laugh isn`t something you learn to do overnight, and there aren`t the places today where you get the chance to learn,” he says. ”People like myself, Jack Benny, George Burns, we played vaudeville. It was a place to work on your material, polish your act. . . . It might take six to eight years to make it, but if you were good, you had that kind of time.
”Today there`s no place to flop. The comedy clubs are fine for what they are, and I hope they keep going, but they don`t give you the full range of experience. You can`t learn sketches. A lot of comedians today don`t know how to use the stage. They take `standup` literally. They stand at the microphone and tell stories. They don`t become multifaceted.”
Berle is worth paying attention to on this subject. He was a modestly successful vaudeville and stage performer who became a national star because he turned out to be perfect for the new medium called television.
He began hosting the variety show ”Texaco Star Theater” on June 8, 1948, and within months had turned it, for all practical purposes, into the Milton Berle show. He did this with a frenetic style: dashing from one corner of the small screen to the other, making the audience wonder what this guy would do next.
He also became one of the first major TV stars, and a powerful figure in the business.