Milton Berle

The Man Who Sold Television Sets

Mendel Berlinger won a Charlie Chaplin impersonation contest at just five years old. He was 1913, and the boy was already touring vaudeville theaters with an ambition bordering on insolence. He wasn't seeking the audience's approval (he wanted their total surrender) through physical comedy that gave viewers no respite.

And she got it quickly.

Milton Berle understood before anyone else that television was not an extension of film but a piece of furniture that needed an aggressive salesman. In 1948, he began hosting Texaco Star Theater, and the impact was so explosive that television set sales doubled in just one year. On Tuesday nights the country came to a standstill to watch a man in drag or with false teeth juggling with ridicule.

Movie theater owners complained that their auditoriums sat empty during the show's broadcast. But Berle only cared about pace. His scripts were a relentless volley of gags with no room for silence. He earned a 80 percent share of the audience in an era when offerings were scarce but technical demands were brutal.

He was the first mass-media phenomenon of the small screen.

He earned the nickname "Uncle Miltie" because he crashed into living rooms across the country like a loud, somewhat overbearing relative. Inside the industry, however, his reputation was different. They called him "The Joke Thief" because he kept a notebook where he jotted down every punchline he heard from other comics, only to deliver it himself with better aim.

NBC's Golden Cage

In 1951 he signed a thirty-year contract with NBC guaranteeing him an annual salary of 200,000 dollars no matter what. It looked like the deal of the century (but it turned out to be a creative millstone). Public tastes shifted toward more sophisticated comedies, and Berle's style started to seem like a distant echo of the carnival tent.

He tried to break into film with roles that demanded more than mugging. In 1963 he appeared in the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World under the direction of Stanley Kramer. There he proved he could hold the frame against legends such as Spencer Tracy without needing to dress up as a waitress. Still, the movies never gave him the throne that television had handed him for a decade.

The industry is cruel to pioneers.

During the seventies and eighties, he made the rounds of talk shows and cameo appearances in hit series. In 1984, he appeared in the music video for Round and Round by the metal band Ratt (a decision that puzzled his longtime fans). He still craved the spotlight, even though the stage was an MTV studio set.

In 1991 he shot his last film, Driving Me Crazy, in which he played a hotel manager. He was no longer the center of the media universe, but he kept the sharp eye of someone who knows exactly where the punchline lands. Because Berle never stopped being a joke worker who measured success by the volume of the audience's laughter.

On 1998, he appeared in an episode of the children's sitcom Kenan & Kel, proving his energy hadn't faded at ninety years old. He died in Los Angeles on March 27, 2002, from colon cancer that had been diagnosed months earlier. His professional legacy is summed up by the 50 million viewers he drew every week in front of a wooden and glass box.