Who is Milton Berle

Milton Berle was a hoot! He'd do anything for a laugh. When you see comedians today acting goofy, you can bet Uncle Miltie was acting even goofier back in the day. He managed to be hilarious without cussing or being vulgar, although once during a live performance he blurted out a few words that shocked everybody. He claimed it was an accident.

Milton Berle was TV's first real star. His show, Texas Star Theater was a huge hit from 1948 to 1955. In fact, Berle is credited for getting the public interested in buying those new-fangled electronic boxes they called televisions.

Berle was a child star, starting ed on stage and moved into radio. TV however, was the perfect arena for his his highly visual, outrageous vaudeville style. 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. Today, even the super bowl doesn't get ratings like that. Of course it helped that Berle had little to no competition on the small box. So he competed with dinner and the big screen. And he won. Fewer movie tickets were sold on the nights his show aired. Some theaters, restaurants and other businesses actually shut down while he was on because all the customers were glued to the tube.

Milton Berle is often called the father of television. But the fickle TV industry didn't appreciate their papa. NBC dumped the Berle show in June 1956. In part, this happened because non other than Elvis Presley caused an uproar by shaking his booty a little too energetically during a performance of "Hound Dog." It might also have been because Berle had the guts to stick up for black performers that the network didn't want on their shows. Those kind of controversies aside, it's also true that his rating dropped as more TVs were sold in rural areas. Those folks didn't appreciate Uncle Miltie as much.

Berle had a reputation as a control freak, but he also gave a lot to others. In fact, he 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.

As Berle aged, he branched out and did some drama. He got good reviews for the most part, but a 1979 appearance on Saturday Night Live turned into the wrong kind of joke. One of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster, described his SNL appearance 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. But not everybody on the show turned against him. Reportedly, Berle got dozens of rambling phone calls from a stoned John Belushi, loudly proclaiming that Berle was the greatest comedian in history.

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