The late great Shelley Berman mellowed from those darkly comic phone calls that mirrored the "Age of Anxiety" in the late 50's and early 60's. Instead of being in a room with no windows or door, or the "morning after" a cat-throwing drunk scene at a party, in his 70's and 80's TV appearances he often enumerated life's little moments of agony. The Mount Rushmore of Comedy, the game-changers of that era, were Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters and Shelley Berman.
