as the comedian was gathering his wits at the lectern onstage, before the comedian himself had said a thing: “Hey Gilbert! You gonna do the one about evolution?”
Again about Gil Berman’s so-called “pretty face”: His father, a ladies’ man if there ever was one, had features that were similarly symmetrical and understated, somewhat dainty. He and his son were what a physical anthropologist would term “paedomorphs,” not to be confused with “pederasts.” That meant they had pleasing features somewhat reminiscent of childhood. All women who are said to be beautiful are paedomorphs. The greatest of old-time comedians, Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, had a pretty face, and yet he was neither a castrato nor an androgyne. The late Oliver Hardy had a pretty face. The late Oliver Hardy had rosebud lips!
Berman said in response to the old geezer: “Please, no questions from the audience, and no autographs or interviews afterward.” There came now, as a formal announcement, a bit he had done for Who’s Sorry Now? He hadn’t planned to use it, but it now seemed apt. “I know the question on the tips of the tongues of all who might wish to interview me: ‘Mr. Berman, where do you get your ideas from?’ Well, you might as well have asked the same question of Lewd-vig van Beethoven. Young Lewd-vig was horsing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden all this shit came pouring out of him, and it was music. I was horsing around at Columbia University like everybody else, and all of a sudden all this shit came pouring out, and it was embarrassment about my country.”
He paused, and then he began the main body of his speech: “I am as celibate as any heterosexual Roman Catholic priest,” and so on.
The shit that came pouring out of young Gil Berman, if you want to call it that, when he himself was a college kid back in 1977, found plenty of laxatives in and around Columbia. Not the least of these was the comedy club only eight blocks away. There was also the miasma from a gruesomely moronic ten-year war, ended at last and lost, which never should have been fought at all: Vietnam . Berman and his classmates, God knows, did not regret having been too young to have fought in that war. It was mostly working-class kids who did that. But they were achingly envious of what Berman would come to call “the draft-dodging students who had raised such particular hell at Columbia while trying to get their government to stop the war. Some of them had
sustained bruises, in fact, from the truncheons of anti-intellectual law-enforcement personnel, or from brickbats hurled by members of the lower social orders in the building trades.”
And drugs were everywhere. Berman on this subject: “You didn’t have to leave the campus and go all the way to the nearest bodega or pizzeria for synthetic accomplishments and popularity. Then as now, the motto of every college, jail, prison, and YMCA in the United States should have been: ‘TV is not enough,’ or, ‘Why put up with the pain of being a living thing when you don’t have to?’ Or, ‘Have a snort, and feel bulletproof for fifteen minutes!’”
He was an only child. Who was his mother, now dead? After her one marriage, she kept her maiden name, which was Magda Lanz, and she lived, in Berman’s words, “from breech birth to long-widowed death in the Knightsbridge mansion built by her father.” That she had come into the world butt foremost, almost killing her own mother by doing that, was no family secret. Her mother—Berman’s grandmother, Sarah—found an occasion almost every day to recall for him the agony she had gone through in order that he might have a mother.
And his mother was permanently deranged by the postpartum depression and electroconvulsive therapy she suffered after giving birth to him, not to mention the nonstop dry heaves before that. So one is tempted to suggest that Gil Berman found chastity more reasonable than most people in good
Again about Gil Berman’s so-called “pretty face”: His father, a ladies’ man if there ever was one, had features that were similarly symmetrical and understated, somewhat dainty. He and his son were what a physical anthropologist would term “paedomorphs,” not to be confused with “pederasts.” That meant they had pleasing features somewhat reminiscent of childhood. All women who are said to be beautiful are paedomorphs. The greatest of old-time comedians, Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, had a pretty face, and yet he was neither a castrato nor an androgyne. The late Oliver Hardy had a pretty face. The late Oliver Hardy had rosebud lips!
Berman said in response to the old geezer: “Please, no questions from the audience, and no autographs or interviews afterward.” There came now, as a formal announcement, a bit he had done for Who’s Sorry Now? He hadn’t planned to use it, but it now seemed apt. “I know the question on the tips of the tongues of all who might wish to interview me: ‘Mr. Berman, where do you get your ideas from?’ Well, you might as well have asked the same question of Lewd-vig van Beethoven. Young Lewd-vig was horsing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden all this shit came pouring out of him, and it was music. I was horsing around at Columbia University like everybody else, and all of a sudden all this shit came pouring out, and it was embarrassment about my country.”
He paused, and then he began the main body of his speech: “I am as celibate as any heterosexual Roman Catholic priest,” and so on.
The shit that came pouring out of young Gil Berman, if you want to call it that, when he himself was a college kid back in 1977, found plenty of laxatives in and around Columbia. Not the least of these was the comedy club only eight blocks away. There was also the miasma from a gruesomely moronic ten-year war, ended at last and lost, which never should have been fought at all: Vietnam . Berman and his classmates, God knows, did not regret having been too young to have fought in that war. It was mostly working-class kids who did that. But they were achingly envious of what Berman would come to call “the draft-dodging students who had raised such particular hell at Columbia while trying to get their government to stop the war. Some of them had
sustained bruises, in fact, from the truncheons of anti-intellectual law-enforcement personnel, or from brickbats hurled by members of the lower social orders in the building trades.”
And drugs were everywhere. Berman on this subject: “You didn’t have to leave the campus and go all the way to the nearest bodega or pizzeria for synthetic accomplishments and popularity. Then as now, the motto of every college, jail, prison, and YMCA in the United States should have been: ‘TV is not enough,’ or, ‘Why put up with the pain of being a living thing when you don’t have to?’ Or, ‘Have a snort, and feel bulletproof for fifteen minutes!’”
He was an only child. Who was his mother, now dead? After her one marriage, she kept her maiden name, which was Magda Lanz, and she lived, in Berman’s words, “from breech birth to long-widowed death in the Knightsbridge mansion built by her father.” That she had come into the world butt foremost, almost killing her own mother by doing that, was no family secret. Her mother—Berman’s grandmother, Sarah—found an occasion almost every day to recall for him the agony she had gone through in order that he might have a mother.
And his mother was permanently deranged by the postpartum depression and electroconvulsive therapy she suffered after giving birth to him, not to mention the nonstop dry heaves before that. So one is tempted to suggest that Gil Berman found chastity more reasonable than most people in good
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