I really don't want to go over this again but those comedians who stayed pretty close to one thing pretty well all petered out long before they died. In addition to Milton Berle, it's striking that the great Marx Brothers didn't make a movie after the decidedly inferior "Love Happy" in 1949 (I seem to recall Groucho said the only reason they made it was to bail Chico out of his gambling debts), Mae West didn't do much other than repeat her earlier work from even earlier for a number of years, before her long, sad, increasingly creepy final years. W. C. Fields' career was fading before, like Ernie Kovacs, he died in an untimely way. That sad clip I posted from Berele's last hurrah on network TV, a friggin' bowling show, was especially sad as the far superior Ritz Brothers were featured on it, showing how far they'd fallen.
Even a good comic shtick gets old and once people have seen it, it stops being comedy and becomes, after an interval, nostalgia. at best. More typically it becomes annoying. Most comedy shticks aren't that good to start with.
The comedians who last tend to be comic actors who do a number of things well, Lily Tomlin is probably the best current example of that. You could point to her long time writer and collaborator Jane Wagner though Tomlin is also a brilliant improviser, if I had time I would look for her TV interview as what seems to have been a character. a multi-millionaire backer, she sprang on the interviewer when she was publicizing Search For Intelligent Life. You can watch old clips of the Carol Burnett show. her work and that of her regular cast, without the kind of embarrassment you feel from watching so many others from that era and before. I can't comment on their subsequent careers but the work they did then stands up pretty well.
Having mentioned Ernie Kovacs, I wonder if he would have developed more if he had lived, though I think his humor wouldn't have made the transition into the later 60s and beyond very well. Of the Marx Brothers only Groucho did much after the act broke up and he didn't do all that much, though he remained quite good for a long time. And Milton Berle was no Marx brother. I asked an old friend, old enough to have had one of the earliest TVs marketed after WWII if she thought Milton Berle was ever funny, she said, no, she never found him funny. She adored Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, from time to time she watches old VCRs of Your Show of Shows. She's 95. Caesar went a lot farther than his start on Berle's show.
Milton Berle was, though, superior to Lenny Bruce, though that's not a high bar to cross. Lenny Bruce was never funny.
Comedy is like eggs, you really don't want to eat them reheated. Canning them for later sale is a bad idea.
Update: I'm tired of the TV retarded troll from Teaneck, he can go neck himself and his buddies.
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