Garry Berman

This slim volume (130 pages including index and bibliography) presented two to three sentence comments by various comedians on various topics such as Comedy as Art, The Vaudevillians, The Silent Films Comedians, The Golden Age of Talkies, The Radio Specialists, The War Years and Beyond, The Television Legends, Stand-up Comedians, and Comedians as Actors. This book needed a good editor. In many cases part of a word was missing, such as “he” instead of “the” and “Cary Grand” instead of “Cary Grant”. It was an okay book, interesting to see what one comedian thinks of another. However, at $14.95 it is not worth it.… (altro)

This book looks at the career of Ed Wynn who started in vaudeville and made the transition to radio, television and film. The most amazing of his transitions was to dramatic actor for which he was nominated for various awards, including a Best Supporting Actor in The Diary of Anne Frank. The book covers his career very well. It pays less attention to his personal life. We do hear about his 3 marriages and his difficult relationship with his son Keenan. While he put his career about his family, it appears that his first wife suffered from depression. The book indicated that while he was a beloved comedian, his home life was very sad, but it never seemed that Wynn took any responsibility for being partially the cause of this sadness in his personal life. However, Wynn's life shows the importance of being able to change and re-invent your self to continue to succeed in life which I think is the best message of this book. I would have liked to have known what happened to Wynn's granddaughters who were mentioned in the book. The book has plenty of photographs but is missing a listing of his work on stage, radio, film, and television which would have caused me to give it another star.… (altro)