"She didn't want to bother you. You were in New York. You were busy."

As I said back in 2005, that's my all-time favorite scene on "Curb Your Enthusiasm":

Any scene with Shelley Berman ascends to a new level of greatness. My all-time favorite scene on the show was the old one where Berman kept beating around the bush, not wanting to reveal to Larry that his (Larry's) mother had died. "She didn't want to bother you. You were busy."

Today, I'm sad to see that Shelley Berman has died: "Shelley Berman, Stand-Up Comic Who Skewered Modern Life, Dies at 92" (NYT).

Mr. Berman, one of the first comedians to have as much success on records as in person or on television, was in the vanguard of a movement that transformed the comedy monologue from a rapid-fire string of gags to something more subtle, more thoughtful and more personal....

The obituary groups Berman with Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

In 1959, Time magazine referred to this new breed as “sick” comics, and the term (which Mr. Berman hated) caught on. But they had little in common with one another besides a determination to remake stand-up comedy in their own image. Mr. Sahl was a wry political commentator; Mr. Bruce was a profane social satirist; Mr. Berman was a beleaguered observer of life’s frustrations and embarrassments.

Perched on a stool — unlike most stand-up comedians, he did his entire act sitting down — Mr. Berman focused on the little things. He talked about passionate kisses that miss the mark so that ‘‘you wind up with the tip of her nose in the corner of your mouth.” Or what to do when the person you are talking to accidentally spits in your face — do you wipe the spit off or make believe it didn’t happen?...

Like his fellow Chicago comedian Bob Newhart, Mr. Berman specialized in telephone monologues, in which the humor came from his reactions to the unheard voice on the other end of the line. (Mr. Berman often claimed that Mr. Newhart stole that idea from him. Mr. Newhart maintained that the idea did not originate with either of them, noting that comedians had been doing telephone monologues since at least the 1920s.)

In one classic routine, Mr. Berman, nursing a brutal hangover, listened with increasing horror as the host of the party he had attended the night before reminded him of the damage he had done: “How did I break a window? … Oh, I see. … Were you very fond of that cat?”

Here he is on "The Judy Garland Show" in a scene that seems to be an elaborately staged musical with 9 singing office workers but suddenly shifts. Listen for the audience reaction at 1:25 as the idea becomes a classic one-man telephone routine (which goes on insanely long):

"If you confess what your little dirty little sins are, you're going to get a whole audience laughing..."

"... because they all have the same dirty little sin." Said by Shelley Berman, explaining the secret of comedy.

From the same little article, Fred Willard:

The perfect comic is the comic who will say something and you say: "Oh my God, I thought I was the only one who felt that way. I was, had this secret all my life. I thought I was a pervert, or I thought I was a racist, or I thought I was an idiot."

(That also sounds like the secret of the Internet.)

Curbing my enthusiasm.

Did you watch the premiere of the new season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"? It got off to a fine start. (Any scene with Shelley Berman ascends to a new level of greatness. My all-time favorite scene on the show was the old one where Berman kept beating around the bush, not wanting to reveal to Larry that his (Larry's) mother had died. "She didn't want to bother you. You were busy.")

I loved all the stuff last night about the Larry David sandwich. They put a lot of thought into concocting a really terrible sandwich. Two kinds of fish and cream cheese -- and capers! ("Sable? What's sable?") And that sandwich is interwoven with the unsandwich-y them of getting religion. (Or is religion like a sandwich? I'll bet some boring minister has built a sermon on that trope.)

But then I decided to reposition myself on a more comfortable piece of furniture and fell asleep for part of it. I'll have to catch it again on HBO on Demand.

There was also "Extras," which I was looking forward to seeing, but I only managed to catch a few snippets as I intermittently resurfaced from the grip of sleep. Sleep and I were like the ocean and Larry David in that first scene of "The Larry David Sandwich."