Shelley Berman may have been the first person whose career was crippled by reality television.

Okay, the second, if you count Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

But McCarthy deserved it. 

Berman, who died Friday at the age of 92 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, was one of the A-list comedians of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a colleague and peer of a select group that included the likes of Mort Sahl, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen and Dick Gregory.

Berman fell into comedy because an acting career, his Plan A, wasn’t coming together. So he took acting to the stage, creating human dramas and mini-dramas that ran anywhere from three to 10 minutes.

He framed them as his end of a phone conversation, with the audience inferring the other end. While the unseen person was essentially his straight man, this technique nonetheless engaged listeners by requiring them to activate their imaginations.

Good idea.

Berman’s routines got as serious as a rare honest discussion between father and son. Because most of them focused on humor, often absurd humor, he was officially known as a comedian.

He could go off on buttermilk or unhelpful phone operators. He could confess his affection for his pillowcase. He did a long, beautifully crafted routine about riding in an airplane that seemed about to crash, until a couple of real-life disasters made that subject not funny anymore and he dropped it.

No one who grew up on the comedians of today, from Eddie Murphy to Amy Schumer, would find anything stylistically anachronistic about Shelley Berman.

Taking his cue from Sahl, whom he credited as his inspiration, Berman grabbed a subject and riffed on it. Call it observational comedy. Whatever. Like many of today’s best-known comedians, he would take that subject and spin it out like cotton candy, swirling it around as it got denser and denser.

And, very often, funnier and funnier. His classic “Morning After the Night Before” routine, for instance, had Berman talking to the host of a party at which Berman apparently had misbehaved outrageously the night before. Sample passage:

“How did I break a window? I see. Were you very fond of that cat? It’s lucky the only thing I threw through a window was a cat. Oh. . . . . she’s a very good sport,  your mother.”

Comedians had been using the telephone as a prop since Alexander Graham Bell invented the infernal thing. Joe Hayman’s sketch “Cohen on the Telephone” was one of the first comedy records released, in 1913. 

Berman put the idea in a different frame. Where most early telephone comedy followed the classic vaudeville pattern of joke-joke-joke, Berman didn’t do one-liners.

He just started talking, he said, and if he did it right, “Funny would come.”

He was right. He recorded two great comedy albums, Inside Shelley Berman (1959) and A Personal Appearance (1961), plus two that had their moments: Outside Shelley Berman (1959) and The Edge of Shelley Berman (1960).

Inside Shelley Berman became the first non-music recording to win a Grammy.

He was a unique comedian in several ways. Being Jewish was not one of them, though he didn’t shy away from referencing that fact. He used it in a different way, with his own neuroses and vulnerabilities.

Reality television was the piece of ground he would come to wish he hadn’t broken.

In 1963, he agreed to let NBC follow him around for a month to do a feature called Comedian Backstage. While it was nominally a documentary, it was more like the embryonic stage of what has come to be called reality television.

As he was performing his “father and son” routine on stage one night, the cameras rolling, a real phone rang backstage.

This enraged him, and after the show, he stormed into the production area to ream anyone within earshot. He grabbed a phone and threw it off the hook, saying that’s how it should remain during his performance.

Silence wasn’t a new demand for Berman. When he performed in places with bars, he required that the bartenders not do things like mix drinks in blenders while he was performing. He felt his material needed the audience’s full attention.

On the NBC special, however, he came off as a petulant prima donna. Because this sort of entertainment documentary was relatively rare at the time, that moment drew a lot of attention, so even people who didn’t know Shelley Berman and hadn’t watched the show suddenly got the message that he was a rude, arrogant jerk.

His career deflated after that, and while there were other factors, like the tidal wave of 1960s popular culture, Berman blamed the NBC special for his personal plight.

The consequences included his eventually declaring bankruptcy, he said. He also accused the producers of deliberately letting that phone ring just to provoke a reaction. While that bit of subversion was never confirmed, it’s exactly the kind of thing that has since become standard reality television practice.

Perhaps ironically, Berman rescued his career largely by turning to television. He became well known for playing Larry David’s father Nat through several seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he had character roles on dozens of shows that included Mary Tyler Moore, L.A. Law, Friends (right), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Grey’s Anatomy, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Peter Gunn.

He also appeared in movies, taught comedy writing at USC and was honored multiple times for his work.

So reality TV didn’t ruin Shelley Berman. But he always felt it sent him down a different, perhaps lesser path, for an outburst that in today’s reality TV world might not even survive the final edit because it wouldn’t be considered obnoxious enough.

There’s an observational comedy bit in there somewhere.