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Milton Berle , (July 12, 1908, New York City; d.March 27, 2002, Los Angeles, California) was an American comedian and---after a career spanning vaudeville, film, and radio---became television's first true superstar. As the manic host of the legendary (NBC, 1948 to June 14, 1955; the show was also known as the Buick-Berle Show when Buick became its sponsor in 1953 and ensured his legend would outlive the show (which once owned America's home audience on Tuesday nights) and, some feel, his talent.

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Born in a five-story walkup at 68 West 118th Street in New York, Berle had the entertainment itch in early childhood, beginning his long career in 1913 by winning a contest with an impersonation of silent comic genius Charlie Chaplin. Despite his many genuine achievements, Berle padded his résumé by falsely claiming to have worked as a child actor in silent films, including . It has been established since that Berle---who later included a reputation for joke-stealing as part of his act---did not appear in these films.

But he did pay his dues in film, stage, and radio work, building a following, and in the fall of 1948 Berle finally caught his biggest break, when NBC---reviving its radio vehicle yet again (it was, formerly, the vehicle through which Ed Wynn and, especially, Fred Allen refined and advanced the s that made them radio legends), with Berle as its host---decided to bring it to television in the fall of 1948, after Berle had spent the summer as one of the tryout show's rotating hosts.

"I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are," Milton Berle was once quoted as saying. It turned out that he got his wish---perhaps a little sooner that he might have wished to get it.

NBC took the chance and named Berle the permanent host of ---and launched an American icon. The show and its host owned Tuesday nights for the next several years, hitting the number one slot in the Nielsen ratings and keeping it with as much as an 80 percent share of the recorded viewing audience. Berle individually and the show itself each won Emmy Awards after the first season. Theaters, restaurants, and other businesses either closed completely or simply shut down for the hour so their customers wouldn't miss Berle's antics. He was credited with a huge spike in television set sales (many believe Berle helped sell more television sets in the U.S. than anyone else in the medium's early years), and between that and his stature as the medium's first superstar Berle earned the nickname "Mr. Television."

He earned his slightly more familiar nickname after ending a 1949 broadcast with a brief remark to children watching the show: "Listen to your Uncle Miltie and go to bed." And he was so popular, at the

The only problem with that deal was that NBC (and practically everyone else) couldn't know just how short would be the average lifespan of any comedian on television, compared to radio comics whose careers went on for two decades and often longer. In part, this was due to the more ephemeral nature of visual comedy: they who don't adapt faster don't survive longer. And, indeed, Berle ended up wearing out his welcome almost as rapidly as he had built it up in the first place. Texaco pulled out of sponsorship of the show in 1953; Buick picked it up, prompting the renaming to , but Berle's ratings continued to fall and Buick pulled out after one season. By the time the again-renamed finished its one full season under that name, Berle already seemed like ancient history---though this final season did provide some of the earliest television appearances by a young rock and roll singing star named Elvis Presley.

NBC had no choice but to cancel the original Berle show at last. He later appeared in the Kraft Music Hall series, but NBC was finding increasingly fewer roles for its one-time superstar. By 1960, he was reduced to hosting a game show,

Unable to find or accept other television work, Berle played Las Vegas, made nightclub appearances, appeared on Broadway in Herb Gardner's , and many others.

In 1966, freed in part from the obligations of his NBC contract, Berle was signed to a new weekly variety series on ABC. The show failed to capture the large audience Berle commanded in the 1950s, and was cancelled after one season. He later appeared as guest villain Louie the Lilac on the short-lived (but wildly popular) series, also on ABC.

Like Jackie Gleason, his contemporary (who managed to avoid Berle's pitfalls in making his own comedy-variety show last over twice as long), Berle proved a solid dramatic actor and was acclaimed for several such performances, most notably his lead role in "Doyle Against The House" on in 1961---he received an Emmy nomination. He also played the part of a blind survivor of an airplane crash in

By 1970, however, Berle was appearing primarily as a nod to his past, an increasingly nostalgic figure as well as a reference in pop culture history. And sometimes this led to disaster as often as devotion. On April 24th, 1979 Berle guest-hosted Saturday Night Live. This should have been a natural union, considering how much the show---in all its "contempt not for the medium but for the bad habits it had developed over the years," as chronicler Tom Shales phrased it---owed to the absolute best of the early, anything-goes ethos of Berle's was trying (and at its best succeeding) in re-inventing the medium.

The bad news was that Mr. Television's appearance proved anything but transcendent. Uncle Miltie seemed to spend as much time trying to upstage the show's youthful cast as he did trying to work with or augment them. In Shales and James Andrew Miller's , one of the show's writers, Rosie Shuster, described the rehearsals and the telecast itself as "sort of like watching a comedy train accident in slow motion on a loop." Upstaging, camera mugging, inserting old comedy bits that he may or may not have "stolen" from others, and a maudlin performance of "September Song" complete with pre-arranged standing ovation (something creator Lorne Michaels and company had never sanctioned), and Berle ended up banned from a show that owed him a certain artistic debt in the first place.

, created by Steven Spielberg, in an episode called "Fine Tuning", where friendly aliens from space, having received TV signals from the Earth of the 1950s, travel to Hollywood in search of their idols, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Burns and Allen---and Uncle Miltie. Berle, speaking gibberish, is the only person able to communicate directly with the aliens. It was one of the finest performances in Berle's later life.

He presided as the master of ceremonies for many Friar's Club roasts and other gatherings. He was also an occasional guest on the Howard Stern radio show, during which he endured Stern's questions about the alleged enormity of his genitals and what Marilyn Monroe was like in bed. Many old startlets in Hollywood remember that 6 canary's could roost on his member all at once. In 1988, a series of syndicated TV specials with the umbrella title "Milton Berle: The Second Time Around" recycled footage from the live Texaco Star Theater programs (unseen for decades) and helped to introduce Berle's brand of comedy to a new audience. One of the last known on camera interviews with Milton Berle was conducted by Steven F. Zambo. A small portion of this interview can be seen in the 2005 PBS' special The Pioneers of Primetime.

Berle had one of the greatest joke collections in the world, with about 6.5 million jokes on computer. The books each had 10,000 of these jokes. Being Jewish, [1] one of his best remembered jokes was, "Any time a person goes into a delicatessen and orders a pastrami on white bread, somewhere a Jew dies."

Mr. Television, of course was one of the first seven people to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984. Berle died of colon cancer on March 27th, 2002, at the age of 93, and was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.

In more than one way, Berle was television's first shooting star as well as its first bona-fide superstar. He burned out almost as quickly as he exploded into a national obsession and never really found another way to recapture the elusive early lightning that united the medium to the man so effectively. The downside is that Berle's manic born to endure except as an influence, and he did himself few favours by making a kind of running gag about stealing jokes---it has helped undermine his stature as a genuine pop culture figure and, in his way, an American original for awhile enough. But however dated even his best work now seems, Milton Berle gave a new medium a shape that continues to be a reference point for both the best (1932) - revue - performer cast by Earl Carroll in the roles of "Mortimer" in the sketch "Mourning Becomes Impossible", "Joe Miller, Jr." in "What Price Jokes", "Frank" in "Two Sailors", "Paul" in "The Cabinet of Doctor X", the "Announcer" in "Studio W.M.C.A." the "Defendant" in "Trial By Jury" and "Milton" in "The Bar Relief"