Education Quote by Shelley Berman

A comedian announcing his thirteenth year teaching a graduate course at USC is funny because it sounds like the start of a serious, credentialed memoir and then quietly dares you to ask: wait, why is Shelley Berman doing this? The line is built like a suit and tie, but it’s worn by a guy whose whole career was making the suit itch.

Berman came up as one of the architects of modern stand-up’s “thinking person” voice: the anxious, articulate, slightly trapped narrator who turns self-awareness into a routine. So the academic phrasing isn’t incidental. “Presently” and “thirteenth year” land with bureaucratic precision, the kind of language that pretends life is trackable and orderly. The subtext is a wink at institutional authority: comedy, the unruly outsider art, has been invited inside the university, stamped with legitimacy. It’s also a joke about legitimacy itself. If a comic can list years-of-service like a tenured professor, maybe the difference between high culture and nightclub culture is mostly paperwork.

Context matters: by the late 20th century, universities started treating film, pop culture, and performance as worthy of graduate study, while Hollywood-adjacent schools like USC became pipelines to industry. Berman’s line rides that cultural shift and gently needles it. He’s not bragging so much as staging a comic reversal: the guy you’d expect to be heckling authority is now part of it, still sounding faintly surprised, like he’s reading his own bio and doesn’t quite believe the punchline.