"John G." told me this was on YouTube and I had to link to it. In the early seventies, someone got the idea that what TV needed was a show that combined old comedy films — mostly public domain footage — with a talk show welcoming present-day comedians — and they got Milton Berle to host it. In fact, they called it Milton Berle's Mad, Mad World of Comedy.
Berle was probably the wrong guy to topline this show as he was then, as he was for the last 25 years of his life, fighting a relentless but losing battle. It was to have comedians of his era — and him, especially — not to be regarded as out-of-date and irrelevant. To hear him tell it, stardom was forever and a great comedian was someone to be worshipped and hired and starred and never to be without an audience to love him, love him, love him.
They made a few episodes of Milton Berle's Mad, Mad World of Comedy as half-hours and it never found the marketplace they sought. The material was edited into different forms including this fifty-minute episode with guests Flip Wilson, Don Adams and the then-relatively-new, relatively-young comedian, Albert Brooks. It is the Albert Brooks segment which is of the greatest interest because in a way, Brooks represented The Enemy to Berle. Brooks was being hailed for "the comedy of today," which must have sounded like an eviction notice to Uncle Miltie in his campaign to never be thought of as passé.
You can sense a certain amount of frustration on his part with the interview. He obviously felt very threatened by Albert and I remember hearing from someone who worked on it that lot of footage was cut because it made the host look bad. If you want to watch just that segment, this link will take you to where it begins but it might be better to watch it in the context of the whole, pasted-together program.
I had — and may still somewhere, have — this on Laserdisc and I always thought it symbolized a turning point in American comedy. It is worth noting that when this was done, Berle was around 65 and Brooks was around 26 — and that Albert Brooks is now 78. Also of note is that they taped these shows at The Masquers Clubhouse in Hollywood, the Masquers being an organization that sought in its way to fight the same battle that Berle fought. That clubhouse was emptied and demolished in 1985 and there's now an apartment building at 1765 N. Sycamore. Milton Berle died in 2002…
And if that interested you, here's another show they edited out of what they taped for this potential series. In this one, Berle shows more clips and chats with Dick Martin, Mort Sahl and Pat Buttram…