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A PAST MASTER of sass, name of Arnold Stang, is the young man responsible for the final conversion of that TV deity, Milton Berle, from the medium’s No. 1 showoff into its No. 1 straight man. With the collabo¬ ration of Goodman Ace, Berle’s chief writer, who smuggled Stang into the script as Francis the stagehand, Ar¬ nold has been tossing off a weekly as¬ sortment of jibes and slurs, all di¬ rected at Berle and reflecting on his alleged lack of talent. This in the face of Miltie’s long-established reputation as owner of the No. 1 insult catalogue in the industry. Paying your disrespects to Berle would be considered by many to be the most enviable job in television. Ar¬ nold, almost the antithesis of the frac¬ tious, flippant stagehand he portrays, has achieved a godlike stature among the anti-Berle element, which now watches the show again just to see Berle get his weekly lumps. Let us pause at this point and dredge up a few of the unkind cuts tossed at Milton by Stang: Berle: I can’t bother arguing you wilh you. I haven’t time. My career is at stake. Stan{>: I’ve watched your career. You should be burned at the stake. Berle: You can’t talk like that to me. I’ll have your job. Stang: After that last show of yours, you’ll need my job. Berle: Why, what do you mean. The Buick people think I’m very important. They handle me with kid gloves. Stang: They don’t want to touch you with their hands. Berle is frequently given bad puns so that Stang can come through with crushers like, “Oh, isn’t that brilliant! What a bon mot! What a great come¬ dian! That line was worthy of Kauf¬ man. That’s Ben Kaufman, a slob I know,” or “That line was truly be- Stang the Fang talks back ... fitting of GBS. That’s a great big slob.” If these lines do not seem too funny in print, be assured that they are when Stang delivers them. He fre¬ quently calls Berle “Aunt Miltie” or “Mr. VT—Very Tired comedy.” Once he said, “When Buick (Berle’s current sponsor) dropped the Circus Hour last year, I thought they were through with freaks.” It might be assumed from all this that Berle is an unwitting foil and the prisoner of his writers. Anybody who knows Miltie knows Berle still runs the show. He is in full accord with the shift in comedy emphasis that has made him an Abbott to Stang’s Cos¬ tello. And Stang has no trouble at all saying kind things about Berle. Milton, he says, is the finest straight man with whom he has ever worked. “Some weeks I’ve gone home with a script that looked so bad I was heart-