“Old comedy standards” are classic routines and joke formats that got passed around and performed for decades, the comedy version of songs from The American Songbook. Many began in vaudeville and burlesque, where comics freely borrowed each other’s bits and there was no internet to act as spoiler. The most famous routines were things like, Who’s on First?, by Abbott & Costello, the baseball wordplay bit and probably the best-known standard of all and Slowly I Turned (also called Niagara Falls), a vaudeville sketch in which a trigger word sets a man off. The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello both did it. Henny Youngman with his “Take my wife… please.” Burns & Allen did it with, “Say goodnight, Gracie.” Rodney Dangerfield would wiggle in his strangling tie and lament, “I don’t get no respect.” And Jack Benny’s “Your money or your life” bit, with the long pause by the penny-pincher seemingly debating the issue with himself. Those all sprang from the Borscht Belt.
The Borscht Belt was a cluster of Jewish resort hotels and bungalow colonies in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, mostly in Sullivan and Ulster counties. It thrived from about the 1920s through the 1960s. Jewish families from New York City, many of whom were shut out of other resorts by antisemitism, spent their summers there. The name comes from borscht, the beet soup common in Eastern European Jewish cooking. The big hotels like Grossinger’s, the Concord, Kutsher’s, and the Nevele, offered huge meals, sports, dancing, and nightly entertainment. That made them a training ground for comedians, who played to tough crowds every night. Many of the people behind the comedy standards came up there, including Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis, Joan Rivers, Buddy Hackett, and Jackie Mason. The rapid-fire, self-deprecating, one-liner style it produced became known simply as “Borscht Belt humor.” The resorts declined from the 1960s on, as air travel became cheap, assimilation spread, and families began vacationing elsewhere.
When I was traveling back and forth from Cornell to NYC, the halfway point in that 5-hour trek was Liberty, NY, where Grossinger’s, the Zeyda & Bubbe (grandparents) of the the Borscht Belt, sat, I was always intrigued and wanted to try it out. I once spent a weekend there to see what it was all about. The accommodations were as you might expect, worn and tattered at the edges, but it was the dining experience that was so very memorable. Everyone was seated family style at big round tables (not an option, no matter the size of your party). They then served whatever was on their menu that night and everyone just dug in…with a frenzy. Besides the food-fight-like chaos, what I particularly remember was the guy who tried the tomato aspic (something with which he was unfamiliar from his upbringing in Queens), only to spit it out in his napkin for the whole table to see. He covered his faux pas with a simple, “Not for me” like Viggo Mortensen did in Green Book when he tried a Pimento cheese sandwich. Most of the Borscht Belt hotels have since closed or been torn down. They enjoyed one last hurrah when Dirty Dancing, which is set at a fictional Catskills resort, was made in 1987. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel features the era too, but that seems more like a flash in the pan by comparison.
By far my favorite routine from that genre was “The 2000 Year Old Man,” where Carl Reiner (rest his soul) interviews Mel Brooks (still going strong at 100). The comedy duo went on to produce a million other laughs in their shows and movies, all of which are memorable in their own ways. I like comedy and I fancy myself a witty, somewhat comedic guy. I was once accused by the infamous Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns (rest his blackened soul) of thinking I was a stand-up comedian when I made a joke to lighten the mood in a tense negotiation. But stock joke formats like “A guy walks into a bar…” as funny as they are for a quick laugh, are not poignant and funny enough for quick, off-the-cuff humor.
I have found two bits that I love using and they have become my comedy standards. They ALWAYS get a good deep laugh and brighten the mood in a way that only a shared experience form of humor can bring about. The first is what I call the next generation advisory joke. Kim and I were boarding a plane recently and we went down the gangway after the pre-boarding, only to find at the last juncture before getting on the plane, a woman standing there holding an infant while the man is packing up all the kiddie gear (stroller, car seat yadda-yadda-yadda) into a zippered bag for gate check. As we passed, I said to the sweating man, “Don’t worry, it will all be over in 40-50 years…” Everyone gets it and everyone knows that as wonderful as parenting can be, it never ends and it takes the patience of Job to get through it sometimes, particularly when playing the part of the accessory mule during travel.
The other comedy standard I like to use is for the older set. It’s best used when meeting a friend’s relative or old childhood friend. The set up is simple. You know that person in the context of the here and now and they knew that person when they were young and growing up. You are unlikely to interact with that person more than this one time and yet you share a bond through this person who you have both known, but with time displacement. It is a pretty common set-up and happens more often than you might realize. I used this bit a few weeks ago when meeting a friend’s sister at his 70th birthday party. This morning I used it when meeting a local neighborhood friend’s childhood friend who was visiting. Once again, I have nothing in common with that person except for our mutual friend, and we only have this one time that we are likely to interact. I told him that I have been anxious to ask him something. That alone gets his and most everyone else’s attention, given that we have no basis for such intimacy. I then said, “Can you help me understand how exactly Mike came to be the way he is?” I don’t have to render any opinion of Mike and neither does he, and yet we can have a good laugh about Mike’s unique quirks without specifying them. Mike himself finds it all quite humorous, because he becomes the center of attention without having any of his foibles or frailties actually mentioned. I find it a very effective icebreaker and bond for that short time we are all together communing over our shared acquaintance, but now with a ribald degree of sarcasm.
Both comedic standards serve to lighten the mood in a tense or potentially awkward setting and there is no finer use of humor than to serve that purpose. It sure beats, “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning”.