Eat, Pray (For Laughs), Love

by Ted Merwin

Stand-up comedy of the Jewish variety reached its peak in the Catskills Mountains in the middle decades of the 20th century. For comics, the Borscht Belt was an essential training ground; for audiences, it was the place where one could vacation without leaving one’s ethnic community. While most of the famous hotels have been razed, Catskills humor lives on. Next Wednesday night, the Museum of Jewish Heritage will present “Pastrami on Rye With Mayo,” a new play by Cory Kahaney starring the author and three other comics — Ross Bennett, Tom Cotter, and Brad Zimmerman.

The playwright told The Jewish Week that she was sitting in a diner in Monroe or Monticello with the other comics when she suddenly realized that they were the only ones left who still worked the Catskills, by doing shows in the few remaining bungalow colonies. The show that she developed is what she calls a “marriage of stand-up and tales from the road — it tells the journey that we had in comedy.” The show, she noted, is a kind of “next generation” of “Catskills on Broadway,” the hit 1991 play that starred Freddie Roman, Marilyn Michaels, Dick Capri, and Mal Z. Lawrence.

Kahaney is a former chef; she trained at a cooking school in Paris and ended up running the catering department at the Algonquin Hotel before deciding in the early 1990s that her true métier was stand-up. After performing at comedy clubs in New York, she landed one-woman shows on both Comedy Central and HBO, which led to development deals with a number of studios. She thought that she needed to “downplay” her Jewishness in order to succeed as a comic. But when those deals evaporated, she said, “I went back to who I was.”

After creating a play called “The J.A.P. Show,” which featured a quartet of female Jewish comics, Kahaney appeared in the 2007 feminist film, “Making Trouble,” in which contemporary Jewish comedians pay tribute to the vaudeville, television and Broadway artists who inspired them. Her interest in food permeates her work; every Christmas Eve, she organizes a comedy night in Philadelphia called the “Moo Shu Jew Show.”

The title of her latest show derives, of course, from the type of sandwich that a non-Jew, particularly one who is not conversant with the most emblematic aspects of Jewish culture, would order in a Jewish deli. But it also refers to the interplay between the four comedians, two of whom are not Jewish. The show, which premiered in February at the Chutzpah! Festival in Vancouver, moves on after New York to the Kravis Center in Palm Beach for three performances in November.

The two non-Jewish comics, according to Kahaney, “use a lot of Yiddish, although we have to keep correcting them.” She called the references to Jewish food the “glue that holds the show together. The running patter is about where we’re going to eat.” The title makes sense from a number of angles, she said. “We figured that Jews would get the joke and gentiles would think that it’s a nice sandwich.”

“Pastrami on Rye With Mayo” will be performed on Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. For tickets, $15 adults, $12 students/seniors, call the box office at (646) 437-4202 or visit www.mjhnyc.org. This program contains adult content.

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Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization