Jewish comedy can be traced back much further than the Catskills’ Borsht Belt, where many prominent comedians began their careers between the 1920s to the 1970s. In fact, comedy is actually mentioned in the Torah. The Gemara [Ta’anis 22a] refers to two professional jesters who were bnei Olam Haba – they earned the World to Come through comedy. When they saw people who were depressed, they cheered them up, and when they saw two people quarrelling, they tried to make peace between them. Yet rarely do we come across people, especially in our greater Orthodox community, who have made comedy their profession. Luckily for me, however, I happen to know a few of them.
My Nephew the Comedian
My nephew, former Baltimorean Zechariah Saltman, attended Bais HaMedrash and Mesivta of Baltimore before learning in Israel and, subsequently, in Beth Medrash Gevoha (BMG) in Lakewood for nine years, including six years in kollel. He recently segued from the “learner” world to the “earner” world. While working part-time for BMG, he is pursuing a career that, for a yeshiva bachur, is anything but routine (no pun intended!): comedy!
Entertainment is Zechariah’s passion, and with the guidance of his Rav, he attended a comedy class at the Gotham Writers Workshop in Manhattan. Upon completing the course in September, he and his fellow students performed in front of a live audience.
Taking the mic in hand before an all-secular crowd, dressed in yeshivishe garb – white dress shirt, black velvet yarmulke, with tzitzis hanging out – Zack, as he is known on stage, opens his act with: “It’s probably hard to tell, but I’m Jewish. I would dress in a way to get less attention, but there’s one small thing holding me back – I love getting attention!”
Zack’s performance got nonstop laughs and rave reviews. People came up to him after his performance and lauded him for his clean, funny routine – sans cursing, inappropriate or vulgar material, and bullying. Such performances are a rarity these days. It was a big kiddush Hashem.
“It’s been a long journey; it’s a process,” recalls Zechariah, who admits that he would crack jokes in elementary school despite being shy. “I’ve always been into humor; reading comics and drawing cartoons really appealed to me. Even at a young age, I wrote interesting stories in a funny voice. It was kind of innocent. I didn’t mean to make jokes, but looking back, I realize it was funny stuff.”
It was in twelfth grade that Zechariah feels he started to discover his own individuality and connect to people through making jokes. He became more outgoing, risking vulnerability if his “audience,” his fellow yeshiva students, did not laugh at his jokes.
“My father died six weeks after I returned from learning in Israel for a year-and-a-half,” shares Zechariah. “Comedy was a way to process and deal with what was going on. I started concentrating on writing humor, and my articles were accepted by The Voice of Lakewood, Yated, Hamodia, Mishpacha, Aish.com, and Ami. Writing humor is a lot different than doing a stand-up comedy routine.”
To develop his humor writing, Zechariah took an online humor writing course and a TV writing course through Gotham Writers Workshop. About six months ago, he started thinking of ways to get his comedy out there, in addition to purely writing.
“I started writing skits for YouTube, as well as for my Instagram page and my website,” says Zechariah. “I would play the part of a character who always got pulled over by the police, and came up with what he thought were clever ideas to get out of a ticket. I also played a role, sometimes a duo role, in dating skits; I made seasonal skits about Purim and Pesach, too. They were experimental, and I was kind of hoping that someone would see them and that I could one day make a living out of it.”
After speaking to Henya Storch, CEO/founder of the Storch Agency International, a New York-based PR and coaching firm (and Frank and Danielle Storch’s cousin!), Zechariah found out that there was definitely a market for comedy in the Orthodox world. Their conversations encouraged him to take the stand-up comedy course, which was comprised mostly of comedy writing, as well as some lectures, which culminated with his live performance.
“I couldn’t believe, when I got up there, that this was me,” recalls Zechariah. “When you go up on stage you are extremely vulnerable. It was almost like an out-of-body experience. I was looking at myself, thinking, who is talking? Who is this guy up on stage waving his arms around? He looks calm, but I was not. I was excited, though; I love making jokes and making people laugh. People laughed after the first joke, and every other one. I got a very good response. Even my teacher was surprised with my performance and asked, ‘You never did stand-up before?’ I feel like this is my calling; this is something I should be doing.”
Concludes Zechariah, “People try to figure me out. They look at me and say, ‘You were in BMG for nine years; you look yeshivish; you live in Lakewood – you’re doing what? You don’t make sense. Who are you?’ We are very into labels; we are very black and white. Yet each person has his or her own circumstances. There are a lot of myths about comedy and a lot of judging. I feel we have to melt the barriers between people and bring everyone together – as it says in the Gemara about the professional jesters who were Bnei Olam Haba.
“Many frum speakers use comedy all the time,” Zechariah points out. “They use humor to get people to listen and to drive home a point. If you just yell a statement at someone, you chance resistance; using humor allows your message to slip in through the back door. Comedy routines can also be used to drive home a real point that everyone can relate to, as it allows us to see the simcha in Yiddishkeit.”
My Gagster Neighbors
My neighbor, Howard Shiman, also had his start in comedy when he was in elementary school.
“Once a week, when I was a seven-year-old second grader, we had to get dressed up in a white shirt and tie and sit quietly in our school auditorium and listen to someone speaking on the stage,” recalls Howard. “Back then, you didn’t talk out of turn, but I twisted whatever was said to the kids sitting on either side of me, and they were hysterical. Of course, I was an innocent bystander in all of this. That is how I got my start. In fact, my third-grade teacher told my parents that had I not been joking throughout second grade, I would have skipped to fourth grade!”
To this day, Howard’s comedic side routinely comes out in casual conversation. “Even when I have an exchange of a few sentences with someone about almost anything, you can see a smile come on the person’s face,” notes Howard, who is an actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and an avid cyclist.
Howard’s wife, Hedy, is an artist. Although she has been drawing nonstop from the age of three, her cartooning career only began 10 years ago. Since then, she and Howard have collaborated on and off, with some success. Their gags – a cartoon drawn by Hedy with the words written by Howard – are signed HowDee, a combination of their first names, Howard and Hedy. They have appeared in various Jewish publications, such as the Where What When, and professional trade magazines like The Artist magazine and Medical Economics. The creative couple has even created illustrated quips for a construction equipment company.
“Howard was always funny; he was always making puns, and plays on words; he’s very amusing and quick,” reminisces Hedy. “Now, we use it in a more commercial way – although we do it for fun, mostly – and we are trying to allow people to enjoy our humor. I’ll put something out there that I think is funny, and after thinking about it for not too long – because he doesn’t need to – Howard just quickly flips it into a gag. We are always working on increasing our portfolio, and we try to customize the comedy to the needs of the client.”
Depending on what the client wants, a gag can take from a few minutes to days to create. Generally, a variety of gags are submitted to a magazine, and the editor chooses among them. Sometimes, the editor asks the Shimans to pitch gag ideas. Very often, the cartoon itself is the gag; some gags don’t have a caption. Those are known as “sight gags.”
“Real life situations often prompt a gag,” explains Hedy. “One day, I told Howard that I had a ten-to-three medical appointment. We thought about it and came up with a four-part gag. In the first frame, two people are sitting in an office and one says to the other, ‘I won’t be in tomorrow.’ In the next frame, the person answers, ‘Why not?’ Then, the original person replies, ‘I made a ten-to-three medical appointment.’ In the last frame, the person continues, ‘I told my boss, and he said, ‘You might as well take the whole day off.’”
Hedy also shares this Howdee creation: “We had another four-part gag in which an older man is driving a car, and his young grandson asks him, ‘Grandpa, what did you do before you used GPS?’ He answered, ‘Well, we had backseat drivers!’”
Thinking in quips is so natural for Howard that, when it is difficult for him to memorize the multiple gags he comes up with on Shabbos, he takes pieces of paper to use as bookmarks to mark off pages in the dictionary that contain the main word of each gag. After Shabbos, he knows that somewhere on those pages hold the clues to those gags.
“I feel humor is important; it’s a big thing,” shares Howard. “You can look at everything in one of two ways: up or down, good or not so good. We need to find the positive.”
Hedy interjects, “I recently heard a statistic shared by Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, that 30 percent of the general population does not have a sense of humor; they don’t know when a joke has been made. They look around and see people laughing, and take their cue.
“I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing this,” concludes Hedy. I love waking up in the morning and looking forward to what I am about to draw next, and I think about it the night before. It’s such a creative, exciting, delightful thing. We both enjoy it. It’s so much fun and very gratifying for us to make people happy with our work!”
