WHEN COMEDY WENT TO SCHOOL, Directed by: Mevlut Akkaya & Ron Frank, Not Rated, USA, 77 min
Lake Worth Playhouse Stonzek Theatre Lake Worth, FL
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WHEN COMEDY WENT TO SCHOOL, Directed by: Mevlut Akkaya & Ron Frank, Not Rated, USA, 77 min
WHEN COMEDY WENT TO SCHOOL Directed by: Mevlut Akkaya & Ron Frank Not Rated, USA, 77 min
When Comedy Went to School answers this question with an entertaining portrait of this country's greatest generation of comics the generation that includes the likes of Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Jackie Mason, Mort Sahl, and Jerry Stiller, all of whom make appearances in the film, telling jokes and telling their stories. The answer is also found in upstate New York's Catskill Mountains, aka the Borscht Belt, where Jewish immigrants transformed lush farmland into the 20th century's largest resort complex. Those Catskill hotels and bungalow colonies provided the setting for a remarkable group of young Jewish-American comedians to hone their craft and become worldwide legends. It was truly when comedy went to school.
The Borscht Belt hotels offered a range of unprecedented facilities where comics could get in front of audiences, work on developing a style, hone their material, and check out the competition. They could even bomb and not be banished forever. The film explores the environment in which these hotels and bungalow colonies, catering almost exclusively to a Jewish clientele, provided a vital proving ground, a laboratory for determining what material workedand what didn't. It was a perfect storm: comedians looking for work and hundreds of venues in need of them.
When Comedy Went to School pays homage through rare archival clips to many other Catskill veterans, including Danny Kaye, Mel Brooks, Red Buttons, Buddy Hackett, Lenny Bruce, Henny Youngman, Don Rickles, Totie Fields, and Rodney Dangerfield to name a few. In later years, Billy Crystal, Joan Rivers, Woody Allen and a very young Jerry Seinfeld built on this foundation.
Location
Lake Worth Playhouse Stonzek Theatre (View)
709 Lake Avenue
Lake Worth, FL 33460
United States
