When Comedy Went to School

Despite its considerable nostalgic charm, When Comedy Went to School (Melvin Akkaya, Ron Frank) seems a wasted opportunity. 

It makes two points well. One is what the Catskills resorts meant to the new Jewish immigrant community as an escape from their European suffering and the strictures of tenement life. The other is that the generation of comics that shaped our comic world got their basic training and devotion to comedy at those resorts. The repetition of that latter shows the film’s wasted opportunity. It often seems to be running on the spot (which might work for a tummler but not for a documentary).

The film drops a nod at why Jews were attracted to and adept at standup comedy and how the genre later drew African Americans in the same way. But these questions have been so much more fully explored elsewhere (in critical writing and in the documentary The Jews Who Invented Hollywood) that this film’s material seems perfunctory. Mixing the sentimental Catskills reminiscence with the nature of Jewish comedy makes the film neither gefilte fish nor overboiled fowl.

There are rewards: briefly catching Woody Allen’s standup act, seeing and hearing the aged king Sid Caesar, catching snatches of the routines by Youngman, King, Hackett, Cohen, Sahl, Dick Gregory, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers. By far the best -- in  wit and in insight -- is Jackie Mason. An hour of Mason on these topics would have made a richer film.

There are a few embarrassments. Why drag in the ubiquitous Larry King? Why run Bob Hope as an instance of “topical humour”? Why let emcee Robert Klein get away with calling the Seinfeld show “parodies”? SCTV, Mel Brooks, Mad Magazine, they did "parodies." All in all, this film collected good material but failed to find a fertile focus. It shows more memory than mind.