The Borscht Belt: Stand-Up's Only Real School
For forty years a chain of kosher resorts two hours north of New York paid comics to work three rooms a night in front of people who had not come to see comedy — and when it died, the training went with it.
The comedy business has never again built anything like it: a dense cluster of paying rooms, close enough together to drive between, that hired comics by the season and put them in front of audiences who had not bought a ticket to see comedy. That was the Catskills, and it ran for roughly half a century.
Built Out of Exclusion
The circuit existed because Jews were not welcome elsewhere. The Smithsonian's account of the Borscht Belt Museum's founding exhibition notes discriminatory hotel advertisements from the 1890s declaring that "Hebrews" were not welcome — so Jewish farming families in the southern Catskills, working land that was bad for farming, started taking in summer boarders instead. Kutsher's began in 1907 as a farmhouse; Grossinger's began around 1913 as a boarding house, and its founders Asher Selig and Malka Grossinger bought their hundred-acre hilltop in 1919.
By the peak, the numbers were enormous, though sources disagree on how enormous. Wikipedia's account counts roughly 500 resorts, 50,000 bungalows and 1,000 rooming houses across Sullivan and Ulster counties; the Borscht Belt Museum itself says more than 1,000 hotels, colonies, camps and boarding houses, and the Smithsonian piece extends the footprint into Orange County. Whichever figure is right, the important part for comedy is the density: hundreds of stages inside an hour's drive of one another.
The Tummler
The job that made the craft was the tummler — from the Yiddish *tumler*, attested in English from around 1930, literally a maker of noise. He was not a comedian who did twenty minutes and left. He was, in Wiktionary's definition, an employee "charged with the duty of entertaining guests throughout the day," and the Catskill Mountain Foundation's history calls him the "tumult-maker": games, storytelling, talent nights, pool-deck nonsense, all week. Mel Brooks worked the job. Milton Berle, Danny Kaye, Phil Silvers and Henny Youngman are all described as having begun as Catskills social directors from the 1920s onward.
Consider what that role actually teaches. A tummler faced the same guests every day of a two-week stay. He could not repeat himself and he could not hide behind an act. He had to read a room in daylight, sober, with children present, and get a laugh out of people who were on their way to lunch. No modern comedy structure asks anyone to do that.
Three Rooms a Night
When resident staff gave way to booked acts — the Catskill Mountain Foundation traces the shift to a booking system run by agents such as the Charles Rapp agency — the volume stayed. Entertainers were "often booked to play two or even three shows per night, moving from hotel to hotel as quickly as the back-country roads would allow." Saturday was the summit, in purpose-built theatres seating up to 1,500.
And the rooms were big. Grossinger's dining room seated 1,300 and the property grew to 812 acres and 585 rooms. The Concord, which Arthur Winarick took over in 1935, reached some 2,000 acres and more than 1,500 guest rooms, with a Morris Lapidus-designed Imperial Room that seated three thousand. A comic learned to hold three thousand people who were mostly there for the pool.
The lists of who came through are long and should be read with care — "got their start at" is the most abused phrase in comedy history. What the sources support is participation, not always origin. Wikipedia's Borscht Belt entry names Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman and Don Rickles as having launched careers there; PBS adds Buddy Hackett, Jerry Lewis, Alan King, and Red Buttons, who changed his name from Aaron Schwatt in the Catskills. Kutsher's own entry credits Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, David Brenner and Jerry Seinfeld. PBS is also blunt about the cost of the formula: the comics who played there "traded on Jewish clichés and Jewish jokes," and at least one resort, Camp Tamiment, refused tummlers on artistic grounds.
What Killed It, and What Went With It
Sullivan County historian John Conway's summary is the one everybody quotes: the three A's — air conditioning, assimilation, and airfare. A cooled apartment in New York beat a mountain breeze; falling fares put Miami and San Juan within reach; and the discrimination that had built the belt eased, so its customers went elsewhere. Grossinger's closed in 1986. The Concord went bankrupt in February 1997 and closed in 1998. Kutsher's, the last of the family hotels, closed in 2013.
The clubs that replaced it were better for comedy in one obvious way — the audience had come to see comedy, so the work could get stranger and more personal. But something concrete was lost. The Catskills gave a young comic hundreds of paid stage hours a summer in front of people who owed him nothing, and made him produce new material for the same faces week after week. Urban clubs offered shorter sets, self-selected crowds, and a great deal less money. Robert Klein's line about what came next, quoted by PBS, is the epitaph: "Before you knew it there were more young people standing in front of brick walls with microphones than you could shake a stick at." More stages, less schooling.