I immediately sprang forth with the lines that I had quickly mastered:
“There, there,” I said. “Harry, have a seat. Here, have a glass of water and tell me in your own words what exactly happened on the night of February the fifteenth…”
The social director said, “He knows the lines! Good enough. Make him old.”
So they gave me a white wig, a goatee, painted many lines on my face, and shoved a rolled-up towel on my back to make me look old and hunched over.
I said, “Do we really need the towel? I’m playing a district attorney, not Quasimodo.”
“Shut up,” they replied.
So there it was, at eight o’clock I’d be making my debut as an actor in front of a live audience. I made my way out onstage and sat behind the district attorney’s desk. The curtain went up. Uncle Harry entered.
“There, there. Harry, have a seat,” I said. Trembling with fear I sallied forth.
“Here,” I said. “Have a glass of water and tell me in your own words what exactly happened on the night of February the fifteenth…”
Unfortunately, I poured a little too much water in the glass. It slipped out of my hand and crashed in a thousand pieces onto the silver platter on the desk below.
A huge gasp followed by stunned silence filled the auditorium. Everybody was paralyzed. Nobody moved. Harry didn’t move. I didn’t move. The audience didn’t move. The band was frozen. I didn’t know what to do. So I decided to spill the beans.
I walked straight down to the footlights, took off my wig and goatee, and said, “Sorry, folks. I’m only fourteen! I’ve never done this before!”
The audience exploded in a huge roar of laughter. I felt great! I’d found my true profession. I wasn’t an actor. I was a comedian.
Unfortunately when the curtain came crashing down the social director was not amused, and he came after me with murder in his eyes. I ran. I ran! I ran past three different hotels until I was sure the social director wasn’t going to catch me and kill me. Needless to say I was never again asked to be an actor at the Butler Lodge.
I kept my job as a busboy on the sour cream station and because of the big laugh I had gotten that night, the owner of the hotel asked me to be a “pool tummler.” The job was simple; the pool tummler wakes up the Jews when they fall asleep around the pool after lunch. He goes around telling jokes, doing impressions, and keeps them amused. He’ll do anything to get the audience on his side. Instead of them drifting off, he keeps them happy and alert and that’s the job.
One of the things I did as the pool tummler was to do an act. I wore a derby and an alpaca coat and I would carry two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and go to the edge of the diving board and start yelling: “Business is no good! I don’t wanna live!”
I’d then jump off into the pool. My suitcases would take me straight to the bottom and my derby would float on the surface. It always got a huge laugh.
It was impossible to swim to the surface in a pool-drenched alpaca coat. So I was looking up from the bottom of the pool for help from Richard, the good-looking blond gentile lifeguard. I was hoping he would notice me at the bottom and dive down and save me. Unfortunately, he was still holding his stomach and laughing with everybody else at my antics on the end of the diving board. But fate was with me; I’d mouthed the words, “Richard, save me.” And he somehow remembered that I was at the bottom of the pool and brought me to the top, struggling for air. For some reason I got even more laughs while gasping for breath.
On my second or third summer back in the Borscht Belt I developed an act mostly made up of a lot of stolen jokes like, “Good evening, ladies and germs! I just flew in from Chicago and boy, are my arms tired. I met a girl in Chicago who was so skinny that when I took her to a restaurant the ma?tre d’ said, ‘Can I check your umbrella?’？”
Eventually I began to flower as a comedy writer when I created some crazy impressions. I would do an impression of James Madison, fourth president of the United States, who was married to Dolley Madison. And I’d do stuff like, “Dolley! Hurry! Set out the fruit salad! Franklin and Jefferson will be here any minute!” And I knew nobody could quarrel with the historical accuracy of my powerful, stentorian James Madison.
But the Jews were a tough audience. I used to do a “Man of a Thousand Faces.” I’d hold up a finger and say “one” and then make a crazy face, with blown-out cheeks and crossed eyes like Harpo Marx. Sometimes they’d wait for a hundred and fifty crazy faces before I got my first laugh.