Borscht Belt at the Burgdorff

Who knew I was feeling nostalgia for the Borscht Belt humor at Grossinger's or The Concord or The Laurels Hotel (where my family stayed in the 1960s), but there I was, unable to wipe a smile off my face watching David Konig's "Hebrew School Dropout" at the Burgdorff Center for the Performing Arts. 

Playing the next two Sundays (April 18 and 25) at 3 p.m., this one-man comedy shtick is a throwback to such comedians as Jackie Mason, Milton Berle and Rodney Dangerfield. (Konig even does that bulging-eye thing.) For over an hour, he has his moments of pure hilarity, holding his own up there under that lonely spotlight of stand-up.

This was a theater outing shared with two other families, including three ten-year-olds and a fourteen-year-old. I figured with my son staring firmly down the road toward his own Bar Mitzvah, along with a friend who is a Hebrew school dropout, it would be, perhaps, relevant. They laughed, but in that forced "ha, ha" way of laughing, mostly because the adults around you are. That said, this is a show more appropriate for lapsed Catholics, ambivalent Jews, or just plain suburbanites with a yen for a kibbitzing night out.

Konig weaves his story of reaching adulthood with no strong foothold  "as a Jew," feeling completely amiss at temple. Lacking that all-important credential of having been Bar Mitzvah'ed, he eventually converts to a starry-eyed Godfather-esque form of Catholicism.

He has his zany anecdotes especially as a talk show host for a Catholic radio show, where Cardinal Egan and his posse keep trying to censor him as he persists in interviewing his mostly Jewish comedian friends like David Brenner and Susie Essman, even booking Mayor Ed Koch. 

"Basically I booked every Jew at the Friars Club," Konig says. "After a while, Cardinal Egan's agent began to get a little nervous. He said to me: 'Look, we don't mind you having all your comedian friends on, but don't you at least know any Catholic comedians?' So I booked Lisa Lampanelli. I told her to keep it clean. It was a short interview."

At the end of this meandering quest, Konig finally reaches home in the form of The Actors Temple on W. 47th Street, where he can finally look up to like-minded Jews, literally, in the 8 x 10 glossies of Jack Benny, Sophie Tucker and others hanging on the walls.  You can catch his show there, beginning April 24 . . .  but of course, on the Sabbath.