OK, so they’re back to calling Trump Hitler. I suppose it was inevitable, but the new twist is quite bold.

It’s almost Halloween, and Democrats have likely seen some frightening internal polls — because after a brief respite, they’re back to the doom and gloom. Trump’s running a “campaign of fear,” as Kamala claimed last week, apparently missing the irony as she herself sowed baseless fear that he would send America’s fat lesbians to a concentration camp. But it’s not just that he’s evil, he’s “lost, confused and frozen on stage,” no doubt a conscious nod to what Republicans said about Biden’s age and infirmity for years.

Yes, as Dems slam Trump’s age and demand he release his health records, they’re simultaneously claiming he has the wherewithal to orchestrate an authoritarian coup. It’s Senile Hitler, run for your lives!

I hate to break it to all the Very Smart People who built careers on pretending not to understand sarcasm, but Trump’s off-the-cuff riffs and hyperbole — certainly nothing new — are both symptoms of the same cultural zeitgeist: Donald Trump is the quintessential Borscht Belt comedian. While you might not know the Borscht Belt by name, you certainly know it in spirit if you’ve paid any attention to pop culture over the past 50 years.

The Borscht Belt, also known as the Yiddish Alps, is the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York that served as the preeminent summer vacation destination for Jewish New Yorkers throughout the mid-20th Century. What started as a collection of bungalows in the 1920s grew into a booming, luxury hotel industry by the 1950s, and began to peter off by the 1970s as air travel became cheaper and Jews became more welcome in American society.

I actually grew up there, right down the road from Grossinger’s, the resort that inspired the 1987 hit Dirty Dancing. My father spent his childhood summers at another Borscht Belt hotel, the Nevele, where he transformed from Bronx youth to Jewish Cowboy, taken under the wing of the resort’s Riding Master in the 1960s. He returned several decades later to take over the Nevele’s equestrian center in the 80s, where I was born just in time for the resort industry to collapse.

While the Borscht Belt resort industry may have died an agonizing death, the distinctly Jewish style of stand-up comedy it birthed lives on in American culture. Comedy legends like Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield, and Mel Brooks all got their start there, developing a style that would inspire acts from Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld. Today, it’s best captured by the Amazon series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which reimagines the male-dominated period through a woman’s perspective. Feminism aside, it’s still quite good.

You get the idea. Borscht Belt humor today is just, well, comedy.

As the Jewish lifestyle site Aish explains, classic Borscht Belt humor features “stereotypical Jewish traits,” like “self-deprecation, insults, complaints, marital bickering, Hypochondria, wordplay and liberal use of Yiddish.” Yet as the Jewish-American experience became more indistinguishable from simply the assimilated American experience, the comedic style gained a broader appeal. Seinfeld may have riffed on the Jewish experience, but its groundbreaking success came more from style than substance; it’s famously “a show about nothing.”

This is the legacy of Borscht Belt comedy today: observational humor, rapid-fire delivery of sharp one-liners, playful cynicism about life’s big questions, a hint of Vaudevillian slapstick, and of course, a willingness to not take yourself too seriously. Most importantly, the delivery must come with a certain chutzpah, where energetic rhythm, timing and tone interact with, and feed off, the audience. These days, it’s far from simply a “Jewish” thing; comics like Sebastian Maniscalco apply the style to the Italian-American experience, while female comics like Amy Schumer and Nicki Glazer use it to satirize women’s issues.

Sound familiar?

Some classic examples: 

“Someone stole all my credit cards but I won’t be reporting it. The thief spends less than my wife did.”

“The Doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bill so the doctor gave him another six months.

“In Jewish tradition, the fetus is not considered viable until it graduates from medical school.”

Some more recent examples from the Al Smith dinner last week: 

“I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods, but then I met Tim Walz.”

“There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris . . . but I’m not worried about them at all because their wives, and their wives’ lovers, are all voting for me.”

“Chuck Schumer is here looking very glum . . . but look on the bright side, Chuck, considering how woke your party has become, if Kamala loses, you still have a chance to become the first woman president.”

Even the elite Manhattan crowd in the room couldn’t help but belly laugh at Trump’s wisecracks.

A whole cottage industry has popped up over the past decade on the basis of not understanding — or pretending not to understand — that Donald Trump is the number one standard bearer of America’s greatest comedy tradition. They take his banter with utmost literalness to paint him as a mad man, but his supporters don’t go to MAGA rallies for stuffy policy lectures. They go for the performance.

With his unique blend of brash humor, audience participation and exaggerated storytelling, Trump rallies echo the raucous spirit of the Borscht Belt in its heyday. Part political rally, part interactive theater, he serves up one-line bangers and takes (mostly) playful jabs at his opponents as he hits them with nicknames straight out of the Vaudeville dictionary. His showmanship thrives on the dynamic improvisational atmosphere, where he reads the crowd and plays off their energy like a seasoned comic working the room. Laughter, shock, cheers and applause become the true measure of success.

This takes the place of real policy substance, as journos love to tut-tut. Yet the audience eats it up; the spectacle gives them a greater chance to participate in the small-d democratic process more than anything the political establishment has delivered in recent decades.

Perhaps it’s not malicious, though. Perhaps journalists don’t understand Trump’s shtick because they just take themselves too seriously; they’re the Guardians of Democracy after all. And perhaps they simply resent someone who’s confident enough to simply have a good time without worrying about all the pretense.

Like all great things in America, this distinctly Jewish sense of humor grew into an American tradition. Ironically, it’s the blonde-haired, blue-eyed WASP who carries it on more than any of the derivative late night comedy hacks whose job it is to chastise him.

Trump isn’t just Making America Great Again, he’s making America laugh again. And that’s something self-serious scolds just can’t understand.

WHAT I’M WATCHING: 

Keeping in the Halloween theme, Ti West’s X film series:

Do watch: The first two, X and Pearl. X tells the story of a 1980s porno shoot gone wrong on an eerie Texas farm, as the old couple who owns the land pick off the promiscuous young group one-by-one in classic slasher fashion. Pearl goes back 50 years, telling the origin story of the first film’s villain and her descent into fame-craving madness. You get all the trappings of classic horror, with some dark comedy laced in satirizing the genre and Hollywood itself. It’s all very inside baseball, but remains comically self-aware of it; even the over-the-top gore is part of the joke. It works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Skip: The third and final installment, MaXXXine. It’s newly released on HBO Max, and the app is once again pushing a flop. It picks up five years after the first film, following Maxine Minx, the lone survivor of the farm, as she seeks to jump from pornstar to mainstream Hollywood actress. Immediately, the pacing feels off. Instead of building irony and suspense, the first half feels tediously self-serious to the point of boredom; there are far too many drawn-out scenes on the allure of fame and stardom. The final twist, that of the murderous Christian televangelists, may have been edgy 30 years ago, but today earned nothing but an eye roll from me. Maybe it’s meant to satirize the trope. To be fair, it probably is. But without the charm of the first two, I couldn’t be sure.

So while you can definitely live without seeing the finale, once you’re invested in the first two, it’ll be hard to resist. Go for it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

WHAT I’M READING: 

Did The New York Times just do real journalism? I’m a Spartan, so I had just a smidge of Schadenfreude reading the Times’s sweeping takedown of DEI at the University of Michigan. Great read, but still too little too late from the Gray Lady.

Another shockingly good essay out of GQ on the death of celebrity. When the most beautiful, talented and exceptionally alluring people in the world all strive to be “relatable,” what, really, is the point of being a star? The allure of past stars was precisely that they weren’t like everyone else, but now, we hold leveling greatness on the altar of mediocrity as the new ideal. We shouldn’t. But we should also extrapolate this lesson out to the rest of American society.

AUTHOR

Gage Klipper

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