Judy Gold on the Borscht Belt, Jewish Comedy, and Why You Can’t Skip the Work

For comedian Judy Gold, the Catskills aren’t nostalgia. They’re a classroom she keeps returning to, even decades after she first drove up here in the 1980s to do late-night sets for Borscht Belt hotel audiences who hadn’t exactly come looking for her.

“When people get a free show, it’s a tougher crowd,” she says. “You’re on their turf. It’s not like they came to me — I went to them.” Those audiences had already seen a show, already eaten a full dinner, and were settling in with something closer to “all right, make me laugh” than genuine appetite.

“If you can make these people laugh, you really have a skill,” she says.

The Birth of Something Real

Gold sees the Catskills as more than a training ground — she calls it the birthplace of an American comedic tradition.

“It was the birth of Jewish comedy,” she says. “Here we are, these immigrants who are forbidden to go to resorts and fancy hotels, and we created a space.”

The performers who came up through that world went on to shape American comedy for generations. Gold worked alongside some of them firsthand, including Buddy Hackett and Owen King.

She traces the humor that emerged there to necessity — part coping mechanism, part communal bond and, at times, something with a sharper edge.

“We do have a certain sense of humor and there is something really real about Jewish comedy,” she says. “But I think we were the first, and it happened there.”

Gold goes further, arguing that the influence extends well beyond one community.

“All comedy is Jewish,” she says.

You Can’t Go Viral Your Way to an Hour

Gold has watched social media reshape the path to a comedy career, and she has concerns about what gets skipped along the way. Performers now build followings through viral videos, then translate that audience into ticket sales. Gold understands how it works. She questions whether it produces lasting stand-up comedians.

“They haven’t done the work to become a great stand-up, and you really can’t avoid that,” she says. “To stay on stage for 45 minutes or more, you have to do the work, and it takes a really, really long time.”

The Catskills, she argues, demanded that work in the most unforgiving way. And the fundamentals it taught, she says, haven’t changed.

“Nothing is original in comedy,” she says. “Even the youngest and newest comedians who are the hottest people right now — you can see there was someone just like them 60 or 70 years ago.”

For Gold, studying that history isn’t optional. She compares it to musical training.

“You have to study classical piano to write rock and roll,” she says. “If you don’t know your history, you’re doomed.”

What’s Coming Next

Gold is, by any measure, busy. She’s appearing in Joy Behar’s play My First Ex-Husband, a collection of monologues drawn from interviews Behar conducted with women about their divorces. The show has already run off-Broadway and is continuing to tour. “Men love it, women love it, and everyone loves Joy,” Gold says.

She also has television work ahead: a role in Mindy Kaling’s new Hulu series Not Suitable for Work, and a part in Larry David’s new HBO sketch show, which she describes as being about the birth of America and its 250th anniversary.

And on Saturday, she headlines the Borscht Belt Comedy Club at Shadowland Stages Studio in Ellenville bringing the tradition she’s spent a career honoring back to the region that forged it.

At an age when her peers are retiring, Gold is genuinely puzzled by the concept.

“I love getting on stage. I just love being a comic,” she says. “There’s nothing better than writing a joke and getting on stage and trying it out and people laugh. It’s just the most amazing feeling.”

Image: Judy Gold performs at Shadowland Stages Studio in Ellenville on Saturday, March 21 at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. (judygold.com)