Funny way to spend a holiday
Henny Youngman, the fiddle-playing comedic master whose machine-gun delivery made him “King of the One Liners,” played his last gig on Christmas 1997, two months before he died of pneumonia at 91, for a mostly Jewish crowd at the New Asia Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.
Youngman headlined the fifth Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show, a perennial San Francisco hit that comedian Lisa Geduldig cooked up for members of the Lost Tribes of Moses like herself who didn’t celebrate Christmas but wanted to go do something fun with others who weren’t celebrating around the tree or otherwise observing the holiday.
“Henny’s manager sat in a
“It’s a place to go where people can laugh in the midst of chaos, to feel camaraderie and have fun.” Shelley Kessler, who has attended every Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show
chair a couple of seats in front of him with cue cards, each with one word,” recalls Geduldig. Cued by that one word, “he did what he’d been doing for the last 70 years — firing off those oneliners. And he was funny. I got so choked up introducing Henny Youngman I almost cried for the first time onstage. That was a moment.”
Now Geduldig will mark Kung Pao Kosher Comedy’s 25th anniversary Saturday, Dec. 23, through Christmas Day, at the New Asia Restaurant on Pacific Avenue, with comedians Cathy Ladman, Wendy Liebman and Gary Gulman. The event, which each year donates partial proceeds to two organizations, will benefit the Jewish Family & Children’s Services North Bay Fire Relief and the Jewish Community Center of Puerto Rico Hurricane Maria Relief Fund.
Geduldig has had the pleasure of presenting other comedic heroes of hers over the last 25 years — among them veteran stars like Shelley Berman, David Brenner and Elayne Boosler — and introducing gifted upstarts like Simon Cadel, who was 14 when he made his West Coast debut at Kung Pao Kosher Comedy in 2014. He’s now on a Canadian sitcom.
Geduldig had lived in San Francisco for a decade by the time she came up with Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, a riff on the Christmas tradition among some Hebrews of catching a movie and eating Chinese. Originally from Long Island, N.Y., she’d grown up in a mostly Jewish neighborhood. After moving here, where she says the Jewish community is more assimilated, she felt more isolated during the end of the year, “not feeling part of what’s happening in December, with everyone Merry Christmas-ing and asking if you’ve done your shopping yet.” And Geduldig knew others felt the same way.
“Because of this event, there is now this place to go and have fun and have a tradition,” says the comedian, spontaneously breaking into the song “Tradition” from “Fiddler on the Roof.”
She figured the first Kung Pao show in 1993, which featured Stu Silverstein, Suzy Berger and Scott Silverman, “was going to be a one-off — until the night of, when we sold out and had to turn 200 people away.”
“There was a sense of belonging,” she recalls. “People felt like they had come home. A lot of friendships began. Audience members became extended family.”
Most of the comedians who’ve performed over the years have been Jewish, with the notable exception of Margaret Cho, a surprise guest in ’94 who came out and said, “I guess I’m the Kung Pao part of the evening.”
Another Korean American comic, Esther Paik Goodhart, who married a Jewish man and converted, appeared in 2007; and the Kinsey Sicks, the “Dragapella Beautyshop Quartet” — two Jewish, two not — in 1996.
Performing at Kung Pao for people of various faiths and ages, some do specifically Jewish bits, but most simply have what Geduldig calls a “Jewish sensibility.” For instance, she wouldn’t say Liebman does Jewish comedy, but “it’s in her cadences, her delivery, her sensibility.”
The same can be said about Ladman, whose credits include appearances on “The Tonight Show,” in episodes of “Mad Men, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and in a recurring role on the current Showtime series “I’m Dying Up Here,” based on the 1970s Los Angeles comedy scene.
“As soon as I hit the stage, people know I’m Jewish. It’s just my vibe,” says Ladman, who’s making her fourth appearance at Kung Pao this year, where “the audiences are fantastic — smart, not too young, not too old. I pretty much do my favorite stuff, the stuff that makes me laugh, because they get it.” That includes her irreverent Hitler material.
Shelley Kessler has attended Kung Pao every year, often bringing her non-Jewish husband and sitting at a table of 10, sharing the lazy Susan and the laughs, with people who’ve become good friends. One is 90year-old Fran Chaplin, who flies up from Los Angeles every year and translates the Yiddish proverbs in the fortune cookies — a Kung Pao Kosher Comedy tradition — for her tablemates.
“It’s a place to go where people can laugh in the midst of chaos,” says Kessler, who just retired as head of the San Mateo County Central Labor Council, “to feel camaraderie and have fun.”
The food is always plentiful and so are the laughs, adds Kessler, who became a Kinsey Sicks fan after hearing them at Kung Pao, and cherishes the memory of seeing Youngman’s final date.
“It’s a piece of history,” she says.