Cultural Affairs
Freddie Roman: Still Roasting After All These Years
By Danielle Stein
Freddie Roman is working the room. He had entered the clubhouse bar at his Boynton Beach resort community five minutes late for our four o’clock meeting; happy hour was in full swing. He didn’t see me – didn’t even look, in fact – and headed straight over to one end of the bar. Now he inserts himself in a group of men sipping scotch, and the kibitzing begins. Eventually, he makes his way down the bar, vodka on the rocks in hand, alternating between small talk and one-liners, leaving laughter in his wake, as if he were the world’s greatest host and this were his living room. I observe him from a corner table and begin to wonder if he forgot about our meeting. At nearly 4:30 he spots me. He is genuinely surprised.
“Is it four o’clock already?” he asks.
Like many of the people in the room, the 65-year-old comedian spends most of the year up north, but this has been a particularly long winter in Florida. That’s because work for Roman is abundant in the Sunshine State. “All my fans are down here now,” he says, referring to the older, predominantly Jewish crowd who knew him when he was a young comic. “It’s in the Torah – it says at 60, they must come here.”
When the season ends and Roman returns to his home in Fort Lee, N.J., he spends his days across the river at the venerated Friar’s Club, where he has served as dean for an unprecedented ten years (and counting), even though the club’s constitution puts an eight-year term limit on the office. Such is Roman’s popularity that the executive board plans to revise the bylaws to accommodate the continuing demand for him. North, south, east or west, Roman is known foremost as a Borscht Belt great, one of the comic legends – along with Sid Ceaser, Buddy Hacket, Jack Carter and Jackie Mason – to emerge from the Catskills resort scene that peaked in the 50s and 60s.
To anyone under 30, the words “Borscht Belt” draw blank stares; mention Dirty Dancing and there might be a hint of recognition. To Roman, however, the region is the birthplace of American stand-up. “The [Catskill] mountains were to the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s what the comedy clubs became in the 80s and 90s,” Roman says. “Everyone got their starts there. There were hundreds of places for a comedian to work – you got to learn your craft.” The 400 or so Catskill resorts thrived on throngs of Jewish families, who were restricted from many other vacation spots. Only a handful of those resorts remain today, but Roman still feels the influence of the place. “In a weird way,” Roman has said, “today’s comedy clubs owe their success to that decline.”
But Roman’s career hardly vanished with the Catskills scene. In the early 90s, he produced and starred in “Catskills on Broadway,” a comedy revue featuring Roman, Dick Capri, Mal Z. Lawrence and Louise DuArt doing Borscht Belt stand-up to rave reviews. And now he is at the center of the comedy world once more, in the role of MC at the Friar’s Club’s infamous celebrity roasts, now a regular feature on Comedy Central. “He’s a great MC – he has the kind of personality you need” says “The View’s” Joy Behar, adding that a good MC like Roman always has a sense of the audience and has the ability to bolster the other comedians when a show may be lagging.
With its mahogany décor and stained glass windows, the Friar’s Club, on East 55th Street, seems a somewhat somber home for its loud, joke-cracking members – Roman in particular. (“They call him Roman because they can hear him all the way in Italy,” fellow comedian Jeffrey Ross once teased at a roast.) But it is precisely his gregarious, compulsively social nature that makes Roman perhaps the most popular Friar. “He walks into the dining room and shakes every hand in there,” Trebot says. “You don’t meet Freddie, he meets you,” Ross quips. “He walks up to you with an open hand and starts shaking and kissing… He’s famous for his kissing. He kisses women, men, babies, ex-comics – and they’re always these wet kisses! He’s kissed more people than anyone I know.”
Roman likes to protest that he is not really the performer people see on stage, but his distinctive voice betrays him as the consummate story teller. Though raspy from smoking, it has a singsong quality – a combination that is simultaneously emphatic and deadpan. And his features – squinty, laughing eyes and a wide mouth posed in a perpetual, almost mischievous grin – suggest that he was born to tell jokes. “Onstage, he is so transparently the person he is,” says Roman’s son, Alan Kirschenbaum, who recalls the nights his parents would host their comedian friends and Kirschenbaum would be allowed to stay up late and “listen to the rhythm of these guys speaking.” What was supposed to be just a social gathering, says Kirschenbaum, would always turn into “a competition to make each other laugh.”
Unlike many of today’s comics, Roman and his generation didn’t have a slew of television and movie stars to emulate. They became professional joke-tellers not because they saw hundreds of people making it big in clubs or on Comedy Central, but because, for many of them, it was a natural extension of themselves. Roman started at age 15, after begging his uncle, who owned a small resort in the Catskills, to MC the nightly entertainment shows. Early in his life, when comedy failed to support his wife and two small children, Roman sold women’s shoes and then insurance, but he was miserable. Sensing his pain, his wife took a teaching job so that Roman could spend more time working the resorts. Speaking to him and his comic contemporaries, one senses that they were made for the stage. Every conversation, every question, is an opportunity to be funny. Asked about Roman, Dick Capri starts riffing.
“Freddie, oh he loves the microphone! He has a medical alert medal on his neck that if he’s found unconscious, put a microphone in his hand and that will revive him. He loves the spotlight so much, the man will talk to deaf people. He will talk to anybody in the whole world…You get on an airplane with that man – most people, they want to read a book, take a nap – Freddie is up and down the aisles, talking to people…”
“The legacy of the Borscht Belt comedians,” Behar says, “is the idea that you don’t need anything but a microphone and a light in order to be funny. You don’t need props or music – all you have to do is get up there with your shtick and relate to the audience and make them laugh.”
Some members of the old boys club are cynical about how much today’s younger comedians have learned from the Borscht Belt alumni. “I avoid new comedians like the plague,” says Jack Carter, who was a headliner in Vegas when Roman began doing opening acts there and regularly performs with him now. “They have very little personality, and they’re vulgar and acerbic – it’s dirty words every other word. And they’re in a club for two minutes and suddenly they have a movie deal.”
But Roman is optimistic. The rise of comedy clubs not only means more comedians, but more diversity. “The greatest change of all is the number of women making a living [in comedy] today,” he says, naming Behar as a favorite. He also admires a number of younger comics. He recalls that, years ago, before their own careers exploded, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser would look to him for influence. “They would come and watch me perform, and afterwards we would talk,” he says.
And there are a few up-and-coming performers Roman adores – Richard Jeni and Jeffrey Ross among them. As dean of the Friar’s, he has been instrumental in bringing younger entertainers into the fold – there are now 200 members under 40, compared to only about 60 such members five years ago. He’s also something of a mentor to these young comics, who come to the club to absorb the word play of their Borscht Belt elders huddled around the card tables. “When I was becoming a member, there weren’t many of us who were younger,” says Ross, who his mentors, can’t help launching into good-natured mini-bits during regular conversation. “But Freddie would always come over and spend time with me and my friends and be real lovable.” Eventually, he says, “you stop noticing who’s young and who’s old.”
Roman’s act has always reflected both his own stage of life
and that of his audience. On stage, he now refers to cholesterol
tests, grandkids and penny-pinching trips to Costco (“You
come home with 100 rolls of toilet paper, you pray for diarrhea…”)
But senior citizen status hasn’t slowed him down; on cruises
he regularly performs two long, energy-sucking shows per night,
and he can be found boozing and schmoozing between performances.
Back at the Boynton Beach happy hour, he darts off to chew some
more fat with the boys at the bar, people who, though they get
a daily dose of Roman, will still pay to see his performances
at nearby nightclubs and universities. Within minutes he has gathered
a small audience. Capri, an old friend, colleague and fellow Friar,
says it is this – an addiction to people, an intense liveliness
– that makes Freddie the ideal ambassador of comedy. “He’s
the social director of the world,” he says. “And he
loves every second of it.”
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