How Mel Brooks got started as a pool tummler
Tummler - a Yiddish word for someone who stirs up tumult or excitement
How Mel Brooks got started in comedy: As a pool tummler (aka crowdworker) in the Catskills...
“The pool tummler wakes up the Jews when they fall asleep around the pool after lunch. He goes around telling jokes, doing impressions, and keeps them amused. He’ll do anything to get the audience on his side. Instead of them drifting off, he keeps them happy and alert, and that’s the job.”
Sounds a lot like a standup MC in between comics. Here’s Brooks describing one of his tummler bits:
“I used to do an act. I wore a derby and an alpaca coat, and I would carry two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and go to the edge of the diving board and say, ‘Business is no good!’ and jump off.”
In addition to Brooks, comedians like Danny Kaye, Sid Caesar and Red Buttons put in summers as tummlers. This obit of Lou Goldstein, “the consummate tummler,” explains the job.
A tummler (pronounced TOOM-ler) — the job title comes from a Yiddish word for someone who stirs up tumult or excitement — was a jack-of-all-trades social director who was supposed to amuse the hotel guests with jokes, songs and shtick that might be better described as slapshtick, as they sat by the pool, emerged from lunch or headed for bingo.
Goldstein did standup too (with borrowed jokes).
There was the one about the mother whose son excitedly announces that he has been picked for the part of the Jewish husband in a school play. The mother replies, “You tell the teacher you want a speaking part.”
Another one:
Mr. Goldstein’s tummler jokes, like the one about the wife who tells her husband after a bitter argument that when he dies she’s going to dance on his grave. The husband goes to his lawyer the next day and asks for a new clause in his will. He wants to be buried at sea.
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