Freddie Roman, a stand-up comedian who told jokes to mostly Jewish audiences in the Catskills, then brought borscht-belt humor to New York City when he conceived and performed in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died Nov. 26 in Boynton Beach, Fla. He was 85.
The cause was a heart attack, his daughter, Judi Levin, said.
Mr. Roman began his comedy career in the Catskills in the early 1960s, when that resort area in upstate New York was thriving, long before it began its steep decline. At one hotel after another, he told one-liners and stories that delighted audiences spending weekends and summer vacations there.
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“Quintessential mountain jokes,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2001, explaining his early shtick. “For example, the one about the lady who’s complaining about the hotel: ‘At this hotel, the food is poison … and such small portions!’”
Over the next half-century, his comedy revolved around his family, and — as his target audiences increasingly escaped the New York area for Florida — aging and retirement. He told of his parents retiring to a condominium in Florida and his father’s early complaint.
“I’m retired four weeks, and in these four weeks I talked to this woman more than I did in 48 years,” he said his father told him. “I have nothing left to say to her. Now that I’ve talked to her, I find out I don’t care for her.”
In 1991 Mr. Roman turned his comedy experience into “Catskills on Broadway,” a revue in which he, Mal Z. Lawrence, Marilyn Michaels, and Dick Capri each performed 30-minute routines and which ended with them onstage together telling more jokes and singing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” Lawrence died last year.
“Freddie had a lot of confidence, for sure, and whatever the show was, he loved to be the MC; he loved to take control of a show,” Capri said in a phone interview. “But he never acted like the boss, although he had a piece of the show.”
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In his review, Mel Gussow of The New York Times wrote, “Catskill resorts may be fighting the recession, but Catskill comedy has not lost its flair.”
The show ran for 453 performances over 13 months at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and then toured in the years after.
In 1994, Mr. Roman was elected dean of the Friars Club in Manhattan, a citadel for comedians and entertainers to schmooze, eat, and play cards. He helped expand its aging membership by inviting younger comedians and a broader range of performers to join.
Mr. Roman, who was part of many Friars roasts, stepped down as dean in 2014 and was replaced by broadcaster Larry King.
When the Friars roasted Mr. Roman, his son, Alan Kirschenbaum, a sitcom writer and producer, praised him as both a parent and a comedian. But, as Mr. Roman recalled in an interview on cable news channel NY1 in 2006, Kirschenbaum added, “I wish I was Shecky Greene’s son, because Shecky Greene took his son to hookers.”
Freddie Roman was born Fred Martin Kirschenbaum on May 28, 1937, in Newark, N.J., and grew up in Queens. His father, Harry, owned a women’s shoe store on Long Island, and his mother, Belle (Burnstein) Kirschenbaum, managed a women’s clothing store.
Fred loved being the center of attention, and at age 15 he started a five-year run in the summers as the unpaid master of ceremonies of Saturday night shows at the Crystal Spring Hotel in the Catskills, which was owned by an uncle and his maternal grandfather. He graduated from New York University in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in dramatic art and married Ethel Harris a year later.
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He put his show business dreams aside to sell shoes in his father’s store, then opened his own shop in Queens. He was successful, but he disliked the work and sold the store. He then got a job selling life insurance and mutual funds, which gave him the time to perform on weekends.
“You’ve got to remember, there were about 200 places to play and they all wanted entertainment in those days, many of them year-round,” Mr. Roman said in 2005.
By his late 20s he was a full-time comedian, working largely in the Catskills. One of his employers, who was Italian, suggested that he change his surname to Roman. It remained his stage name, although legally he was still Fred Kirschenbaum.
In 1970, when Mr. Roman was booked at the Concord, one of the top Catskill hotels, Totie Fields, a pioneering female comic who was hot at the time, saw his act and loved it. She arranged to have him perform in Las Vegas for the first time; she also hired him as an opening act.
“That broke down the door for me,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1997.
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He would spread his Catskills-bred shtick around the country for five decades.
He worked often in Las Vegas and in Atlantic City, where from 1989 to 1990 he hosted a “Tonight Show”-like variety show at the Trump Castle — a rare period of permanence. Florida also became a regular stop for him, as he followed his older audiences south.
Mr. Roman played a comedian in “Sweet Lorraine” (1987), a film about a past-its-prime Catskill hotel, and a country club member in the Prime Video series “Red Oaks,” which ran from 2014 to 2017. He also appeared on the televised roasts of Hugh Hefner, Rob Reiner, Drew Carey, and Chevy Chase, and in the documentary “Funny Already: A History of Jewish Comedy” (2004).
In addition to his daughter and his wife, Mr. Roman leaves four grandchildren; and two brothers, George and Ed Kirschenbaum. His son died in 2012.
Mr. Roman said “Catskills on Broadway” played to enthusiastic audiences in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, outside the borscht belt’s natural habitat.
After one road performance, George Carlin came backstage and told Mr. Roman that he regretted never having performed in the Catskills.
“And I was really touched by that,” Mr. Roman told The Record of Hackensack, N.J., in 2016. “He said, ‘You made it look like the greatest place in the world to work.’
“And yeah,” he added, “it really was.”