Last month, the American Film Institute did something it had never done in a quarter century of list making. It reorganised its “100 Years… 100 Laughs” canon and elevated Blazing Saddles from sixth place to first, crowning it the funniest film of all time. The occasion was Mel Brooks’s hundredth birthday. The man born Melvin Kaminsky in a Brooklyn tenement, who cleared landmines in the Ardennes before clearing a path through American comedy, had spent decades kvetching that his 1974 Western satire was funnier than Some Like It Hot. AFI’s president finally conceded. “He’s right,” said Bob Gazzale. “It’s good to be the king.”

It is good to be the king. But the kingdom is older than any single court jester, and the throne room stretches from the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement to the comedy clubs of Tel Aviv, from the Borscht Belt lodges of the Catskills to a sold out Radio City Music Hall in the spring of 2026, where a Tel Aviv born comedian called MODI played two packed houses and proved that Jewish comedy is not a museum exhibit but a living, breathing, ticket selling force.

MODI, born Mordechi Rosenfeld, left Israel at 7, grew up on Long Island, worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch, and quit it all for open mic nights. Thirty years later, he is the biggest Jewish stand up act in America, and the trajectory tells you something about the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)