Not many comedians claim personal friendships that span a century of American humorists, from Groucho Marx and Jack Benny to young bucks like Dane Cook.
David Steinberg is one of the few, the proud, the hilarious.
Remembered for his performances on the original “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and “The Tonight Show,” Steinberg today works primarily as a TV director. Notably, he is Larry David’s go-to guy for directing episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The Winnipeg, Manitoba, native is still very much in the humor game, and will perform during the Peninsula JCC’s Festival of Jewish Humor on Feb. 21 at Cañada College Theatre in Redwood City.
Steinberg, 66, is well qualified to headline a Jewish humor festival. He’s a former yeshiva student and alum of Bnei Akiva, a Zionist youth organization. He spent a year in Israel. “I thought of myself as the Mick Jagger of the yeshiva,” he says. “We were supposed to come back as leaders of Zionism.”
It set the stage for a career as a very openly Jewish comedian at a time other comics were changing their names to sound less ethnic. “My Yiddishkeit was really a part of who I was,” says Steinberg from his home in Los Angeles. “I was almost militantly Jewish in a way. That was my approach to humor.”
For his festival appearance, Steinberg will not do the kind of stand-up routines that made him famous decades ago. Instead, he will more or less wing it, telling the story of his life –– from small-town Canada to Chicago’s Second City, where he learned the art of improv, and on to celebrity in New York and Los Angeles.
“All the stories are funny,” he says. “At the end of the evening you get a look at my life, and I do, too. I talk about the stars I’ve worked with. But I can’t do any story without at least trying to make it funny.”
Some of those stories go back to his childhood in Winnipeg, which he remembers as a great, if small, Jewish town. His father was a Yiddish-speaking grocer who also operated a small shul out of the home. This, he adds, was not unusual — “in Winnipeg in the ’40s and ’50s, in the north end almost every two blocks there was a shul.”
More importantly, he says, Canadian Jews were not under pressure to conform to a national ideal.
“There’s no urge to be a melting pot,” Steinberg says. “Ethnicity is fine. Ukrainians have their thing, Jews have theirs. You’re not forced into an American version of yourself.”
No doubt many in his audience are too young to remember the Smothers Brothers show, on which Steinberg performed ribald “sermons” that helped spur CBS famously to cancel the show (most notably when his routine included a line that the non-Jews had “grabbed the Jews by the Old Testament”).
But few are too young to appreciate Steinberg’s anecdotes about Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.
Steinberg has known both for years, and directed a few “Seinfeld” episodes. When Larry David later launched his unusual comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” at first the creative team wasn’t sure what they had. It seemed to be going nowhere fast.
“[Larry] called me saying, ‘You have to come over. This is a disaster,’ ” recalls Steinberg. “When I came in we got organized, we unlocked the improvisational trend, which was Larry’s intention. Now we really have it down.”
In addition to directing multiple episodes of “Weeds,” “Friends” and “Mad About You,” he also created “Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg,” a series of public conversations with great comics such as Jon Stewart, Seinfeld, Ray Romano and Garry Shandling.
He’s no slouch himself, as his long career on stage attests. For attendees at the Festival of Jewish Humor, for once Steinberg’s focus won’t be on his colleagues, but on himself.
“The more personal you are on stage, the better,” he says. “The audience will take anything, as long as it’s funny and you connect.”
More laughs from humor fest
In addition to David Steinberg’s appearance Feb. 21, the Festival of Jewish Humor kicks off with a Wednesday, Feb. 18 workshop led by Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, co-editor of “The Big Book of Jewish Humor.” He will discuss how humor has helped define the Jewish people.
Former “Seinfeld” writer Carol Leifer and frequent “Tonight Show” guest Cathy Ladman will deliver a night of comedy Feb. 26.
Another marquee event is an interview with artist Drew Friedman (whose “Old Jewish Comedians” exhibit is on display at the PJCC through March 1) with New York Times writer Ben Schwartz, 2 p.m. March 1.
“Silent Film Swim” will feature Jewish comedians from the silent era projected on the wall next to the JCC’s indoor pool. It begins 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19.
Storyteller Liora Brosbe will present “Jewish Humor for Kids” at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 20. Hollywood voiceover artist Kevin Delaney will offer “Humor in Voiceover” workshops for kids and adults 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Feb. 28. And Teatro Zinzanni’s Frank Ferrante will present “An Evening With Groucho” at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Feb. 28.
For more information about the festival, tickets or a brochure, call (650) 212-7522, or go to www.pjcc.org. The PJCC is located at 800 Foster City Blvd., Foster City.