The Joke

2m / Dramatic Comedy / Unit set It’s 1965 and two comedians, Steady Eddie & Doug the Mug, knock ‘em dead every night in the Catskills. Punchlines and cheap shots fly – on stage and off – as Doug and Ed battle for the spotlight over a decade, pushing each other to the cusp of a new direction of stand up comedy. With their personal and professional lives uncovered at center stage, Eddie and Doug must find a way to laugh it off while staying at the top of their game. Sam Marks’ The Joke takes a look at the friendship and the rivalry between two comic partners during the golden years of the Borscht Belt. A tasty two-hander by Sam Marks…A comedy team working the Catskills in the 1960s and ‘70s, getting few laughs while undergoing all the stresses of a doomed marriage…And just as in a marriage in which one half of the couple changes while the other stays the same, the relationship deteriorates. Allusions to a woman and to the historical context as the '60s give way to the '70s are tantalizing but not overdone; the focus stays on the two men.. - Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times