Ari Abramowitz doesn’t have a title at Camp Stolin, although he’s been running their plays and comedy skits for 25 years. Because camp comedy isn’t just about being funny. It’s about being funny under conditions that should technically be illegal.

People have two days to prepare, and often it’s not fully scripted. What he does have is a talented staff, bursting with ideas and limited on time. So Ari developed a rule that’s also a filtering mechanism.

“You come to me with an idea,” he says, “and you have to tell me your concept in one sentence.”

I ask for an example: “Imagine a Chumash seudah [Chumash party], except instead of five-year-olds, they’re all adults.”

Familiarity is a comedic engine, and since everyone already recognizes the frame, the moment you tilt it, it can become hilarious.

Years ago, in Camp Stolin, they were brainstorming a skit. Lots of voices, lots of ideas. Ari encourages that kind of chaos. He believes anyone should join the meeting, toss in ideas, and he’ll know quickly which ones have potential.

One guy suggested, “How about we do a play that flops on purpose?”

Ari said everyone jumped on it. The guy thought they were making fun of him, but they weren’t. They were thrilled.

They did it in camp first, and Ari later showed it to a director friend who insisted this belonged on a real stage. Ari resisted, saying this was camp material, not big-stage material. But eventually the script got written, it went up, and was performed before a sold-out audience of thousands.

And when he describes the actual flops in their version, you can hear his affection for mechanics. The rabbi whose beard comes off in his hand, a locked door mid-scene while the director screams the combination from the side, the classic “walking down steps behind a wall” trick, until the wall collapses and you see the actor crouching, plus the guys holding the wall. The comedy lands because the audience understands the illusion and then gets to watch it break.

What looks like chaos is actually precision, a reminder that even a show built on things going wrong still requires everything to go right.

Ari’s plays have had so much success over the years that he feels quite comfortable talking about the rare flops. He offers two examples.

One was a skit idea about a baby who needs occupational therapy, except the baby would be played by the biggest counselor in camp. Giant guy in a crib, giant guy in a high chair, giant guy being therapized. In the abstract, it’s funny immediately. Except it wasn’t. Strong as the concept was, they didn’t have enough substance to build it.

Another was a “Satmar guy stuck in a Young Israel shul for Shabbos” premise. They can’t handle the jar of herring in his pocket, and he can’t handle their straightness.

It’s instant comedy tension, but once again, there was not enough material to keep the scene surprising. Once the audience knows what the gag is, it becomes repetition.

And Ari’s point wasn’t that the ideas themselves were bad, but rather that a concept alone isn’t always a skit.

Comedy, he says, isn’t just subverting expectations once. It’s subverting them again and again, with escalation, timing, pacing, and the right pauses, expressions, and physical applications.

I asked what he learned from flops that made him better, and he answered like a man giving survival principles:

Listen to everybody. Even if you decide later that someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, listen first. If one person says it, others in the room are thinking it too.

Give other people their space. If someone else is rolling, let them roll. Don’t hijack the moment because you want to be the star. Some of the best camp comedy he’s seen is when an unexpected person becomes the star and you don’t fight it.

You’re not that amazing. This one he delivered with the bluntness of a mentor who’s seen too many confident boys forget their lines. Confidence makes you stop preparing. If you’re calm right before a comedy skit, it’s a bad sign, because calm can mean you’re too sure of yourself. A little anxiety is a good thing.

He applies the same discipline to serious speaking. Ari speaks often at his shul on Friday nights, Shalosh Seudos, whatever the week demands, and he prepares every time, even when he doesn’t end up speaking. He told me about being blindsided at a sheva brachos where an uncle asked him to say a few words. Ari made him wait 15 minutes while he wrote a beginning, middle, and end. Because starting a speech with “I didn’t really prepare” is not a charming disclaimer, it’s an insult to the room.

How does a person keep doing this for decades without burning out?

“I love it, I live it, and the feedback fuels me,” Ari says. “And my parents are my biggest fans.”

His mother works in a store and introduces herself to customers as his mother. His father calls him randomly after bumping into someone who praised him, just to share the feedback like it’s a simchah. They backed him from day one, not with reluctant tolerance, but with genuine excitement.

Ari once floated the idea of taking a break from the annual Purim shpiel, until his rav shut the idea down. Absolutely not. “Not because the rav needed to hear my jokes,” Ari says, “but because he believes in the value of entertainment and the ability to move people through it.”

My Real Self

Mendel Richter started out on a community chat for Jews in Singapore. Until everyone wanted a slice of his life

Chances are you’ve encountered Mendel Richter without realizing it.

He’s the Israeli guy complaining about shul politics. He’s the overbearing Jewish mother. He’s the clueless bochur. He’s the anxiety-ridden baal teshuvah. He’s the Moshe Rabbeinu wannabe. And occasionally, he’s all of them in the same 30-second video.

Richter, better known as “Reggie” (@reggie_torahshorts), has quietly built a following pushing toward six figures, with short comedic videos that blend Jewish life, relatable awkwardness, accents, and observational humor into something that feels both niche and universal. His content lands somewhere between frum inside jokes and mainstream social-media storytelling.

But the origin story, which is almost comically unglamorous, started in Singapore.

Mendel Richter grew up in Queens, New York, where his parents run a local Chabad House. He says creativity was always part of his identity. As a child, he participated in school plays, camp productions, art projects, and music. He composes songs, plays piano, and enjoys singing, talents that he hopes to develop further in the future.

A few years ago, Richter was on shlichus in Singapore when a rabbi asked if he could share a short Torah thought for the community chat.

At first, it was just weekly content for community chat groups. But he already had what every creator needs before they realize they’re a creator: a backlog of ideas.

“I always had random creative ideas,” he says. “So I started posting them, too.”

Then came Chanukah 2024, and something clicked. Followers jumped from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

“I was posting almost every day,” he says. “Sometimes two or three times a day.”

When I ask how he generates so much material, Richter doesn’t describe a writer’s room, a structured brainstorming process, or a carefully engineered comedic system. He describes life.

“I just see things,” he says. “Something happens, and I think that would be funny if I apply it to Shabbos, or a Jewish mother, or shidduchim.”

Ideas go straight into his phone. Then he executes quickly.

“If I really like it, I make it on the spot and post it.”

And Richter admits that he sometimes scrolls through his own videos and laughs.

For some creators, watching their own content is torture. For him, it’s enjoyment.

“Sometimes I just scroll my own video and just laugh at my own stuff,” he admits. “I have about fifteen videos I really like. I’ve learned to appreciate myself.”

I point out that self-acceptance is part of what makes him so effective at comedy. Many performers struggle with self-consciousness, but Richter seems largely free of it. He projects a kind of cheerful normalcy, not trying to be a comedian, just someone who happens to create funny things. And audiences feel that authenticity. You don’t get the sense he’s performing for validation; you get the sense he’s having fun.

Richter recently got married and now lives in Crown Heights. His wife knew about his videos before they met, which created a modern dating dynamic unimaginable 20 years ago.

“She’s always given honest feedback,” he says. “She lets me know right away if something is good or not good.”

That honesty may be one of his biggest assets.

Creative people often operate inside echo chambers. Honest feedback is rare. Supportive honesty is even rarer. He says he’s lucky. And when life hits him with a curveball, he pretends not to notice.

He earns income through sponsored content, Jewish organizations, and promotions, but most importantly, he enjoys the work.

Sometimes, content creation looks like hustle culture. Sometimes, it looks like someone doing what they love and letting the rest figure itself out. Richter belongs firmly in the second category.

Richter explains why he makes videos in the first place.

“I try to make stuff that we go through every day,” he says. “I like to teach everyone that we’re all living the same life, and it’s fine to laugh about all these little things. And just know you’re normal, you’re good. Everyone does the same crazy things.”

When you see your own experiences reflected back at you, even if they are entirely exaggerated and dramatized but still recognizable, it creates relief. You realize that you’re not alone and your life isn’t uniquely chaotic. You get the sense that someone else understands.

Part of Richter’s appeal is his ability to switch characters seamlessly. Israeli accents, American voices, exaggerated personalities. Each video becomes a miniature sketch populated by familiar archetypes.

Sometimes viewers even ask whether a particular persona is the “real him.” It isn’t, he says. They’re all him.

And because many of his videos focus on universally human behaviors like misunderstanding conversations, family dynamics, and social awkwardness, they tend to travel beyond the frum world.

I throw out my standard hypothetical prompt, how he’d approach a sketch about the invention of gefilte fish. He imagines gefilte fish being invented by a very Ashkenazi cook who had scraps from several different fish preparations and was about to throw them out, until his mother stopped him and insisted it would be bal tashchis to waste good food. So it all got mashed together, seasoned, and reinvented as a “new dish.”

Comedy, he says, often works by exaggerating fragments of truth. Richter seems to intuitively understand this, amplifying recognizable traits and customs just enough to trigger laughter without losing relatability.

Richter shares a story he once heard. Someone asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe if a person who doesn’t keep Shabbos, and only attends shul occasionally, should be taken seriously. Isn’t he just “wearing a costume”?

The Rebbe answered: “The costume is the rest of the year. The moment he’s in shul, that’s the real him.”

It’s a striking metaphor and unintentionally relevant to Richter’s work. Online personas often feel artificial. But sometimes the creative version of someone reveals more truth than their everyday life.

When I ask who he really is beneath the characters, he answers simply, “A regular guy trying to do the right thing, and trying to have some fun.”

Side by Side

Is there a piece of your life inside a FrumSide comic?

IFyou’ve ever looked around your own life and thought, “This would be funny if it weren’t happening to me,” you’re already living inside a FrumSide comic. That’s the quiet genius of Levi and Mendel Goldgrab. What they’re really collecting are fragments of lived experience: the pressures, the routines and the unspoken rules everyone recognizes. Then they just nudge it half a step past reality, and that’s where the laugh lives.

The Goldgrab brothers grew up in Flatbush, in the kind of environment where camp stories, yeshivah references and family dynamics overlap into a shared cultural language. Today, Levi lives in London after marrying a local girl, while Mendel is based in Monsey, but the creative shorthand between them still carries the rhythms of their Brooklyn upbringing.

In one comic — their style clearly reminiscent to Gary Larson’s long-running nationally syndicated, “The Far Side” — a full-scale Jewish concert is underway, except the performers are animals in black hats under the name “ZOOSHA,” with a giraffe who looks oddly like the towering Shlomo Gaisin crooning into a microphone while a lion-faced Zachariah Goldschmiedt lookalike is deejaying. It’s ridiculous, but also strangely accurate to the energy of certain events that start as kumzitzes and end somewhere between a Carlebach minyan and a Simchas Beis Hashoeivah.

And then there’s the trench-coat guy outside a Talmud Torah, opening his jacket to reveal stacks of “Mitzvah Notes” like contraband, a perfect retelling of how even something as pure as encouraging good behavior can take on institutional weight once forms, systems, and expectations get involved.

Their humor isn’t limited to everyday life. One comic imagines a family of mountains throwing a “Congratulations on your promotion” party, only for the father to walk in defeated and announce, “Sorry guys… they went with Sinai.” Of course, it’s a reframing of the Midrash that Har Sinai was chosen for its humility, while tapping into the distressing, familiar feeliing of not getting the job everyone assumed was yours.

Once you see how much of your own life is hiding inside their panels, a new question emerges: Where exactly are they getting this material from? And should the rest of us be worried?

There’s a particular craft to turning everyday life into something both funny and meaningful and Levi and Mendel make it look natural. I suspected it wasn’t, so I asked them to walk me through the process.

FrumSide, despite the slick presentation and viral reach, is not even a year old. The first comic appeared sometime last June. For months it lived mostly on their personal statuses, circulating among friends, before the brothers realized they might actually be onto something.

“We started just for fun,” Levi tells me. “We passed them around, people liked them, so we kept making more. Eventually we said, okay, we should probably put this somewhere more public.”

A few months later, they had a recognizable brand, a growing audience and comics being shared across very different corners of the Jewish world. From yeshivah bochurim to Modern Orthodox professionals to bubbies in Yerushalayim. The humor itself, though, wasn’t new.

“A lot of this comedy is between family,” Levi says. “Between brothers, between friends. This is kind of the first time we’re sharing it publicly.”

I comment that the Pesach Seder in their house must be hilarious.

“Quite the opposite,” Levi says. “That’s where the humor comes from.”

“It’s a coping mechanism,” Mendel adds.

That tension between seriousness and absurdity runs through many of their most memorable panels.

Take the zemiros comic: a father lost in song at the Shabbos table, eyes closed, clapping in spiritual ecstasy, while behind him a giant insect is literally carrying off one of the children and chaos erupts around the table. No one interrupts because Tatty is singing.

Or the debate video: “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS Chavrusa.” In the panel, Shapiro lectures his overwhelmed learning partner. “Oh, so you feel Rashi’s pshat is better? Yeah, well, Tosafos doesn’t care about your feelings.” You can practically hear Ben saying that.

Then there’s “Chabad of Texas,” a Lubavitcher chassid on horseback chasing down a fleeing Jew across a desert landscape with a tefillin lasso in hand. It’s the Wild West of kiruv.

Or the sheep standing next to a Yid with a paintbrush and a butcher knife next to his dilapidated Egyptian door, saying, “I guess he’s finally painting that darn thing….”

When I ask which comic has gotten the biggest reaction, the answer generally depends on the audience, but Pharaoh’s Ozempic dream seemed to hit across the board.

That one, where ancient Egypt meets modern weight-loss culture, depicts Pharaoh’s famous dream of fat and skinny cows reimagined as a pharmaceutical ad: “Ozempic. Pharaoh’s dream, your reality.”

But for Mendel, some comics are personal. He points to a Breslov-inspired panel showing Humpty Dumpty shattered on the ground while a chassid offers him a book: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men never heard the teachings of Rebbe Nachman.”

“I think that one was more for me than for the public,” he says.

Levi also shares an unexpected personal connection to one of the Internet’s more recognizable Jewish podcast personalities. He was a classmate of Yaakov Langer of the Living L’Chaim/Inspiration for the Nation podcast for nearly a decade.

“Yaakov was always drawing comics,” Levi recalls. “I always used to draw comics as well, but I couldn’t actually draw. Mine were always stick men, while Yaakov had these proper characters.”

For Levi, the combination of Photoshop and AI has been nothing short of revolutionary. Tools that didn’t exist when he was a kid suddenly unlocked the visual side of ideas he’d always had in his head. What used to stop at stick figures can now become fully realized panels.

But how do these ideas actually happen?

Mendel’s answer begins somewhere unexpected.

“It always starts with tefillah,” he says matter-of-factly. “I ask the Eibeshter to help me with ideas. Some of these concepts, it’s not something a regular person just thinks of. It comes from a higher place.”

Then comes the hishtadlus — sometimes after hours of thinking, sometimes in late-night bursts of inspiration.

“I’ve sat from midnight to four in the morning, just thinking,” he says. “And by the time I went to sleep I had ten comics written.”

Levi describes the visual side like a kind of digital collage. The jokes, he emphasizes, are entirely theirs, no AI prompts for humor. But the artwork begins with multiple AI-generated drafts, followed by meticulous manual editing.

“We might generate six or seven versions,” he says. “Then I Photoshop them together, take a piece from here, a piece from there. Like arts and crafts.”

Details matter.

“There’s a lot of AI slop out there,” Levi says. “We want to do it properly. No six fingers. No weird faces. Everything should look normal.”

That might mean carefully constructing Bas Pharaoh’s elongated arm, which AI can’t manage on its own, or experimenting with multiple versions of a character’s glasses before settling on the right look.

The attention to detail is part of what makes the comics feel finished rather than gimmicky, closer to Gary Larson than meme culture. Ironically, the project has even changed their own religious habits.

“I actually started shnayim mikra because of FrumSide,” Mendel admits.

Of all the origin stories for Torah learning, that may be the first one involving cartoon cows and podcast-interviewed Monopoly men.

Before we wrap up, I throw them a challenge, a hypothetical prompt about someone pitching gefilte fish as a new product.

Their minds start working immediately: boardroom scene, characters, angle, punchline possibilities. Within seconds they’re riffing on Hashem offering gefilte fish to the nations of the world.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1101)