With insider confidence, frum comedians have the last laugh

In 2026, frum humor is no longer a sideshow, but a stage of its own, whose players fill a space that mainstream comedy never quite could: humor that doesn’t mock the frum world from the outside, but mines the rich, sometimes absurd realities of Orthodox living — from shidduchim to Yom Tov politics to the sociology of the Shabbos table — with the confidence of insiders, transforming it all into a knowing communal laugh

Don’t Wait for the Mood

For Ari Abramowitz, being funny is serious business

Imagine a four-minute scene built around a man trying to open a jar of pickles. He wedges it against a curtain and the curtain collapses. He slams it against a cabinet and the cabinet falls apart. He bangs it into a wall and a chunk of sheetrock explodes outward. The tension keeps building as the audience leans forward, waiting for resolution. Eventually, another character enters the wrecked room, notices the jar of pickles, twists the lid once, and opens the jar effortlessly. That’s the joke. But the real punchline is that Ari Abramowitz can hold an entire audience in suspense over something as trivial as an unopened jar of pickles, and make it feel like high drama.

Part performer, part director, part storyteller, and part professional chaos organizer, Ari Abramowitz has spent years building theatrical experiences, each on a level bigger than the one that preceded it. He produces live storytelling programs with slides, sound effects, and dramatic staging for shuls, camps, and family events, while also creating filmed and recorded content for kids through projects like Ari and Friends on Mostly Music, Ropogos on Toveedo, and the English-language camp film Echoes of Faith. His newest venture, Kling, is a subscription phone line delivering stories and entertainment to children (currently in Yiddish, with plans for English).

What makes Ari unusual isn’t just that he creates content. It’s that he treats imagination like a communal activity, something meant to be shared, built together and experienced live. Give Ari a few props, a handful of volunteers and minimal adult supervision, and he’ll build you a universe.

One thing you learn quickly talking to Ari Abramowitz is that he takes jokes very seriously. And his approach to writing comedy is straightforward: Just start writing. He doesn’t begin by deciding where to begin, he begins by beginning.

“My thing is always — just start writing,” he says. “I don’t care if the first half is going to be completely scratched. I just start writing… and as I start writing, I get into it.”

Start writing. Start building. Start preparing. Don’t wait for the mood. Don’t wait for inspiration. Don’t trust your own greatness. Put your head fully into it, and the engine turns over.

Part of why Ari can do both comedy and drama, and can switch between them without needing to be rebooted, is that he doesn’t just observe a world, he enters it.

He illustrates this point by sharing how, when he was 17 and working in a kids’ shoe store, he decided that he was going to become an expert on shoes.

“Whatever I’m busy with, my head is 100 percent there,” he says. “Not only is my head there, I become that situation.”

It’s a revealing insight, and it helps explain why his comedy isn’t just “jokes.” It’s scenes; it’s worlds. He doesn’t skim the surface of an idea. He moves in, unpacks, hangs up a coat, and starts rearranging the furniture.

I ask how he’d approach a sketch about the invention of gefilte fish, and within seconds he’s narrating the story of a desperate fish seller staring at a pile of bones and thinking, I can sell this. So he grinds it all together, adds flour, invents a name on the spot, and now he has to convince customers this is intentional. Once that universe exists, the jokes start showing up on their own, pulled from mental storage like their props in a messy closet. He’ll sometimes anchor the whole sketch with an ending first. Maybe a carrot accidentally falls onto the dish, a customer buys it that way, and suddenly everybody wants what he’s eating. “I write the end at the bottom,” he says. “Then I work my way down to it.”