D’yan Forest: A Gefilte Fish Out of Water – 31 July 2025

On D’yan Forest’s 91^st birthday, she gathered together a group of her closest friends, theatre community members, and ticket buyers, to Joe’s Pub for a rousing celebration. The Guinness Book of World Records’ oldest living comedienne delivered a hilarious stand up set (partially sitting down), which included rewritten versions of musical numbers and the occasional church hymn to celebrate the fact that “everything old is new again.” Her humor (some might say, khokhma) included serious topics about antisemitism and what it means to be a Jew—as well as meeting the stand up comedy standard demand for sex jokes.

D’yan’s show traced her history from birth as a Jewish woman who was excluded from everything from tennis to bar mitzvahs for some reason or another. As the restrictions continued through college and into her acting career (which required a new nose and a new name in order to properly launch), D’yan makes light of an almost forgotten reality—that antisemitism took opportunities away from natural born American citizens such a short time ago that there are some among the living who can still remember. In addition to being a wonderful performer, D’yan was the first Jewish woman at Middlebury College where her primary social opportunities were starting a Hillel that only contained 8 members (which was 80% of Middlebury’s Jewish students) and singing in the church choir (which required consulting her mother on which Christian words to hum instead of say).

D’yan can laugh about these experiences now, but, as she intentionally points out, these jokes arose from a belief that this kind of discrimination was over. In today’s post October 7 world, D’yan has been experiencing hateful comments holding her responsible for a war not of her making, far, far outside the realm of what it means to be a 91 year old comedian singing, “If I Were a Christian” to the tune of “If I Were a Rich Man” and asking the audience to join her in a thoughtful chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.” Once again, there are places in New York and around the world with signs and rules forbidding Jews from entering, as well as places where that sentiment is implicit but still heavily present. D’yan says that she is staying in New York because it is the only place where being herself doesn’t feel like a contradiction. After all, this Jewish bisexual 91 year old (former?) swinger has lived a lifetime of needing to laugh at herself to cope with exclusion and heartbreak. She deserves to live in a place where enough people are in on the jokes to laugh with her.

My favorite joke from the show was her repetition of a Holocaust joke credited to Ricky Gervais. A Holocaust survivor goes to heaven after dying of old age. When he meets God, he tells God a joke about Auschwitz. God doesn’t laugh, and the Holocaust survivor says, “I guess you had to be there.” D’yan’s retelling of this joke was one of her only uses of outside material in the entire performance, but it is incredibly representative of how the night felt. Her humor still gets laughs because it is dark and relevant and twisted, just like the world we live in. Some of her jokes have a universality to them—sex jokes from a 91 year old who “hasn’t 69’d since 69” are there for all of us. But for those of us who, like myself, are young queer Jews experiencing being barred from spaces we always thought of as our own, it was profoundly reassuring to see someone go through worse and still be here to laugh about it. As D’yan opened with, “everything old is new again.” Her message is important in that it reminds us to laugh through everything we can’t sing or dance through. D’yan Forest reminds us to keep telling our stories, keep writing, keep fighting, keep standing up (on stage if we want to!).

The evening concluded with the audience singing D’yan a happy birthday and a smile that bonded a room full of strangers who entered it not fully knowing what to expect from a 91 year old Gefilte Fish Out of Water. It was a memorable night and beautiful moment. But best of all, it made me laugh.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Andrea Alton PR.