The Joke
by Sam Marks

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