Popular Culture
These resorts have been the setting for movies such as Dirty Dancing, Sweet Lorraine, and A Walk on the Moon.
Characters inspired by Borscht Belt comics include Billy Crystal's Buddy Young Jr. from Mr. Saturday Night and Robert Smigel's Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.
The early 20th-century Jewish experience of vacationing in the Catskills was recounted in the graphic short story "Cookalein" by Will Eisner. The story appears in Eisner's collection A Contract with God.
The novel Marjorie Morningstar was about the same era and locale, but the corresponding film was actually made in the Adirondacks, rather than the Catskills.
In The Sopranos episode, "Unidentified Black Males", Tony Soprano lies to protect his cousin, Tony Blundetto from a murderously irate Johnny Sack, by claiming that Tony B. could not have murdered Sacks' friend Joey "Peeps" because the two Tonys were upstate, in Monticello, searching for Tony B.'s missing daughter.
Read more about this topic: Borscht Belt
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unthinking people will often try to teach you how to do the things which you can do better than you can be taught to do them. If you are sure of all this, you can start to add to your value as a mother by learning the things that can be taught, for the best of our civilization and culture offers much that is of value, if you can take it without loss of what comes to you naturally.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)