Comedy Showcase: 91-Year-Old D'yan Forest - Oldest Female Standup Comedian - "A Gefilte Fish Out of Water"

It's not every day that we discover a new Jewish standup comic, let alone a 91-year-old one who has been certified by Guinness World Records as the oldest female comedian in the business. But today we came across D'yan Forest, whose real name is Diana Schulman.

As Clara Shapiro wrote in The Forward,

D’yan Forest leads a double life. By day, the 91-year-old singer and comedian is Diana Schulman, an aficionado of golf, swimming and cappuccinos. By night, like Clark Kent morphing into Superman, she transforms into D’yan Forest, a fedora-tipping, ukulele-strumming spotlight-stealer with as much material locked in her memory as a Homeric bard. She holds the Guinness World Record for “Oldest Working Female Comedian,” though her gleeful laugh and booming showbiz belt makes it easy to forget her age.

She has a comedy special, A Gefilte Fish Out of Water, a tour of her life from her earliest days (“I didn’t even know what Jewish was, or that I had it!”) to her nonagenarian ones. We'll be sharing some excerpts from the show in the coming weeks. Today we're posting her story about her encounter with Christian hymns at Middlebury College in Vermont.

 Enjoy!