'Life is funny' says Wilkins comedian, 87

When you ask Skip Davis what inspires him, at age 87, to keep performing as a stand-up comedian at small, local venues, he’ll tell you “life is funny.”

“I’m thankful for every day,” Davis said in his Wilkins Township house, the same he’s lived in since the 1960s. “That’s why they call it ‘present.’ Every day is a gift.”

It’s Davis’ ability to find the funny in the mundane that keeps him telling jokes at events like the one March 12 at the Monroeville Public Library. He reviewed “The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America,” talking about highlights in the book and weaving jokes throughout.

As a Jew, Davis sticks to jokes that poke fun at idiosyncrasies found within the creed.

His favorite joke to tell goes somewhat like this: “There’s a Jewish couple sitting, reading different parts of the newspaper. All of a sudden, the wife puts it down and says to her husband ‘You ain’t got no willpower. Goldberg and Levine, they have willpower, not you.’

“The husband says, ‘What?’”

“So the wife says, ‘Goldberg. Levine. They have willpower, not you. Goldberg used to smoke three packs of cigarettes a day. He would put one out and smoke another. Now he quit. Levine, well he’s a drunken bum. He would drink anything … he quit. Cold chicken. Didn’t even have to go to AA. They have willpower, not you.’”

“To this the husband says, ‘OK, tell you what sweetie face, we’ll see. I’ll sleep in the guest room for three weeks and you sleep in our bedroom.’”

“At the end of three weeks, there’s a knock at the husband’s door. There’s his wife standing in a nightgown. The husband says, ‘What do you want?’”

“She says, ‘Goldberg is smoking again.’”

Comedy first entered Davis’ life when the Fathers Club at the Hebrew Institute needed entertainment for a function “somewhere in the 1960s and 1970s.”

“They needed entertainment but they couldn’t pay anything. So I told jokes. Apparently I did it well because other organizations started asking me to do the same thing,” he said.

As a traveling salesman, Davis never took his act to comedy clubs. He did, however, share jokes with a crowd on a Mediterranean cruise once. Comedian, actor and singer Robert Klein performed that night, too.

“I have a picture with him somewhere around here,” he said. “He complimented me after and told me ‘You did very well.’”

For Davis, who still works as a marketing consultant and sales representative for around 30 companies, that compliment – on top of everything else in his life – was enough.

Before marrying his wife, the two were talking about the future as they enjoyed a date at Kennywood. Davis said Arlene, who passed last year after a 62-year marriage, told him if he wanted to marry her, he needed to agree they were to have four children.

“She told me that’s nonnegotiable. ‘We are having four children,’ she told me,” Davis said. He said he was worried about how he would provide for so many.

“But we figured it out,” he said.

And comedy was, and is, the cherry on top.

“I had a good life, I don’t regret anything,” said Davis. “When you’re old, and you can do something you could do when you were young, that’s a good feeling.”