A clown, a klezmer band and Adolf Hitler walk into a bar.

Well, not quite. But they do appear together on stage in “Good Showbiz: A Celebration of Jewish Theater,” a mostly one-man show that is wrapping up a monthlong run at the Elysian Theater in Los Angeles on Saturday. (Tickets, unsurprisingly, cost $18.)

The show is the joint creation of comedian Eli Leonard and director Theodore Bressman, a writer and producer who got his first production credits working under the actor Seth Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg. The comedian Sarah Shtern plays several smaller characters, including Hitler. 

“What we’re trying to do here is build our own punk rock version of Jewish comedy that does not shy away from the history of Yiddish theater or Jewish stand-up, but embraces the history for the moment we’re in right now,” Bressman told Jewish Insider on Thursday. The team takes inspiration from more than a century of Jewish comedy, including stand-up, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and Alex Edelman’s Emmy-winning Broadway special “Just For Us.”

Promotional materials could make even a connoisseur of vaudevillian Jewish comedy blush: Photos posted to Leonard’s Instagram show him dressed in the most cartoonish possible caricature of a Jewish person, wearing a black hat with a tallit, a long black coat characteristic of Haredi Jews and a prosthetic nose, at times dancing with a bottle of Manischewitz perched on his head. 

This awkwardness is the point, Bressman said. The goal of the show, he added, is to force viewers to face the discomfort of laughing at exaggerated Jewish stereotypes — laughter that Leonard invites with his performance — when antisemitism is rising. Leonard was trained as a clown, and that’s the comedy he employs: sensationalist and interactive, bringing in audience members for short bits and awkward confrontations. 

“It catches people by surprise to see a Jewish man truly inhabit the most over-the-top version of the stereotype, and then to get people laughing within that context. It’s a provocative hour, because I think people don’t even realize how willing they are and how OK they feel laughing at this kind of comedy,” Bressman said. “There’s clues throughout the show that the stereotype is in service of this larger message at the end of the show.”

The message is a simple one, but Bressman thinks it’s still needed: that little antisemitic asides that may seem relatively painless, like comments about Jews running Hollywood or Jews running the media, can lead to the kind of deep-rooted antisemitism that became a part of state policy in Nazi Germany.

“What that leaves the audience with is hopefully a greater understanding that the conspiracy theories and willingness to engage in stereotypes that so many people seem egregiously willing to do in 2024 have direct roots to the Jewish experience in Germany and in the lead-up to the Holocaust,” said Bressman. “That’s why there’s such an unknown feeling of pain associated with the propagation of these conspiracy theories today.”