Manhattan, NY – Marine Corps’ Only Stand-Up Jewish Comic

Manhattan, NY – Were the Marines ever to need an ambassador to Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community, they could do worse than Lt. Col. Dave Rosner. Two of its female members were on a Fleet Week tour of the USS Iwo Jima, an 844-foot amphibious assault ship, when a reporter wanted to ask a few questions about their visit. Lt. Col. Rosner tried to reassure them.

“I told them, ‘It’s all tsnies,” he said, using what he said was the Yiddish word for modest. And he drew a laugh about the photos the reporter’s photographer wanted to take of them. “I said, ‘We’ll put them behind a mechitza,’ ” the partition used to separate men and women at Orthodox services.

Lt. Col. Rosner is funny—seriously. Indeed, it’s a pretty safe bet he’s the Marine Corps’ only stand-up Jewish comic. The lieutenant colonel’s shtick, which he’s performed at clubs such as Catch a Rising Star, includes bits like trying to persuade his general to take a nicer, safer hill, and selling his fellow grunts life insurance in the heat of battle.

At the time he was telling me the accompanying jokes I was trying to avoid breaking my neck as we were clambering down a ramp on the Iwo Jima’s massive, hangar-like waterline “well deck” to board a Riverine Assault Boat.

I first met Lt. Col. Rosner at Fleet Week a few years back when my nephew, a military buff, persuaded me to try to use my press pass to cut the lines onto the USS Kearsage, another huge amphibious assault ship bristling with troops, jets, helicopters and all manner of futuristic technology.

So I did my best to puff out my chest, hide my liberal-arts background and appear the sort of fellow you’d want to share a foxhole with. It came as something of a shock, as it undoubtedly did to those Orthodox Jewish ladies, when the soldier assigned to lead my nephew and me on the tour was A) Jewish and B) a stand-up comic.

Lt. Col. Rosner reported that his career has taken off since we last met—at least his military stand-up career. He is acting as emcee at Marine Corps events. “It took 20 years,” he said, “but I’ve been able to combine the two without getting into trouble.”

He’s brought in to break the tension at “musters” where reservists—who fear they may be about to be “involuntarily mobilized” to Iraq or Afghanistan, with wives and mothers weeping outside—are ordered to report. “I took a right turn on the 501,” he recently told just such a meeting in Raleigh-Durham, “and ended up at a Klan meeting.”

Maybe you had to be there. He recently returned to Iraq, where he served during Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield, to entertain the troops at a forward operating base on the Iranian border shortly after the Iranians attacked it. He said the base commander told him, “The guys are a little shaken up. We really could use some jokes here,” so Lt. Col. Rosner complied.

Passing a row of Port o’ Potties on our visit brought back memories of Desert Storm and his sensitive Jewish nose. The desert heat and demands on the latrines made the experience so off-putting, he said, that “before I went in there I’d put on a gas mask.” Only problem: He was the camp’s assistant commandant and was tasked with sounding the alarm if they were about to be attacked. His men—and women—feared he knew something they didn’t.

The glory of the U.S. Armed Forces is that they can display overwhelming military might and at the same time make an excellent chocolate-chip cookie—examples of which were both on display during our tour. Our final stop was an invitation-only buffet lunch aboard the Iwo Jima for United Nations ambassadors and military personnel, addressed by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice.

There was a swan ice sculpture and also shrimp, egg rolls, chicken wings and perhaps the largest prime rib I’ve ever seen—all of it made on board by Navy chefs.

Lt. Col. Rosner was more than willing to pose with the behemoth cut of beef. But he wouldn’t have touched it with your knife and fork. “It’s not kosher,” he explained.