There was this Jew...

Deb Filler tells jokes about the Holocaust, she ridicules her mother and 35 other family members. It's okay though. She's Jewish.

Deb Filler's solo show opens in startling style: "I'd like to dedicate this show to my dad. We are very close, dad and I. Last year, he took me on holiday, just the two of us. Well, it's not exactly the vacation I would have picked. Actually, it was a tour of East European death camps. And, of course, being a comedian, I decided to do a show about it. Is everybody comfortable?" A filmed version of the show, Punch Me in the Stomach, forms part of this year's London Jewish Film Festival which starts today.

Filler grew up in New Zealand and learned at an early age how to use humour to lighten the black moods of a father deeply scarred by his experiences during the Holocaust. "Once, when he was about to explode, I mimicked his laugh and one of his gestures. And he called out to my mother: 'Hey, that's me!' I always knew how to make him laugh." She got into folk music in the early 1970s, created a radical theatre group called Debbie and the Dum Dums, then decided she wanted to be a serious actress and went to train in New York.

She kept on with cabaret even while studying Chekhov. One of the venues was Sammy's Famous Rumanian Jewish Steak House, on the Lower East Side. "I was a singing waitress. I'd get up and say 'I'd like to sing a song from New Zealand, the song which many of us think of as our national anthem, we sing it like a prayer, and I'd like to sing it for you now.' And then I'd startle all the staid New Jersey folk by launching into a raucous number from the Yiddish music hall."

Yet it soon became obvious that she was never going to be able to compete with "the gorgeous blond men and women with American accents who came into the school for three months and then rushed off to get a commercial agent. All they wanted to do was get their teeth capped! I was appalled and decided I could only survive by creating a niche for myself."

"I had gone to my father's 60th birthday party in 1982 and done a 45- minute act, which made fun of my whole family. So I went back to my comedy class in New York and did the characters from that show, and they were all on the edge of their seats saying: 'Great! You have to do something with this. It's totally alive and the characters are fabulous.' "

In the flesh, as on film, Filler is a complete chameleon, instantly transforming herself into dozens of relatives spouting their gripes in countless combinations of Polish, German, Australian and New Zealand accents. The hypochondriac uncle: "I don't feel well. My colon is itching." The sickly younger sister, now an obsessive polisher, Filler had often envied as a child: "Mum spent a lot of time dealing with her and her mucus." The gauche teenage boyfriend who dumped her and has now become hugely successful selling ornamental flamingos. The aunt who burned down her business for $3m, bought herself a mansion and filled it with expensive but spectacularly tasteless antiques ("Louis XVI stinks with leopard-skin, it doesn't go"). All this fed into a one-woman show, Life from the Bottom (1983), consisting of seven 10- minute character sketches. "There was also Debbie Feldman," Filler explained, "a New York lady with a completely dysfunctional family - and that family was the beginning of Punch Me in the Stomach. I would set it up by saying: 'I went to my father's birthday party and I couldn't get a word in edgeways.' Punch arose out of that original 10-minute piece, drawing on my extended family, and their extended family."

The final link in the chain came in 1990, when Filler's father, determined to confront his terrible past, took her on a trip to Eastern Europe. Even in Auschwitz, he recalled, it was vital to keep one's sense of humour. When the transport arrived, he found himself squashed eight to a bunk, all forced to turn over at the same time: "We laughed! We had to. What else could we do? We laughed the whole first night in Auschwitz."

Forty-five years later, they returned together to Terezin, the camp from which he was eventually liberated. After they had looked round, she went to the lavatory - absolutely filthy and pulled the chain. It refused to flush. She pulled again, and it broke. She climbed up on to the bowl to try and re-attach it, her foot slipped, she started to laugh and then stopped herself. "I can't laugh, I'm in a concentration camp." She re- emerged, still holding the broken toilet chain in her hand, to find her father waiting by the souvenir stall. They both laughed so hard they could hardly stop...

As it finally came together, Punch Me in the Stomach is a hilarious, 36-character group portrait of Filler's extended family. It is also something far more unusual and uncomfortable, a comic (or tragi-comic) meditation on what it is like to be the child of a Holocaust survivor, growing up in an environment where school friends assumed the number tattooed on her father's arm was his phone number. A mother so haunted by death that, even in the middle of a party, she would say things like: "I bought myself a plot at the cemetery when I was 35. Would you like to go over there tomorrow and see what's available?" Black humour hardly comes any blacker. But that is precisely what makes it so exhilarating and liberating.

Filler also told me about passing the comedian's ultimate test. Once, while working as a minicab driver, she was sent to pick up Mr Misery himself, the professionally suicidal singer Leonard Cohen - and reduced him to helpless hysteria: "I told him a very funny Jewish joke - and the guy loved it. I thought he was so cool, I'd never get him to laugh, but he was slapping his thighs and banging on the window. Many years later, when we were doing research for the film, I found one of his songs I wanted for the closing song, so I sent him a fax, phoned him up and started off. 'You probably don't remember me...' 'Remember you?' he interrupted instantly, 'I've been telling your jokes for the last 10 years!' " n

'Punch Me in the Stomach' 7.00pm, Sat, NFT, London, SE1. Booking: 0171- 928 3232