User Reviews

Toody and Muldoon find out that Joel Pokrass, one of the boys on their PAL basketball team, isn't playing well because he's worried about his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. It turns out that the boy's father is a notorious slumlord (who Schnauzer calls "The Beast of the Bronx") and, although everyone likes Joel, not one person who lives in the 53rd Precinct will come to his Bar Mitzvah because most of them have lived, at one time or another, in one of Pokrass' crumbling slum buildings and hates him. Toody and Muldoon have to find a way to get people to come to Joel's Bar Mitzvah despite everybody's feelings about his father. This is an hilarious entry in the series, very well written by Nat Hiken with Joe E. Ross at the top of his form as Toody and Al Lewis in one of his best jobs as the eternally put-upon Leo Schnauzer. Burlesque comic B.S. Pully is the skinflint Pokrass and does an excellent job of it. Hiken's plots tend to go off on tangents before coming back together for an hilarious and clever ending, and this is an excellent example of that. Very, very funny episode.