Daniel Cainer is the Jewish Tom Lehrer. With his satirical songs and clever story-telling, the British-born, piano-playing entertainer calls to mind Lehrer in his heyday — with one important difference: Lehrer lampooned the politics and social issues of his day (the threat of atomic warfare, the nefarious influence of the Vatican, etc.), while Cainer's targets are smaller and more personal: the Jewish world he grew up in.
It's not that Cainer paid much attention to Judaism when young, he confesses at the start of his hour-long show, Jewish Chronicles. “It's just that I had a mid-life kosher crisis.”
One result of the crisis was that he re-connected with his roots, namely his own family. Consequently he found a whole vein of rich, funny material to exploit, such as the unrequited love affair between his grandfather Isaac and his Auntie Rae. Another of Cainer's songs deals with his family's Orthodox rabbi, who had a fatal attraction for cocaine and hookers, (“He put his peckel in her shmekel through a hole in the sheet”).
Cainer's humor is warm and good-natured, and he works in a hamisheh way, always trying to involve the audience in his songs, all of which deal with the human condition, which is why gentiles, as well as Jews, are able to enjoy his show.
Cainer has toured much of the world with one version or another of Jewish Chronicles. As yet, though, he has not performed in the USA, but it's this reviewer's belief that his material would go over well there.
