He was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, a Jewish son of Nettie and Martin, and raised on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
As a child, he sparred with his tough-minded mother, who worked in a delicatessen at the same time his father toiled away as an accountant. There was always tension in the family, a functional dysfunction. His parents didn’t get along, and they stumbled through a rocky marriage.
As a young boy, Allan attended Hebrew school for eight years, spoke Yiddish and found his niche making people laugh, most likely out of self-preservation and as a way to make sense of the senseless.
