A Jewish freshman searches for love and money at the University of Minnesota in this raucous satire from the author of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
It’s the middle of the Great Depression and Morris Katz and his cousin Albert are broke. The self-declared “best humpers in St. Paul,” they haven’t quite figured out how to make their talents pay. But that’s all about to change when they head off to college on a mission from Morris’s mother to find rich, unattractive Jewish girls to marry.
The boys arrive on campus armed with a secret weapon: the poetry of Morris’s cousin Crip, a stay-at-home genius who sublimates his sex drive into song. Within a day, Morris is courting Celeste Zimmerman, the frumpy heir to a movie theater franchise. But then an Irish Catholic beauty falls under the spell of Crip’s verse and goes gaga over Morris. She thinks he’s a Jewish-Communist revolutionary poet, and who is he to tell her otherwise? But is it happiness Morris truly wants, or money? And what will Mama Katz say?
