Take My Buyout, Please …

Four decades ago, Thomas H. Lee was one of the pioneers of leveraged buyouts.

But Mr. Lee, who accepted an award for philanthropy on Tuesday evening at an event organized by the UJA-Federation of New York, had an alternate explanation for how the private equity business began â€" one that might have been delivered by a financially savvy Borscht Belt comedian.

“I thought I would tell you about the first buyout,” Mr. Lee said, with deadpan humor. “It happened at a great event like this. A great man was being honored.”

The man, overcome with gratitude, promised that he would give his new son-in-law a 40 percent stake in his company, the joke went. True to his word, he bestowed the stock certificate the following morning. He then offered the young man a role in the company. Sales? Manufacturing? Accounting? But none was to the son-in-law’s liking.

Stumped, the father-in-law asked what the young man had in mind, Mr. Lee went on.

“He says, ‘Well, why don’t you buy me out?’”

The crowd roared. Mr. Lee accepted an award named for Jack Nash, a financier who helped create the modern hedge fund business. The UJA-Federation gala, known as the “private equity recognition event,” raised $1.1 million.

The room in the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan was filled with private equity and hedge fund types, in addition to representatives of the UJA-Federation, a charitable organization focused on Jewish philanthropy. The guests ate sushi and mini tofu-based ice cream cones.

“For an extraordinary asset manager, who’s that witty?” Bruce Richards, the chief executive of Marathon Asset Management, said in an interview after the speeches. Mr. Lee, he said, “takes the cake.”

Mr. Lee â€" or “Tomcat,” as he called himself, because he had “nine different lives” â€" peppered his remarks with wry humor.

One of these lives was as a philanthropist. Another was his life as a husband. And as a father. And as a hypochondriac. “I haven’t told you about my gravestone,” he said. “It’s going to say: ‘I told you I was really sick.’”

Mr. Lee, who founded a major private equity firm in Boston before moving to New York, poked fun at his former marriage; at George Steinbrenner, the deceased owner of the Yankees; and at the UJA-Federation itself.

“46 years ago I got married in this room,” said Mr. Lee, whose current wife, Ann Tenenbaum, was sitting nearby. “It was one of the worst nights of my life.”

Using the term for investors in private equity funds, he recalled something he said he had heard in New York. “You don’t know how limited you can be until you’ve been a limited partner of George Steinbrenner,” Mr. Lee said.

He took the joke one step further.

“So, you don’t know how well you can be solicited until the UJA comes calling,” Mr. Lee said. “But after all, it’s a call that I welcome.”