THE ULTIMATE JACKIE MASON
Macomber, Shawn
America’s most beloved comedian is alive and well on Broadway. By shawn Macomber 16 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 C “omedy, in general, is a great escape for anyone who wants to...
...When you couch something in comedic terms, no matter how controver sial, it suddenly becomes acceptable,” Mason contin ued from a Marriott in Florida where he was testing material for his upcoming Broadway production, as well as finishing last-minute pre-production on a film he’s shooting this spring...
...You could tell the same jokes about sex and love and conflict or fear or thievery or fear...
...Everything in your expe-rience affects you for the rest of your life,” Mason offered when asked how those years influ-enced his comedy...
...In reality, Mason was beginning to recognize comedy as a passion, a calling...
...He’s like a box of Cracker Jacks: you never know what prize you’re going to get...
...In a strange intertwining of the different eras of his life, Mason won an Emmy in 1992 for his voice-over role as the Rabbi Hyman Krustofski on The Simpsons...
...One thing I’ve noticed is 80 percent of commer-cials on television now seem to be either trying to get you to buy something that may give you diarrhea or cure constipation,” Mason laughed...
...The comedian scoffed at this derision, bided his time, and when he returned fifteen years later to Broadway his one-man show The World According to Me...
...win a fight against another guy who has similarly reduced himself, all under the guise of sacrificing themselves for humanitarian reasons,” Mason said...
...In other words, Mason wasn’t a man who was going to let some-oneknockhisteethoutjustbecause everyone else in the rink thought it a swell deal...
...From the stage I make a joke and the same people who I would otherwise so offend are laughing their heads off...
...Particularly if mixed with honesty...
...Mason’s first Broadway show, A Teaspoon Every Four Hours—an inter-racial love story/comedy, not that detractors eager to shellac Mason as bigot care—was savaged by critics and after a lengthy preview period closed on opening night...
...Politically Incorrect...
...For all the hype, Mason isn’t looking to election 2008 as a triumph of Hope over experience, either...
...Alas, as he noted in the documentary An Equal Opportunity Offender, “My egomania was great, but my voice was mediocre...
...But I don’t see anything Lenny Bruce was actually saying as outdated because he was talking about uni-versal truths...
...He didn’t pros-trate himself before the Powers That Be or try to latch on to a popular comedic prototype chameleon-like...
...I don’t think it’s going to change...
...Like his three brothers before him, he became an ordained rabbi...
...They open up to him very easily and he engages them very easily without judgment...
...Sullivan Mason eventually dropped his libel suit...
...I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet...
...Maybe 50 years ago, if Lenny Bruce wanted to illustrate hypocrisy he’d talk about religion...
...This is a free country...
...I think it’s all filed away in his head for future reference...
...I’d be a jerk and that’s the end of that...
...It isn’t the easiest path to success...
...He’s on to the next thing...
...N early a half-century after his first appear-ance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Jackie Mason approaches his craft in much the same way as he did working those Catskills lodges...
...But any time a columnist wants to criticize someone like Obama they feel like they have to write three columns beforehand offer-ing proof of how they’ve never been a bigot—three columns of suffering and fear and panic so they might meekly speak their mind...
...To tell you the truth, life doesn’t change that much,” he said...
...I was always fascinated by the crazy irony of a guy with a $100 million reducing himself to an alley cat, adopting a real gutter mentality to prove he can “This is a free country...
...It nevertheless took many years to undo the damage...
...As long as it is relevant and topical, as long as it’s a reflection of our times, a reflection of the foibles and fables of human behavior, it will be in the show...
...You ever see these peo-ple volunteering at a hospital to help sick people or in a poor neighborhood offering a bowl of soup to the hungry...
...She’sshouting,‘Whatisthis,PiccadillyCircus?’ and Jackie’s just standing there quietly with a benign APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 17 smile,” Felder recalled...
...Not long after his father’s death, Mason resigned from his syna-gogue to pursue comedy full-time...
...Somebody in the family had to make a living,” Mason is fond of joking, but his three-year stint leading prayers was hardly wasted time...
...He’s on to the next thing...
...If we’re all bigots, how’s a guy like this, with about an hour and a half of political experience, get to this place he finds himself...
...The blossoming stand-up told the folks back home per-forming was simply a way to earn extra money while he prepared for the rabbinate...
...Today dirty words are a way of life...
...But they’re here to save humanity with a campaign during which all they ever talk about is how much you need to help them...
...A ll of which brings us to Jackie Mason’s eighth and final solo Broadway show, a swan song somewhat immodestly entitled The Ultimate Jew now running at New World Stages...
...20 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008...
...He’s like a box of Cracker Jacks: you never know what prize you’re going to get...
...Society changes...
...Instead, Mason took the trib-ulations as incentive to be bolder, to be even more himself...
...For humanitarian reasons...
...The show might be about the news...
...Obviously half the actors in Hollywood trip-ping over each other to go stand with Hugo Chavez and tell Bush to drop dead would have lost their citi-zenship by now if it wasn’t a free country,” Mason chuckled ruefully...
...Mason’s unwillingness to be a career kvetcher may have something to do with his improbable rise to comedic legend...
...Even if he has always been ultimatelytriumphant,Mason’s journey has doubtless him to roll with punches hard enough to send a lesser man into, say, telemarketing...
...It might be about parking the car...
...Today people are not so religious, so you might talk about how they pretend not to be obsessed with status symbols...
...It is part of how he’s come to be able to understand the human condition so well, I think...
...If I were to say exactly the same thing in personal conversation that I say on stage, people wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear it...
...Marriage is still there...
...Jackie’s a dream to work with because he has an incredibly versatile mind that can go in any direc-tion,” Felder said...
...I say a lot of those things anyway...
...After clawing his way up resorts to small clubs to larg-er clubs, for example, Mason landed a The Ed Sullivan forced to pay those dues all over again when Sullivan preted Mason wiggling his fingers playfully at him as an obscene ges-ture and fired him in 1962...
...So, to me, comedy is not such an elusive art form...
...He paused, snickering to himself before adding, “No, this is not a bad job at all...
...If I were to say exactly the same thing in personal conversation that I say on stage, people wouldn’t be so thrilled to hear it...
...From the stage I make a joke and the same people who I would otherwise so offend are laughing their heads off...
...One of the keys to this essence at this particular moment in human history, to Mason’s mind, is cer-tainly fundamental...
...Sometimes that meant taking the much-heralded, yet-still-infrequently-used road less traveled...
...When I really start to try to fig ure out why I stress this more than that in my act, I’d have to say a lot of it probably does come from the values my father instilled in me...
...In those days, a public denunciation from Sullivan, even if even-tually retracted, was enough to make a performer radioactive...
...The rabbinate was no cure for the stand-up bug, though...
...The essence of humanity...
...No one seems to be challenging the moniker yet, which isn’t a bad full circle for a guy who was credited as simply “Jew #1” rather than “#1 Jew” in Mel Brooks’s History of the World: Part I. 18 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 “The theme of the show is the same as the theme of all my other shows,” Mason explained...
...You could tell a variation of the same marriage jokes today you did a thousand years ago...
...The authors add, “When Likewise, when Mason saw how the enter-was played, the sully himself by joining in...
...I’m just not so self-obsessed that the stage has to be on Broadway...
...The ego trip for me is entertaining people, and I can do that anywhere...
...We [have] never met Jewish men involved in pointless struggles,” Mason and Felder write in their 2007 book Shmucks!, probably the only tome in exis-tence to take on Paris Hilton, Jimmy Carter, Roman Polanski, Doctors Who Keep You Waiting, and Pushy Waiters with equal verve...
...I say a lot of those things anyway...
...The world changes and so limi-tations change,” the comedian rea-soned...
...The televised special won an Emmy, the album a Grammy...
...Okay, so that is differ-ent...
...That does not change...
...ran for two and a half years, earning Mason Tony and Ace awards...
...Mason’s acquired career knowledge includes what it feels like to be pummeled by a brass-knuckle–wearing goon, how to recognize the distinct sound of a hotel room being shot up while standing in it, and how to deal both with countless death threats and a menac-ing bully like Frank Sinatra who doesn’t like some jokes you tell...
...To someone unfamiliar with our society it must seem like Amer-ica’s two biggest problems are going into and getting out of the toilet...
...At a time when Barack Obama, a guy who has about as much right to be president as I have to be an astronaut, is frontrunner for the presidency, we still have people who insist on persisting in the fantasy that there is no real freedom for black people in America, that slavery is about to make a comeback next Thursday and all the rest,” Mason said...
...Becoming a cantor emerged as a possible compro-mise position...
...strangers come over to introduce themselves,” Felder, who fancies Mason a “Jewish Will Rogers,” marveled...
...The man has boundless energy...
...Or it might be about…politics, a subject Mason doesn’t dwell on particularly in his act, but does not shy away from, either...
...You get in a real discussion with him, though, and by the end you’re exhausted...
...If you spend an afternoon walking around New York City with Jackie, you may see fifty complete APRIl 2008 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR 19 “People are just drawn to him...
...In my opinion, what a family finds funny when they sit down at a dinner table to talk about their day has probably not changed fundamentally over the last thousand years...
...It’s true: Art is hard...
...At that time the limit was dirty words...
...He not only says them, he says them with pas-sion...
...You know, you could write 40 books in the time it takes to prepare a two-hour show for Broadway...
...Although young Yacov was clearly a born entertainer yearning for the limelight, Eli Maza insisted his sons continue this long tradition...
...Perhaps at that moment somewhere in the ethereal light of the next world, Eli Maza shook his head in smiling disbelief at his son, the award-win-ning cartoon rabbi...
...Unable to sing in Hebrew, Mason found solace cracking jokes in English at Catskills resorts...
...Felder insists that while his co-conspirator is “completely fearless” when it comes to controversial topics, Mason is also “absolutely devoid of hatred...
...People are just drawn to him...
...You could actually build the bridge to nowhere in the time it takes...
...You could kill a person and get out of jail in twenty years, but if you challenge the wrong politically correct ideal you are finished for good...
...Mason would listen to Jack Benny and Bob Hope on the radio, the sureness that he could add his own twist to what they did gnawing at him...
...For all its hypocrisy and hyperbole, Mason nevertheless finds both beauty and the beast in poli-tics, which he describes alternately as “a piece of poetry that tells the whole story of life in general” and “a microcosm of all the sicknesses of a human being...
...shawn Macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...Jackie Mason, after all, began life as Yacov Moshe Maza, born to a family whose patri-archs as far back as his great-great-grandfather had been rabbis...
...But the list of issues and problems we are not allowed to talk about without losing our place in polite society grows every day...
...But the list of issues and problems we are not allowed to talk about without losing our place in polite society grows every day...
...So after tackling those two, um… pressing issues, will those who attend The Ultimate Jew on closing night be watching Jackie Mason, com-edian extraordinaire, ride off into the sunset...
...Maybe this brazen stubbornness was a part of the cultural heritage of Judaism...
...And Mason, an occa-sional columnist for The American Spectator, makes the most out of this refuge...
...J ackie mason’s frequent collaborator Raoul Felder—a New York City celebrity divorce attorney whose nicknames include “The Lion King of Splitsville” and “Dr...
...The mechan-ics of the jokes change...
...Nevertheless, at age 25 Mason honored his father’s wishes...
...I’m sure the way I talk and the way I think and what I find funny has a lot to do with the spiritu al upbringing I had...
...Take hypocrisy...
...Estranged Love”—tells a story of visiting the set of Mason’s 1989 sitcom Chicken Soup on the day a cast member ground shooting to a halt over some minor noise...
...By shawn Macomber 16 THe AMeRIcAn sPecTAToR APRIl 2008 C “omedy, in general, is a great escape for anyone who wants to com-plain,” Jackie Mason mused in his lilting staccato accent one recent morning...
...You could kill a person and get out of jail in twenty years, but if you challenge the wrong politi-cally correct ideal you are finished for good...
...Co-conspirator Felder told TAS that when a particular issue catches Mason’s attention the com-edian will often send two or three typed pages to his law office—sans paragraph breaks or periods...
...As Mason quipped when Jews for Jesus used his without permission, have the utmost respect for people who practice the Christian faith the fact is, as everyone knows, I am as Jewish as a matzo ball or kosher salami...
...I’d be a jerk and that’s the end of that...
...When you come up in clubs competing with the clanging dishes and people talking and eating you learn to work through much bigger things than this.’ I became aware of the very Jackie had many today simply haven’t...
...You get in a real discussion with him, though, and by the end you’re exhausted...
...I’ll still be on a stage whenever I feel like it,” Mason reassured...
...This is as it should be: Comedy is the last remaining safe harbor in American society for unadulterated free thought...
...The titles of the septuagenarian come dian’s popular one-man Broadway shows and albums bear the sincerity of this mindset out: Much Ado About Everything...
...They open up to him very easily and he engages them very easily without judgment...
...He tells me, ‘She’s upset because somebody hiccupped 200 feet away while she was trying to concentrate...
...The man has boundless energy...
...Even if he did make Caddyshack II...
...There is no theme...
...He’ll get into long conversations with beggars, not in a demeaning way, and discuss with them the character of their lives...
...When I pointed out to Mason that in 1964 Lenny Bruce was arrest-ed on obscenity charges by under-cover police officers for using language in a Greenwich Village club that would be considered prudish by today’s standards, he rejected the premise outright...
Vol. 41 • April 2008 • No. 3
