Hailing from a long line of rabbis, Jackie Mason tried out the seminary as a young man. Now a secular Jew, Mason confesses his only “religious practice” is never telling the same joke twice.
By James Giza
Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Jackie Mason and the pope walk into a bar.
The bartender looks at them and says, “So, John Paul, what’ll it be?”
The pope wrinkles his brow and looks up at the ceiling.
“I’ll have a whisky sour,” he finally says.
The bartender nods. Then he looks at Mason.
“And for you, rabbi?”
Mason stares at him.
“How did you know I was a rabbi?” he says.
“Well, you’re here with the pope, aren’t you?” the bartender says.
“That’s right,” says Mason.
“So you must be a religious personage of some sort. And it looks like he’s paying, so you must be a Jew!”
It’s a bad joke, maybe because it’s not really a joke at all. At least, not the rabbi part.
Jackie Mason, the Borscht Belt comedian who has spent a healthy portion of his long career skewering Jews with his Yiddishe shtick, is coming to San Diego on Dec. 13 for a one-night-only standup performance at the Civic Theatre. It’s one stop on the pre-New York tour of “Freshly Squeezed,” his seventh one-man comedy show, which will open on Broadway in March 2005.
But long before he was a big shot on the road all the time telling jokes, Mason was a little pisher on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, growing up in a family full of rabbis.
His father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great grandfather were rabbis. So are his three older brothers. Mason was ordained at 25, but he quit after three years to become a comedian.
“I only did it at that time to please my father because I have three older brothers who are rabbis, and his greatest pride was to have his fourth son become a rabbi,” says Mason, in his trademark thick Old World accent. “It meant so much to him that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him. But I had to live my own life and do as I pleased with my own future.
“In the long run, my father wasn’t too disappointed because as soon as I started to make money, I shared it all with my family and my brothers who never made a living. They couldn’t afford a decent car or a decent home, and I made sure that I bought them everything to make them comfortable. So in a way, even though it wasn’t rewarding to my father in religious terms, there was at least some compensatory advantage that everybody got out of it. And it didn’t make him feel half as bad.”
The rabbinate’s loss has been comedy’s gain.
An insult is to Jackie Mason as a paintbrush is to Henri Matisse or a baseball bat is to Tony Gwynn. At his worst, Mason is rude, offensive and unapologetic. At his best, he’s… rude, offensive and unapologetic.
Every ethnic group has taken a beating from Mason, as have homosexuals, politicians, cab drivers and pretty much every other human being on the planet. So it goes with Mason that you either love him and think he’s a genius, or you hate him and think he’s a monster. And even if you love him, that doesn’t mean he won’t call you a schmuck.
Mason first rose to national prominence in the early 1960s as a regular performer on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He fell into Sullivan’s disfavor, however, as a result of a now infamous live show in 1962 when Sullivan thought Mason gave him the finger, an incident that made Mason a pariah of the comedy world and cast a shadow over his career for more than a decade.
But Mason climbed back to the top. His one-man show “The World According to Me” began a 2 1/2-year run on Broadway in 1986 and earned him a Tony Award. Five more one-man Broadway shows followed, each one a critical and commercial success, each one cementing Mason’s place as one of the top comedians in the business.
At 73, he still loves the stage.
“I love the egomania of hearing laughs and applause when I perform,” says Mason. “The same thing that makes anybody else try to be the life of a party. Everybody needs attention and loves approval and would rather bathe in glory than float around unrecognized and unnoticed. So this is a great, sure way to be the belle of the ball. To be the big man on the block.”
The roots of Mason’s development into that big man go back to his days playing clubs around the country and in the Borscht Belt – the predominantly Jewish resort hotels of the Catskill Mountains.
Milton Berle, George Burns, Buddy Hackett, Henny Youngman. A slew of famous Jewish comedians spent time making stomachs ache in the Borscht Belt, but those looking for nostalgic pining from Mason about that style and era of comedy fading away should expect disappointment. He doesn’t see things that way.
“I think people make that up in their own minds that there’s a difference in the style,” he says. “I don’t see where my approach to comedy is any different than any young guy who happens to be a good comedian. They’re telling jokes just like I am. The only thing that’s different is I look older.
“Bob Hope, his monologue was not that much different before he passed away when he was 95 years old. Was Johnny Carson so different than Jay Leno when he did a monologue? People like to think that
the old-timers are different than the new-timers, it’s a new era, a new type of comedy. I don’t see anything new in it. It’s just accordance of how good you are.”
Beyond the Borscht Belt, Jewish comedians haven’t fared too badly. From Lenny Bruce to Mel Brooks to Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld, Jews have kept the comedy game on lockdown. Mason’s explanation why is a familiar one.
“I think it’s persecution,” he says. “It’s the feeling of being left out of the mainstream of a society. When you’re an outsider, you’re laughing at your plight. You’re always searching for jokes to make fun of the fact that you can’t quite feel like you’re part of the system. It’s like an escape from the feeling of frustration that you have by not belonging.”
Mason’s Jewish pride remains as strong as ever. He still travels to Israel three or four times a year and cares deeply about its survival. But there won’t be any Chanukah candles burning in his New York apartment this month.
“All the values that Judaism has always taught me as a religious Jew, I’m very proud of it and grateful to it,” he says. “But I myself am not a particularly practicing religious man because I’m always on the road. I have no connection even to the family structure because I’m a single guy, and I’m always traveling the universe all by myself.”
Not all of Mason’s recent work, however, has been solo ventures.
He and his friend, the divorce attorney Raoul Lionel Felder, write a column for the Internet edition of The American Spectator and The Washington Times. The columns are decidedly rightwing.
In an August column in The American Spectator, they described the Democratic National Convention as “a mass love-in that had all the sincerity of a hooker’s kiss to her last customer of the night.”
In another column, in reference to national security adviser Richard Clarke, Felder and Mason wrote, “The height of his power came during the Clinton administration when Clinton, too bored or preoccupied inspecting throngs of overweight and under-aged girls, did not attend the morning CIA briefing, as does President Bush, and instead, later in the day received his summary from Clarke. He then had the mornings to sleep late and the rest of the day to chase girls.”
But Mason is far from partisan when it comes to his comedy. He makes merciless fun of both Bush and Kerry in his new act because, as he says, he’s “an equal opportunity abuser.”
“One thing I made up my mind as a comedian is never to show any preference between one side or the other,” says Mason. “Because even though people believe in democracy and they love the fact that we have elections so that everybody can oppose each other and still be happy, the fact really is they love to have it in principle, but in practice they hate you if you’re on the other side.
“When I’m a political columnist it’s one thing, but when I’m a comedian, people want to hear comedy. They don’t want to hear a guy pushing for one side or another. I don’t want to go there with a fraudulent label. I come as a comedian, and as soon as I start talking seriously or recommending anything and making a serious approach to any issue, I’m basically defrauding the public. There’s such a thing as truth in packaging in a supermarket. There should be just as much truth in packaging for a performer.
“Because people have a right to resent it and get their money back. And since I don’t want to give them their money back… I know every Jew would sue me in a second if they had an excuse, so I’m not allowing that to happen by protecting or defending any position from any candidate. By the time I’m finished making fun of both of them, you can bet your life nobody knows what side I’m on.”
You can also bet you won’t hear any repeat jokes in Mason’s new two-hour show. He says he makes it a “religious practice” not to tell any of the same jokes from previous shows.
“I have an obsession about this,” he says. “I have a personal kind of animosity for anybody who tells people the same joke again for new money. If you’re gonna ask me for new money, I better have a new joke. You don’t sell the same shirt twice to the same guy.”
As always, “Freshly Squeezed” will present Mason spouting off on the hot topics of today. Politics, the Atkins diet, same-sex marriage. Mum’s the word on specifics, though. Mason never tells his jokes in interviews.
“Maybe this way,” he says, “I’ll get a customer.”
Freshly Squeezed
When: Monday, Dec. 13, 7 p.m.
Where: Civic Theatre, 202 C St., Downtown
Tickets $29.50-$59.50. For more information, call (619) 570-1100.
For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.