Variety shows flourished on American television when I was a kid, and thanks to their popularity we learned that most comedians were Jewish. Think of Myron Cohen, Ben Blue and Jack E. Leonard, among others. A greenhorn accent laced with Yiddishisms became the much-envied language of comedy. We were Ohio goyim trying to sound like Borscht Belt comics. The funniest of all was Jackie Mason, who died Saturday at age ninety-three. A former cantor and rabbi, he was born Yacov Moshe Hakohen Maza in Sheboygan, Wisc. – a fellow Midwesterner. Even his birthplace sounded funny.
When Mason’s one-man show, The World According
to Me!, was a hit on Broadway, Whitney Balliett profiled him for The New
Yorker. “The Casualness of It” was published on September 19, 1988, and
later collected in Balliett’s New York Voices (University Press of
Mississippi, 2006). As with his profiles of jazz musicians, much of the Mason
piece is dialogue by his subject. “Mason rarely stops talking,” he writes.
Balliett describes Mason’s show:
“It is contagious rampaging Surrealism. It
immediately lifts his show from its purported level of Catskills comedy (which
it has never been anyway) to that giddy plane where W.C. Fields and the Marx
Brothers sport.”
When I’ve been working for hours at the keyboard,
my customary break is not music but clips of funny men doing their job, most
often Don Rickles, Jonathan Winters (not a Jew) and Mason. Here’s how Balliett
closes his profile, with Mason talking:
“I’m not a fly-by-night character. My mind is too
active. It has too much curiosity, too much concern about the world. My outlook
on life will always make me replenish my material. I’m totally unaware of
retiring. You don’t see ninety-year-old bricklayers and plumbers. But you see ninety-year-old
comedians.”
2 comments:
I went backstage to interview Jackie Mason on Broadway in 1989. Eartha Kitt was also there, paying a visit. "Pay no attention to her," Mason ordered. "I'm the star." Mason's manager was also there. She was a shrewd-looking woman who looked on with a faint smile. Halfway through our conversation, the phone rang. The manager picked it up. "It's the box office," she said, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. "Jack Benny's [adopted] daughter is here."
"What does she want?" from Mason.
"Comp tickets."
Mason thought for a moment and frowned. "No."
As an interview subject, Mason was charming and hilarious. His talk had the same hypnotic rhythm in private as on stage. But when I heard the news of his death, what came back most vividly was wonder at the fact that I had actually once met Eartha Kitt, and that I had been witness, at second hand, to a rebuff of the daughter of one of my great heroes, Jack Benny. Perhaps Mason had some ancient grudge against Benny - Mason was known to hold a few of those.
Mason was once assaulted by some goons, acting at the behest of Frank Sinatra, whom Mason had offended with a joke. (Not everyone had Don Rickles' right of taking free shots at the Chairman.) All of which is an excuse for sharing my favorite joke, which can be used by anyone and always gets a laugh:
You know, Frank Sinatra once saved my life. He said, "That's enough, fellas."
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