Once upon a time, Jackie Mason was a very funny performer who also had a gift for getting into silly public spats. Based on what I've seen of him lately, he seems to have gotten worse at the first skill and better at the second. You'd think a guy who was once ordained as a rabbi would do a little better job of anger management. His latest tiff has to do with a comedian who was supposed to open for him at a Chicago gig. Then the comedian was cancelled, ostensibly only because he was self-identified as a Palestinian. Mason claims it was the decision of the club, Zanies, struggling to avert a massive protest and keep the doors open.
My friend Jay Zilber has spent a little time studying all the press accounts of the squabble and come to some interesting and, I think, largely correct deductions. Basically, as Jay says here, everyone involved misbehaved and the press accounts have taken a complicated story and reduced it to a simple, inaccurate summary. The Palestinian comic, Ray Hanania, seems to be way too interested in promoting his dismissal for publicity purposes. On the other hand, Jackie Mason's side botched this up and, at least on Crossfire, Mason was insulting people for interpreting the situation exactly the way his own publicist originally tried to spin it. Jay reveals many details I did not hear or read about before, most notably that Hanania was not merely Mason's one-shot opening act but was actually booked as the (solo) headliner at the comedy club for the whole weekend, and was only cancelled as Mason's opener. That changes the picture…a lot.
The one place I might disagree with Jay is when he says, "Mason — having obviously never been blindsided by a publicity stunt like this — elicits a small amount of sympathy from me." Not from me. I think Jackie Mason has spent most of his career working the other side of this racket, rushing to the press to claim victimization (and, often, discrimination) every time he's suffered any kind of setback anywhere. He may not have had it done to him before but he certainly knows the drill.