Rabbi-turned-stand-up-comic Jackie Mason has died at the age of 93. He had a strange career — up and down, up and down — full of fights and feuds and wacky business ideas that crashed and burned. But at the core of it all was a really great act. In the mid-eighties, he had a major "up" when he mounted a stage production on Broadway and elsewhere called The World According To Me. It was basically just him on a stage doing the best of all the material he'd been doing on stage the previous thirty years and it was hysterical.
I took my father to see it in Los Angeles and you would not believe how funny Mason was. He followed it with a series of other shows, some of which I saw. But the first show was kind of like "The Best of Jackie Mason" and the others were more like "The Rest of Jackie Mason" and not very good. For a time, he kept turning up in and around Broadway with new productions. When some show closed and the theater would otherwise have been dark for a few months, Mason would run in and rent the place for bargain rates. Then he'd stand outside the theater for much of the day, chatting with tourists and persuading them to buy tickets to his show.
For a long time, I think I saw him somewhere on every trip I made to Manhattan. He'd either be outside the theater where his latest show was playing or he'd be sitting in the Carnegie Delicatessen, holding court and telling people to go buy tickets to his current show or the next one. Some of the shows ran quite a long time but in 2003, he produced a musical comedy and here's what I wrote then…
As we predicted here, Jackie Mason's new Broadway show is closing in a hurry. It opened on November 19 and the last performance is November 30. Reviews ranged from bad to really bad. William Stevenson over at Broadway.com, for instance, wrote: "Charging Broadway prices for this comic catastrophe is truly criminal. It's only worth paying if you want to be able to say you've seen the worst musical comedy on Broadway in recent memory." For some reason, when I came across that, I had a mental image of Mason reading the notice and saying, "Well, it could have been worse…"
There are all sorts of stories about Jackie Mason…feuding with Frank Sinatra, feuding with Ed Sullivan, feuding with reporters who wrote about the field of comedy and didn't give him what he felt was his due. He was perpetually at the center of trouble. For a while, he was rabidly right-wing and in 2009, I wrote this here…
Once in the Carnegie, though he was several tables away, I had to suffer through an extended monologue about how it was a foregone conclusion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were heading for prison. There was so much evidence, in fact, that they were already secretly plea-bargaining for reduced sentences. Shortly after that, Hillary became the junior senator from New York, which I guess was part of the plea bargain. On that same trip, a "friend" took me to see Mason's then-current Broadway offering…and I put "friend" in quotes because real friends just don't do things like that to you. I once loved seeing Jackie Mason on stage but that night, his humor was about as sharp as his political reporting.
Two other things I want to say about him before I go: Back in 2013, my cousin David did a really good interview with Mason and you can read it here.
Also, if you ever come across the comedy record at the top of this post, get it. It's solid evidence that Jackie Mason was once a great, great stand-up. And if any of it seems familiar to you from other places, that may be because he was one of those comedians that a lot of other comedians stole from. I'll even give you what's probably an example here…
This is a brief audio link from that record, I'm the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet. It came out in 1962 and this was part of his opening…
And here's a clip from the opening of Don Adams…Live?, a comedy record that the star of Get Smart recorded in Las Vegas in 1967…
I can't guarantee that Jackie Mason didn't "borrow" the joke from somewhere else. But I suspect Adams got it from Mason's act — and probably that record. Mason was so good that other comics couldn't resist helping himself to his material. It wouldn't surprise me if more did now because a lot of it was timeless and he's no longer around to object.