Comedian Jackie Mason Is Still Really, Really Funny

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

But in an in-depth interview with Tablet Magazine, he also gets serious about Israel, anti-Semitism, and why Italians love him

By David Evanier from a June 2013 interview in Tablet Magazine

I met Jackie Mason for the first time a few months ago at the kosher Great American Health Bar on West 57th Street in Manhattan. My friend Mike Fiorito went up to him and told him a joke. “What kind of a shmuck tells me a joke?” Mason said. I introduced myself and gave him my card. A month later he called me. We’ve been shmoozing together ever since.

Mason looks like his pictures from 20 years ago, with black hair and sad, alert eyes. He is intelligent, youthful, and nimble and strides across the street without looking right or left. Usually, he doesn’t have to. Wherever he goes, he is a conspicuous celebrity. Every time we walk down a Manhattan street together, he is greeted like a rock star by scores of people from all ethnic groups who go crazy at the sight of him. They run up to him and embrace him. Before he was 25, Mason left the hearth in Sheboygan, Wisc., and made his way to the Catskills, where he became an overnight sensation. He has remained a star in a much broader arena ever since.

What does it mean to you to be a Jew?

It means that the chances are you are going to be a more intelligent person, and you’ll have more decency, and you’ll help people whether they deserve it or not. And no matter what crime any person from any denomination commits, somehow you’ll always convince yourself it’s your fault.

Why have you stayed so identifiably Jewish in your accent and your subject matter?

I didn’t emphasize my Jewishness because I wanted to. I just happen to have been raised in a family where everybody happened to talk like this, so why would I talk like somebody else? And it’s not true that my act is about Judaism. It sounds like Judaism, but my act is about all kinds of people, but because I sound so Jewish, people are too stupid to separate the sound from the substance.

How did you become attracted to comedy?

I became attracted to it because I was a rabbi. And I started to tell jokes in my sermons.

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