Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Jackie Mason, 93, Dies; Turned Kvetching Into Comedy Gold

He kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had closed and eventually brought it, triumphantly, to Broadway.

Jackie Mason in 2003 in the Broadway musical revue “Laughing Room Only.” He appeared on Broadway several times, mostly in one-man shows.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Jackie Mason, whose staccato, arm-waving delivery and thick Yiddish accent kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had shut their doors, and whose career reached new heights in the 1980s with a series of one-man shows on Broadway, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 93.

His death, at Mount Sinai Hospital, was confirmed by the lawyer Raoul Felder, a longtime friend.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.

“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”

The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

The humor was punchy, down-to-earth and emphatically Jewish: His last one-man show in New York, in 2008, was titled “The Ultimate Jew.” A former rabbi from a long line of rabbis, Mr. Mason made comic capital as a Jew feeling his way — sometimes nervously, sometimes pugnaciously — through a perplexing gentile world.

“Every time I see a contradiction or hypocrisy in somebody’s behavior,” he once told The Wall Street Journal, “I think of the Talmud and build the joke from there.”

Describing his comic style to The New York Times in 1988, he said, “My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you.”

“He’s not better than you, he’s just another guy,” he added. “I see life with love — I’m your brother up there — but if I see you make a fool out of yourself, I owe it to you to point that out to you.”

He was born Yacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wis., on June 9, 1928, to immigrants from Belarus. (Some sources give the year as 1931.) When he was 5, his father, Eli, an Orthodox rabbi, and his mother, Bella (Gitlin) Maza, moved the family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Yacov discovered that his path in life had already been determined. Not only his father, but his grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfathers had all been rabbis. His three older brothers became rabbis.

“It was unheard-of to think of anything else,” Mr. Mason said. “But I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this, because this is not my calling.”

Image
After Mr. Mason’s career fell into the doldrums, he found success with a series of one-man shows. “The World According to Me!,” opened on Broadway in 1986 and ran for two years.Credit...Associated Press

After earning a degree from City College, he pursued rabbinical studies at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, a yeshiva in Manhattan, and was ordained. In a state of mounting misery, he tended to congregations in Weldon, N.C., and Latrobe, Pa., unhappy in his profession but unwilling to disappoint his father.

Hedging his bets, he had begun working summers in the Catskills, where he wrote comic monologues and appeared onstage at every opportunity. This, he decided, was his true calling, and after his father’s death in 1959 he felt free to pursue it in earnest, with a new name.

He struggled at first, playing the Catskills and, with little success, obscure clubs in New York and Miami. Plagued by guilt, he underwent psychoanalysis, which did not solve his problems but did provide him with good comic material.

Nevertheless, he found it hard to break into the nightclub circuit in New York — in part, he claimed, because his act made Jewish audiences uncomfortable. “My accent reminds them of a background they’re trying to forget,” he said.

While performing at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1960, he caught the attention of his fellow comedian Jan Murray, who recommended him to the television personality Steve Allen. Two appearances in two weeks on “The Steve Allen Show” led to bookings at the Copacabana and the Blue Angel in New York.

Mr. Mason’s career was off and running. He became a regular on the top television variety shows, recorded two albums for the Verve label — “I Am the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet” and “I Want to Leave You With the Words of a Great Comedian” — and wrote a book, “My Son the Candidate.”

Image
Mr. Mason hosted the TV personality Morton Downey Jr. during a live radio broadcast in 1988 from Golden’s Restaurant on West 51st Street in New York.Credit...Frankie Ziths/Associated Press

After many appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”

Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.

The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”

“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

His career went into a slump, punctuated by bizarre instances of bad luck. In Las Vegas in 1966, after he made a few ill-considered remarks about Frank Sinatra’s recent marriage to the much younger Mia Farrow (“Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces,” one joke went), an unidentified gunman fired a .22 pistol into his hotel room.

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

Rebuffed, Mr. Mason set about rebuilding his career with guest appearances on television. His new manager, Jyll Rosenfeld, convinced that the old borscht belt comics were ripe for a comeback, encouraged him to bring his act to the theater as a one-man show.

After attracting celebrity audiences in Los Angeles, that show, “The World According to Me!,” opened on Broadway in December 1986 and ran for two years. It earned Mr. Mason a special Tony Award in 1987, as well as an Emmy for writing after HBO aired an abridged version in 1988.

“I didn’t think it would work,” Mr. Mason said. “But people, when they come into a theater, see you in a whole new light. It’s like taking a picture from a kitchen and hanging it in a museum.”

In 1991 Mr. Mason married Ms. Rosenfeld, who survives him. He is also survived by a daughter, the comedian Sheba Mason, from a relationship with Ginger Reiter in the 1970s and ’80s; a brother, Rabbi Gabriel Maza; and a sister, Gail Schulman.

“The World According to Me!” generated a series of sequels — “Politically Incorrect,” “Love Thy Neighbor,” “Prune Danish” and others — which carried Mr. Mason through the 1990s and into the new millennium.

He published an autobiography, “Jackie, Oy!” (written with Ken Gross), in 1988. He also found a new sideline as an opinionated political commentator on talk radio. In the 2016 presidential campaign, he was one of the few well-known entertainers to support Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Mason’s forays into political commentary caused him trouble. He was reported to have used a Yiddish word considered to be a racial slur in talking about David N. Dinkins, the Black mayoral candidate, during a luncheon with Newsweek reporters in 1989. Mr. Mason was a campaigner for Mr. Dinkins’s opponent, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who also attended the luncheon. Mr. Giuliani said the incident had been blown out of proportion but nevertheless dismissed Mr. Mason from the campaign. Mr. Mason at first refused to apologize but did so later.

He drew attention for using the same word regarding President Barack Obama during a performance in 2009.

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

“I’ve been doing this for a hundred thousand years, but it’s like I was born last Thursday,” Mr. Mason once said of his career turnaround. “They see me as today’s comedian. Thank God I stunk for such a long time and was invisible, so I could be discovered.”

Michael Levenson contributed reporting.

A correction was made on 
July 26, 2021

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the circumstances in which Mr. Mason was reported to have used a Yiddish word, considered to be a racial slur, in talking about David N. Dinkins, at the time a Black candidate for mayor of New York City. The comment, in 1989, came during a luncheon with Newsweek reporters, not during a banquet at the Plaza hotel in Manhattan.

A correction was made on 
July 27, 2021

An earlier version of this obituary misstated where Mr. Mason pursued rabbinical studies; it was at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem of America, a yeshiva in Manhattan, not Yeshiva University. The earlier version also overstated the number of times that Mr. Mason appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" before his contract with it was canceled after Mr. Mason made what Mr. Sullivan regarded as an obscene gesture onstage; he had appeared on the show about 20 times before then, not "dozens of times." And the earlier version referred incorrectly to Mr. Mason's two younger sisters; it was not the case that they married rabbis.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Jackie Mason, 93, Who Transformed Kvetching Into a Comedic Gold Mine. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT