Rant #2,699: Funny, Funny

You probably read that comic Jackie Mason died this past weekend at age 93.
 
He was the last of his generation of comics, Jewish comics who honed their craft in the old Borscht Belt in the Catskill Mountains of New York, which at one time was about the only place that Jews could go on vacation and be themselves.
 
Even driving up to the Catskill Mountains from New York City, Jews had to go in and out of towns that thought they had horns and were emissaries of the devil.
 
My father often spoke about seeing signs as the drove up to the Catskills with his family as a young child stating, “No Dogs or Jews Allowed,” in that order.
 
But getting back to Mason, he was born in the Midwest, but moved with his family to the Lower East Side when he was five years old.
 
His family name was Maza, and he had at least three brothers. My father knew him pretty well as the brother of one of his friends on the Lower East Side.
 
Mason was groomed to be a rabbi, as were all the male children in his house, and at age 25, he was ordained as one, as were all the Maza boys at one point.
 
But Maza got the show business bug from his summers in the Catskills waiting on tables, and although he was an ordained rabbi, he gave up the cloth to venture into standup comedy in the late 1950s.
 
He became a popular attraction on the Borscht Belt circuit with his very ethnic story telling—he was almost a younger version of Myron Cohen—and Ed Sullivan caught wind of him, and he appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
 
During an appearance in 1964, Mason got on Sullivan’s bad side on the national stage. Mason was doing his routine, and Sullivan was hyper sensitive to time during the live show, and from his place offstage, signaled for Mason to “cut” his act.
 
Mason mentioned this right in the middle of his routine—a no no right there—and then when he was forced off, he supposedly gave Sullivan the middle finger right in front of the national audience.
 
Not only would he never appear on the show again, but through the rest of the 1960s and pretty much into the 1980s, he was almost blacklisted for his actions, actions which he denied right from the get go.
 
Mason played in smaller venues, appeared off and on television, but it took him roughly 20 years to become a headliner again, helped on by an appearance in Steve Martin’s “The Jerk,” and later on Caddyshack.

He, like Rodney Dangerfield, had been rediscovered by a younger audience, and both comics went to the heights of their popularity around the time.
 
But it was on Broadway that Mason made his biggest comeback and biggest impact.
 
He had first appeared on Broadway in 1969, but in 1986, his one man show, “The World According To Me,” brought him back to the height of fame.
 
He became a very in-demand comic once again, and he subsequently starred in several other one-man shows, with his popularity rubbing off on the industry, even bringing other Borscht Belt comics to new popularity.
 
Fame was not without its problems, as he was accused of racism when he called then-New York City Mayor David Dinkins a derisive Yiddish name, and he had some other negative press, as he fathered a child out of wedlock and married a women who was about 25 years his junior.
 
And, of course, his comedy, which was heavily influenced by his upbringing and was criticized for dealing heavily with stereotypes, pretty much ran out of gas as the public became more sensitive to such things and forgot how to laugh at themselves.

He was a bitter man, and he even had an off-Broadway play written about him and his nastiness, which featured his own daughter!
 
Mason passed away this past Saturday on the Jewish Sabbath, after a short hospital stay.
 
Personally, I enjoyed Mason and his overly ethnic comedy. And you did not have to be Jewish to laugh, laugh and laugh some more over his stories and anecdotes, because his storytelling, although so Jewish leaning, was also so All-American in scope.

He was an equal opportunity offender, like Don Rickles was, but Rickles' act was pretty much an act; Mason, well you really believed that he meant what he said, however funny, but there was a mean streak through it all.
 
By all reports, he was not the nicest person in the world, and I did try to get in contact with him a few times to ask him if he remembered my father, and that one of his brothers was a very good friend of my dad during the 1930s and 1940s when they all called the Loser East Side home.
 
He never returned any message I sent to him, which to me, means that yes, he did remember my father, he simply did not want to deal with people from that time period in his life, who perhaps knew more about him than the public did.
 
But my father often said that “he knew him when,” so I have to believe that Mason knew and remembered my father pretty well from the old days.
 
Whatever the case, both Mason and my father are gone now, and in that stickball game in heaven, Jackie is going to have to wait his turn how, as he is no better or worse than any of the former Lower East Siders that he has to deal with once again.
 
R.I.P. to one of the last of the great Borscht Belt comics, a guy who grew up exactly where my father grew up, put on his pants the same way that my father did, but somehow, forgot where he came from.
 
Too bad … too bad indeed.