Oh yes, he’s the great offender

Let’s hear it once more of the old school performers: Mel Brooks, Leslie Nielsen, Woody Allen…and Jackie Mason. The veteran New York comic is one of the last men standing from that generation of Jewish comedians who took the entertainment world by storm throughout the sixties and seventies. On records such as Politically Incorrect, the perennially cantankerous Mason airs his hilariously corrosive views on such hot-potato topics as race relations, religion, sex, OJ Simpson and the increasingly narrow differences between the GOP and the Kerry/Edwards brand of marshmallow liberalism.

It’s an incendiary cocktail of subject matter for sure, and Mason, like some comedic forefather of Brian De Palma or Quentin Tarantino, has certainly shipped his fair share of criticism from all sides of the political divide down through the years. So let’s get right down to it - do the PC-Oprah brigade have too much of a stranglehold on mainstream American culture?
“Well, it’s not my main objection in life,” considers the former Rabbi, speaking down the line from his New York home. “I mean, I’m not so offended and infuriated by that as I am by the preposterous war that’s going on right now, which is taking the lives of twenty year old kids every day for reasons that nobody can figure out.
“You’ve got these Republicans completely refuting all suggestions that the situation in Iraq bears any comparison to Vietnam, despite the fact that (a) we’ve just deposed a dictator we armed in the first place, (b) the situation in Iraq is currently an absolute mess (c) we’ve done a first class job of alienating a significant proportion of an entire region, on this occasion the Middle East, and (d) both sides have got young men coming home in body bags. But we’re destroying a country to advance the cause of civilisation, so I guess that makes it okay. Honestly, some times in this country I feel like I’m living in an insane asylum.”
In a vintage Mason-ian change of tack, when I quiz Jackie on his views on US equality lobbies, he switches from hardcore anti-establishment invective to a more, well, politically incorrect mode of thought, the general tenor of which is unlikely to see him invited on Dr. Phil any time soon.
“You know, I don’t think normal people see any prejudice in what I do,” states Jackie. “I think the only people who see prejudice in my jokes are people who have some kind of emotional problem. They feel compelled to prove that they’re humanitarians saving people from a Jew like me. If I make the slightest reference to black people, immediately there’s five thousand Jewish organisations that find it offensive, because they have to prove that they are flawless altruists helping black people advance in life. They make my joke into a big problem, they amplify a gag into a crusade against black people, because they’re very sick and they need a cause to align themselves with. I mean, there’s a certain type of activist, and they don’t like to have their megaphones and placards lying idle, put it that way.”
Certainly, over the past forty years, Mason’s relationship with controversy has been roughly equivalent to that of the X-Men’s Magneto with the metallic elements. In the sixties, he found himself excommunicated from The Ed Sullivan Show after the programme’s venerable host - as Mason’s PR blurb rather circumspectly puts it - “misinterpreted” one of the comedian’s hand gestures during a performance on the show. What exactly were the circumstances of Mason’s and Sullivan’s imbroglio?
“Well, at the time, it felt like that incident had become the most celebrated affair in the history of entertainment,” reflects Jackie. “The next day, I had calls from all over the world; from Tokyo, from Africa, the sub-continent, everywhere. Wars could have broken out, the Kremlin could have authorised the dropping of the Bomb on Poughkeepsie, but all anyone would have wanted to talk about was the Jackie Mason incident on The Ed Sullivan Show.
“At the time, the show went out live. On the night I performed, President Johnson was about to come on air to address the nation, and Ed Sullivan was very nervous about this, so he started to give me hand gestures to make sure I got off on time. He started to really distract the crowd, and I was losing their attention, so to make sure no one at home thought I was dying onstage, I started to make fun of his hand movements to try and win back the studio audience.
“Now, it worked, people started to laugh, but afterwards Ed Sullivan was really pissed off with me because he thought I had been giving him the finger and basically saying ‘Fuck You’, which wasn’t the case at all. But it caused absolute uproar - I got calls from all over the world from people looking for me to talk about it; Johnny Carson and Red Skelton starting doing jokes about it on their shows; it was all over the newspapers. The net result was that I didn’t work in television again for twenty years.”
However, after finally hitting his stride again in the mid-eighties, Mason has gone from strength to strength, earning admiring notices from the likes of Woody Allen (“we run into each in New York about once every three years, and stand there and compliment each for other about twenty minutes, then we go our separate ways again”), and Carl Reiner and Steve Martin, who famously offered him the part of the garage owner in the cult classic, The Jerk. How long does Jackie think he’ll continue to perform comedy?
“I’ll keep working as long as my mouth can keep my moving, my legs can keep standing and people like you keep calling,” he answers. “The point is not to focus on the final destination, but just to enjoy the journey.”

Jackie Mason plays Vicar St in Dublin on July 1 & 2