Jackie Mason obituary

The Guardian (UK) ^ | June 25 2022 | Jonathan Margolis

[texas booster]

During the course of his six-decade career, Jackie Mason was declared one of the greatest comedians of all time, by Mel Brooks; played hundreds of sellout shows, on Broadway and in London; won a Tony, an Emmy and was even nominated for a Grammy; and performed for the Queen and the Queen Mother. He also had career-damaging feuds with the TV host Ed Sullivan and the singer Frank Sinatra, the second of which would end with Mason’s Las Vegas hotel room being strafed with bullets.

Mason, who has died aged 93, was a pioneer of a modern, personalised form of comedy. Much of his material focused on the differences between Jews and Gentiles, and he seemed to delight in teetering on the edge of racism and – oddly, for a man who called himself “the ultimate Jew” – antisemitism. The Guardian writer Jonathan Freedland, after meeting Mason in 1998, drew parallels between the American and the equally provocative Bernard Manning, who was part-Jewish.

He was born Yacov to Jewish immigrant parents from Belarus, Bella (nee Gitlin) and Eli Maza, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, in 1934. Or, as he sometimes said, 1931. Or 1936; he was famously inconsistent and contradictory about personal matters he regarded as trivial – such as his age, and even whether he was married or not. In his 1988 autobiography, Jackie Oy!, he says that he was born “in the fourth year of the 1930s”, though when his death was announced his friend the lawyer Raoul Felder confirmed the year as 1928. The family moved to New York when Mason was two, or five, according to his own varying accounts. But it was early enough to ensure that he grew up with the thick Brooklyn accent that became his trademark.

[Conservative4Life]

He was great, I loved his character in ‘The Jerk’ RIP

[Albion Wilde]