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Did you ever notice that Gentiles on vacation are always running and jumping and leaping around?
A Jew on a vacation is looking for a place to sit.
A Jew sees a chair, its a successful vacation.
Jackie Mason was born Yacov Moshe Maza on June 9, 1928.
But Rabbi Maza had another calling: stand-up comedy.
Mason had a distinctive performance style: staccato cadence, jabbing hand gestures, and a thick Yiddish accent.
Mason did a dozen spots for Paar over the next ten months.
Other variety and talk shows followed, includingThe Ed Sullivan Show.
The Ed Sullivan Showwas the premiere TV showcase for comedians and singers of that era.
Masons agents begged him to get speech and elocution lessons to help mitigate his thick Yiddish accent.
Luckily for Mason, in the early 1960s, the public was embracing Americanized Jewishness as never before.
Masons act was a nice fit for the time.
He soon was playing club dates all across the country.
Unfortunately, two events conspired to nearly derail Masons ascending career.
1 hit, House of the Rising Sun).
Teenage rock-and-roll fans were notoriously difficult crowds for stand-ups and comedy teams.
This is where the trouble began.
Mason playfully improvised around that moment, mimicking Sullivan and saying, Getting lots of fingers tonight.
Heres a finger for you and a finger for you and a finger for you.
Mason finally got some nice laughs and left the stage.
Unfortunately for Mason, Sullivan believed he had just been flipped off by the 36-year-old comic.
Sullivan wasnt exactly sure when the CBS News feed had ceased.
This was a comedians nightmare.
In addition to being too Jewish, Mason was now too dirty.
Both sides lawyered up.
Sullivan eventually apologized to Mason and invited him back on the show two years after the incident.
In return, Mason dropped the lawsuit.
But Masons career had somewhat stalled.
The show had 97 previews.
It opened on June 14, 1969.
It closed June 14, 1969.
There was one performance.
The reviews were brutal.
In the 1970s, Mason toiled in the wilderness.
He went from headlining Vegas casinos like the Aladdin to playing second-rate clubs in Miami and New Jersey.
In 1983, Masondeclared bankruptcy.
Then, just three years later, he engineered one of the most spectacular rebounds in stand-up comedy history.
He was inspired by another comic, Dick Shawn, who had successfully done that trick.
In the mid-1970s, Shawn created a show calledThe Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World.
They succeeded in the most spectacular fashion.
And it all happened in just six months.
Neil Simoncalled itthe funniest single night Ive spent in the theater in the last ten years.
Mel Brooks added, Nobody makes me laugh harder.
But this time, it would be entirely different.
Heady stuff for a 58-year-old washed-up mountain comic.
And it didnt stop there.
During awards season, Walter Matthau presented Mason with a special Tony Award.
He called Mason a profound and hilarious chronicler of our life and times.
Over the next 20 years, Mason rode the juice of his unlikely Broadway triumph.
He successfully toured the U.S., Canada, England, Israel, and South Africa.
He took home an Emmy Award in 1992 for his voice work on the show.
But Masons home was the Broadway stage, and he kept returning until he ran out of jokes.
The last installment, in 2005, was calledJackie Mason: Freshly Squeezed Just One Jew Talking.
A lot of his routines were sharpened during decades of sweating it out in dead-end nightclubs.
Perhaps no one summed up Masons wild and improbable career like the man himself.
And now Im art.
