Jackie Mason, onetime rabbi who became a Broadway standup star, dies

“My ambition all my life was to be a star,” Jackie Mason once said, but few stars had a slower or more roundabout path to fame. He didn’t become a standup comedian until he was about 30, after giving up his original name, Yacov Maza, and his original profession as a rabbi.

The brash edge of chutzpah was always there — Mason’s first comedy album was called “I’m the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet” — but he was as surprised as anyone when his astringent jokes about modern life and Jewish cultural identity finally struck a chord with the wider culture.

He was in his 50s — his exact age was always a matter of conjecture — when he became a sensation with the 1986 Broadway debut of his one-man show “Jackie Mason’s The World According to Me!”

Mason, who was a Tonyand Emmy Award-winner, a best-selling author and had recurring hits on Broadway, died Saturday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.

The death was confirmed by lawyer Raoul Felder, a longtime friend. He did not cite a specific cause.

Mason worked on the Borscht Circuit of Jewish hotels in the Catskill Mountains of New York before becoming a fixture on TV variety shows. In 1964, his career was almost derailed during an appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” a popular variety series. Under a tight schedule, Sullivan had held up two fingers, then one, to signal to Mason the number of minutes remaining for his act.

“I’ve been getting lots of fingers tonight. Here’s a finger for you and a finger for you and a finger for you,” Mason said, jabbing his index finger in the air.

Sullivan thought he was making an obscene gesture with a different finger and reportedly told him, “I will destroy you in show business.”

Mason’s $45,000 contract with Sullivan was canceled, and he had trouble finding work in clubs. He filed a $3 million libel lawsuit before reconciling with Sullivan and returning to his show after two years. Still, the stigma lingered.

“I was suddenly considered obnoxious, arrogant, vulgar, unstable, abnormal,” Mason told the New Yorker in 1988.

When he joked about Frank Sinatra’s marriage to the much-younger actress Mia Farrow, Mason found himself the target of violence. Shots were fired into his hotel room, and an unknown assailant approached him as he sat in a car, punching him through an open window, breaking his nose and warning him to stop making fun of Sinatra.

In the wake of the Sullivan debacle, he continued to search for a spotlight. After seeing a performance in a theater by comedian Dick Shawn, Mason’s manager suggested a similar format.

“Jackie Mason’s The World According to Me!” opened at Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre in December 1986 and was an immediate hit. The performance was similar to what he had done for decades in nightclubs: Mason alone on a stage, telling jokes and nonstop stories that tumbled through his tortured psyche and came out in a Yiddish-inflected New York accent.

The difference was the venue.

“When people saw me in a nightclub, they would laugh their heads off,” Mason told the Chicago Tribune in 1987. “But they would write me off as just another nightclub comedian, which is not of any great artistic significance to them. But when that same person sees you in a legitimate theater, where yesterday he saw Shakespeare and the next day something in French and the day after that Peter O’Toole, he places Jackie Mason in that category and thinks: ‘I must be seeing the same thing; I must be seeing an art form.’ ”

He would toss insults at his audience, like Don Rickles, make jokes about sex that stopped just short of crudeness. In a bit about the absurdity of TV weather forecasters predicting an 80% chance of rain, he asked, “Did anyone ever buy 80 percent of an umbrella?”

Above all, Mason kept returning to the subject that was a lifelong obsession: an exploration of what it meant to be Jewish in America.

“The truth is that in this country, Jews don’t fight, they don’t,” he said in one segment of “The World According to Me!” “They almost fight, they almost fight. Every Jew I know almost killed somebody. They’ll always tell you, ‘If he said one more word!’ ”— pronounced “woid” — “he would have been dead today. I was ready. ‘One more word!’ What that word — nobody knows.”

The effect of Mason’s comedy was heightened by his rapid delivery, vocal modulations and deliberate repetition. One joke rolled into another, building a steady, growing wave of laughter in the audience.