Ex-rabbi Mason, comic of amused outrage, dies
NEW YORK — Jackie Mason, a rabbi-turned-comedian whose feisty brand of stand-up comedy led him to Catskills nightclubs, West Coast talk shows and Broadway stages, has died. He was 93.
Mason died Saturday evening at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan after being hospitalized for about two weeks, celebrity lawyer Raoul Felder said.
The irascible Mason was known for his sharp wit and piercing social commentary, often about being Jewish, men and women, and his own inadequacies. His typical style was amused outrage.
“Eighty percent of married men cheat in America. The rest cheat in Europe,” he joked. Another Mason line was: “Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows, marriage does.” About himself, he said: “I was so self-conscious. Every time football players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.”
His death was mourned far and wide, from fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who called him “one of the best,” to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, who hailed Mason as “irreverent, iconoclastic, funny, smart and a great American patriot.” Actor Henry Winkler tweeted: “Now you get to make heaven laugh.”
Mason called himself an observer who watched people and learned. He said he got his jokes from those observations and then tried them out on friends. “I’d rather make a fool of myself in front of two people for nothing than a thousand people who paid for a ticket,” he once said.
He was able to articulate the average Joe’s anger, making the indignities of life seem funny and maybe just a little bit more bearable.
“I very rarely write anything down. I just think about life a lot and try to put it into phrases that will get a joke,” he said. “I never do a joke that has a point that I don’t believe in. To me, the message and the joke is the same.”