Shalom, Jackie!
Comic dead at 93
Famed Borscht Belt comedian Jackie Mason, who rose from a modest childhood on the Lower East Side to become one of the most famous funnymen of all time, died Saturday. He was 93.
Mason died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, with wife Jyll and a few friends by his side, longtime pal and lawyer Raoul Felder told The Post.
There will be a small, private funeral service Sunday in New York, said Felder, who declined to name the location. A larger, public memorial service is expected at a later date, the lawyer noted.
“We shall never see his like again. This was a mold that was broken,” an emotional Felder said. “We’re going to miss him.”
The sharp-tongued, legendarily brash Mason was born in Sheboygan, Wis., to immigrant parents from Belarus. The family moved to Manhattan when little Yacov Moshe Maza, as he was then known, was just 5, according to The New York Times, which first reported his death.
He graduated City College and by 25 became an ordained rabbi.
Mason — who once said he turned to comedy after his father died because “somebody in the family had to make a living” — was frequently stopped on the street wherever he went, and always took the time to listen, Felder said.
“He used to listen to all the waiters’ complaints,” recalled Felder, who wrote a series of books with Mason.
Jackie was even a favorite comedian of the Queen Mother and Prince Charles.
Mason caused a stir after one performance for the Queen Mother, when he refused to wait afterward and bow to her, recalled Felder, who described Mason as “very smart and very opinionated.”
“At the end the whole cast lined up and waited and bowed when a member of royalty came over. Jackie was having none of this,” Felder said. “He just left. It became a big story — he had walked out on the Queen Mum. So he invented a story that he couldn’t stay there anymore because he was sick.”
Mason started his career in New York nightclubs, and by the 1960s regularly appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” where he was once banned after the host mistakenly believed Mason gave him the middle finger during an interruption in a telecast.
His one-man show, “The World According to Me!” made him a Tony-winning Broadway star.
When he passed, the attending doctors and nurses wept. “They were all fans of his. They were all crying,” Felder said. “He was like a shooting star that comes every 100 years.”