The ex-rabbi who became a comedy icon

1928–2021

Jackie Mason turned kvetching into a coarse and often savagely funny art form. In a fast, Yiddish-inflected cadence, the stand-up comedian ranted about politics, food, Jewishness, and the indignities of everyday life—including elevator music. “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there?” he quipped. “The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.” Ordained as a rabbi before turning to comedy, Mason refused to disguise his ethnic origins onstage. “I find it hard to be told, as I often used to be, that I was ‘too Jewish,’” he recalled in 2015. “This is like saying to a bear, ‘You have too much fur.’” He sometimes employed crude ethnic shtick, but his sharp-eyed observational humor allowed him to outlast almost every other comedian of his generation. “If I see you make a fool out of yourself,” Mason said, “I owe it to you to point that out to you.”

He was born Yacov Moshe Maza in Sheboygan, Wis., to immigrants from Belarus, said The New York Times. At age 5, he moved with his family to New York City and soon “discovered that his path in life had already been determined.” Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, it was expected that Yacov would become a rabbi. “I knew, from the time I’m 12, I had to plot to get out of this,” he said. He studied at Yeshiva University and worked summer jobs at resorts in New York’s Borscht Belt. Ordained at 25 and “in a state of mounting misery,” he led Jewish congregations in Weldon, N.C., and Latrobe, Pa., and peppered his sermons with jokes. After his father’s death in 1959, Mason embraced comedy full-time.

Jackie Mason

Few stars had a “more roundabout path to fame,” said The Washington Post. An early break got him on The Steve Allen Show in 1961, and he became a regular on variety shows. But during a 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Mason responded to the host’s two-finger wrap-up gesture with what Sullivan thought was the middle finger. Sullivan canceled Mason’s six-show contract and booking agents shunned him. After a 1966 Las Vegas gig in which Mason poked fun at the age difference between newly married Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow—“Frank soaks his dentures and Mia brushes her braces”—shots were fired into his hotel room. For the next two decades, Mason worked the club circuit and struggled to get back into the spotlight.

But a 1986 one-man Broadway show became “an unexpected phenomenon,” said VanityFair.com. That show, The World According to Me!, sold out every performance for more than a year and was adapted into an Emmy-winning HBO special. A series of sequels carried him through the next decade and helped him score a recurring guest spot on The Simpsons as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown. Mason’s “embrace of political incorrectness often landed him in the hot seat,” said NPR .org. In 1989, he used a Yiddish word considered to be a racial slur for Black people while talking about then–New York City mayoral candidate David Dinkins; he used the same word for President Barack Obama in 2009. Mason would shruggingly respond to those he offended by calling himself “an equal-opportunity abuser” who was not superior to those he mocked. “I am definitely a sick egomaniac,” Mason said. “I definitely need the attention.”