Jackie Mason, the stand-up comedian, one-time rabbi, and occasional actor died on Saturday. Known for his Yiddish lilt and blunt punchlines, Mason swapped synagogues for nightclubs in the 1950s, then became a mainstay on television in the 1960s. He had a career dip until his Tony-winning sensation, The World According to Me, which ran in the late 1980s. It led to his notable voice-over role as Krusty the Clown’s father on The Simpsons, which won him a Primetime Emmy. Mason’s old-school comedy belonged to an earlier era, bringing with it some outdated attitudes and the occasional controversy. He was 93 years old.
Mason was born Yacov Moshe Maza in, of all places, Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 1928. (With all due respect to Sheboyganites, it sounds like he was born funny.) His parents were Jewish immigrants from Minsk, and his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were rabbis. At the age of five, the family moved to Henry Street on New York’s Lower East Side, then a primarily Jewish neighborhood. He trained to be a rabbi, as did his three brothers.
In The World According to Me, he described his transition to comedy as a way of being “more honest to himself.” He would deliver sermons, then start “to tell a few jokes here and there.” He ribbed, “to make it more palatable for myself, and as the jokes were getting better and better, I started to charge a cover and a minimum.”
Jokes aside, he waited until his father passed away before heading to the Catskill Mountains, where predominantly Jewish audiences from New York would spend summers in bungalow colonies (see: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). By the early 1960s, he was bringing his act to television as a guest on The Steve Allen Show and The Perry Como Show. Most notably, he had a recurring spot on the biggest show of the era, The Ed Sullivan Show.
In one notorious incident in 1964, Sullivan, off-camera, held up two fingers as a “wrap it up in two minutes” signal. Mason, however, was cooking and turned it into a bit. “I’m getting a lot of fingers tonight,” he said before pointing fingers back. (“Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you.”) Sullivan interpreted this as an “obscene gesture” and fired him.
This led to Mason filing a defamation lawsuit. While the two eventually mended fences—and Mason appeared on Sullivan’s show five more times—the incident tarnished Mason’s career. He popped up occasionally on the big screen, including as the voice of a robot tailor alongside Myron Cohen in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, the gas station manager in Carl Reiner-Steve Martin collaboration The Jerk, and a persecuted Jew in Mel Brooks’s The History of the World — Part I. But he went back to working clubs for roughly two decades.
His unusual style of comedy eventually found purchase on Broadway in 1986. The World According To Me was essentially a lengthy curmudgeon’s rant, where Mason leaned into his Yiddish accent. Mason would slip in caustic remarks by couching them in preposterous brackets, suggesting he would never, ever want to suggest something like—then he’d say the horrible thing. He’d double back to remark that only a terrible person would laugh. Another technique of his was to drop a heavy philosophical question like, “why is there hatred in the world?” He’d let it settle on the quiet audience, then point to a random person and say: “I’m asking you.”
The show was an unexpected phenomenon, winning him a special Tony Award, a Grammy nomination, and an Emmy for writing when the show was adapted for an HBO special. A short-lived sitcom, Chicken Soup, opposite Lynn Redgrave, aired on ABC in 1989.
In 1991, Mason made his first of 11 voice-over appearances as Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky, Krusty the Clown’s father on The Simpsons. That episode, “Like Father, Like Clown,” which won Mason another Emmy, was based on the classic film, The Jazz Singer, but traded sprayed seltzer for singing. Mason continued doing stand-up in big rooms around the globe and had four more Broadway runs over the years, the most recent being Jackie Mason: Freshly Squeezed in 2005, something of an ironic name, as many of the jokes were recycled from decades past.
Mason’s mouth off-stage earned him some criticism. In 1989, he referred to New York City’s eventual mayor David Dinkins as “a fancy shvartze with a mustache.” The Yiddish word “shvartze” is considered derogatory when used in that context, but Mason claimed the word simply meant “black.” He used the term again in 2009 in reference to President Barack Obama. Toward the end of his life, he would occasionally appear on Fox News, championing Donald Trump.
Mason lived for years in Metropolitan Tower on West 57th Street near Carnegie Hall with his wife Jyll Rosenfeld. It was there, in 2012, that Kaoru Suzuki-McMullen was arrested after attacking Mason in what was called a “jealous rage.” It was later revealed that the two, who both lived in the building, were dating. He was 83, and she was 48. At the time, the New York Post quoted Ginger Reiter, a former Mason girlfriend who claimed to be the mother of his “love child” (a claim Mason denied). She called Mason a sexual “dynamo” and added, “and he’s no Robert Redford.” Mason moved to a $4.1 million unit on Central Park South in 2017.