When I was growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago, there were basically two comedians whom everyone watched.
One was Eddie Murphy, …
When I was growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago, there were basically two comedians whom everyone watched. One was Eddie Murphy, whose 1987 comedy special, Raw, was an instant hit. The other was Jackie Mason, whom the New York Times credits for keeping “the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had closed,” but whose comedy was far edgier and more daring than that quaint, nostalgic description allows. Mason passed away this weekend at the age of 93, but remained active and outspoken despite his age. He had, after all, been “rediscovered” at the end of a career that was presumed to have died in the era of black-and-white television. By then, he was too hardened by experience to care what people thought. That made his comedy subversive, and hilarious. In Mason’s Emmy-winning special, The World According to Me!, Mason skewered political figures who were considered almost untouchable — at least on the left — even then. He did memorable, slapstick impressions of Teddy Kennedy, for example, and Jesse Jackson (“I don’t fly, I don’t go, I don’t die, I don’t know!”).
