THEATER REVIEW : A ‘Politically Incorrect’ Jackie Mason Gets Even : The angry ‘equal opportunity offender’ returns on a soapbox to settle some scores.
NEW YORK — We are supposed to have feelings about Jackie Mason. Big-time feelings. We’re meant to be offended by his bigotry, or to squeal “can-he-get-away-with-that?†guilty laughs at his stereotypes, or--more noble at Broadway prices--to embrace his honesty as a tonic to purge our hypocritical times with ruthless candor.
Even the title of his newest Broadway show, “Jackie Mason: Politically Incorrect,†is chosen to dunk our pigtails in the inkwells of self-righteousness. Dare to take issue with the truth of some observations, or find them generally more angry and less fresh than in his previous two shows and you risk sounding like a member of the thought police, an enemy of free speech, one of those “yentas†or “Nazi bastards†to whom he makes us feel superior for a couple of hours at the Golden Theater.
Bolder still, we will admit not feeling much about Mason at all. He does what he does again, much as he did to enormous surprise and giddy delight with “The World According to Me†in 1986, and again to less surprise and a bit more uneasy delight with “Jackie Mason: Brand New†three years later.
He still has those great antennae for absurdities, for the foolishness in phone-machine messages that, at this late date, instruct callers to leave their numbers after the beep (“What, they’re going to leave a plate of soup?â€), or the environmental sham of separating tuna-fish cans while ignoring emission standards. And he still has his double-breasted bantam strut and his rabbinical jazz-riff rhythms, judiciously revved, that pile funny-sounding yiddishisms on top of one another with the infectious incongruity of a davening rapper with adenoids.
But Mason is angry this time. More than just deflating some genuine excesses suggested by his title, he uses the “politically incorrect†bravado to settle personal scores and support a soapbox. His pumpkin face turns dangerously red about the “phony bastard†in the White House. “Nobody lies as good as Clinton,†says the comedian, who devotes most of the second act to rage against the President, screaming “fraud†about broken campaign promises on taxes, Haitians and Bosnia. “Since when have human beings dying,†he asks, red turning to purple, not been in “our vital interest?â€
We celebrate the humanitarian generosity, but then he knocks Janet Reno for not trying to look sexy, and moments earlier, he had solved the entire sticky issue of affirmative action with this question and answer: “How come they don’t blame black people because there are no Chinese tap dancers? Chinese don’t want to be tap dancers. They want to press shirts.â€
Mason prides himself on being an “equal opportunity offender,†but, more than ever, his indignation is extremely selective. There’s a difference between saying Jews always feel guilty for everything they didn’t do and saying Indian taxi drivers smell bad. It’s one thing to say Jews don’t like violence (“Jews become dentists because Gentiles play hockeyâ€), another to neglect entirely the bloody little business on the West Bank.
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Mason still knows how to work an audience and weave outlandish bits brilliantly into the benign ones. In the four years since his last show here, however, he has been bounced from Rudolph Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign for the “fancy schvartzer with a mustache†remark about David Dinkins and, last month, was condemned by the Anti-Defamation League for being a racist.
So there’s a chip on his shoulder these days that, when he digs deeper than Bobbitt-Harding-Menendez for material, puts an unpleasant defensive spin on the observations. We laugh, sure, and marvel at a mind that asks why, when there is more violence in literature than on TV, we’re not scared of people leaving the library.
But we can’t ignore the crack already reprinted in interviews with Mason as a proud example of his fearless wit against the tyranny of hyper-sensitivity. Jumping off a routine about the judge who let HIV-positive Haitians leave Guantanamo for the U.S., he jokes “If you have AIDS, you can come into this country. If you have fruit, you can’t. If you want to bring fruit into this country, give it to someone with AIDS.†Cute.
Trouble is, this country bans HIV-positive foreigners, except for the 10-day waiver for the Gay Games in June and except for Haitians held for 20 months without representation and adequate medical care. There’s a big difference between being politically incorrect and legally incorrect. Call me a “yenta Nazi bastard,†but I noticed.
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