Jackie Mason: Much Ado About Everything
Hypocrisy is deadly to comedy: there’s an art to saying somebody’s full of shit without being called full of shit yourself. Woody Allen seemed a wonderful satirist of pompous New York Wallace Shawn-style intellectual windbags until it became clear that he longed for acceptance from the very windbags he was skewering. Eddie Murphy, an astute observer of racial prejudice, severely undermined his own credibility with his virulent homophobic rants, which sold hundreds of thousands of comedy albums in the mid-80s.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Mason–appearing for the next month at Park West in Much Ado About Everything, his latest one-man stand-up and social-satire performance–may be guilty of many things and has probably been accused of more. A bigot? Perhaps, despite the fact that 90 percent of his ethnic humor comes at the expense of his own religion and that his jabs at blacks and Italians are considerably more tame than any jokes you’d hear after the Canadian Club started to flow at a bar mitzvah. Homophobic? To some extent. Mason’s brief, mincing homo impersonation was lame when John Ritter was doing it on Three’s Company 20 years ago, and even though Mason does it to make a point about Clinton’s hypocrisy on gays in the military, it still comes off as tired and cheap. Sexist? Sure. By far the weakest elements of his act are his jaw-droppingly outdated jokes about suburban households in which diamond-sporting, fur-clad wives boss around their meek Jewish husbands.
The prime targets of Mason’s comedy are not generally so safely distant. Instead they’re the status-seeking nouveau riche of the suburbs. They’re the well-heeled professionals of America who attend the opera even though they can’t stand the music (Mason calls the opera house a “bedroom for rich Jews”). They’re the art lovers who hang Picassos in their living rooms even though they don’t have the slightest understanding of them, the pseudoliberals who claim to support civil rights but run for the suburbs the moment a black family moves into the neighborhood, the young assimilated Jews who claim pride in their heritage but clamor for acceptance in the goyish mainstream, the poseurs who pay three bucks for a cup of java at a trendy coffeehouse even though they can’t tell a fancy blend from Sanka. In short, they’re the people who spend $45 to go to Park West and roar with laughter at a vaguely rabbinical sexagenarian telling them they’re full of shit.
Mason’s newest and strongest material comes at the end of the first act, when he sets his satiric sights on the institution that for him embodies the ultimate in bourgeois hypocrisy: Starbucks. To Mason, it’s a “shithouse” where you pay three bucks or more to “drink burnt coffee from a cardboard cup,” you don’t get any refills, and you sit on an uncomfortable stool in a window “like a caged animal” before you get to clean up your own place. “The less you get, the more it costs,” Mason cannily observes, not only confronting the absurd lust for status but quite possibly initiating a downturn in business for the coffee conglomerate.
