AS a rule, Broadway performers don’t tangle with critics.
They take their lumps, then salve their wounds in private.
Not so Jackie Mason.
Here’s what the comedian has to say about Bruce Weber, second-string hatchet man on The New York Times:
“He’s a sick bastard. He’s insane. He doesn’t like me because he thinks I’m a conservative. He thinks I’m a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He thinks I’m a Nazi. Me, a little Jew from the Roosevelt era!”
Mason was taken aback by Weber’s review last week of his new show, “Prune Danish,” at the Royale.
It was an especially bitter attack that called the show mean-spirited and “idiotically, hypocritically reactionary.”
It accused Mason of perpetuating “disparaging” stereotypes, and knifed him for being jingoistic and intolerant.
Worst of all, it said much of Mason’s material “isn’t funny.”
The review stood out – it was much talked about around Broadway last week – because nearly all the other notices were glowing, as they usually are for Mason’s shows.
The other critics seemed to take Mason for what he is: a satirist who makes fun of everybody – Bush, Clinton, Gentiles, Jews, Indians, the French (he says they “stink”).
Weber, though, objected to what he perceived to be a “strain of conservative soap-box language” in Mason’s show.
And Mason thinks Weber deliberately misrepresented the comic’s jokes to make him sound like a racist right-winger.
For instance, Weber took Mason to task for “vehemently” advocating a new amendment to ban flag burning.
But Mason says that was not at all what he was doing.
He was simply setting up a joke – “a joke I slipped in that’s so old, I’m embarrassed I used it.”
It goes like this: “They want a Constitutional amendment to stop the burning of the American flag. And they’re 100 percent right. In this country, you can burn the flag, but you can’t tear the tag off a mattress.”
Mason points out that the line “they’re 100 percent right” has to be there to get the laugh. It is, he says, the build-up to the punch line.
“And because of this, he thinks I’m the greatest threat to freedom of speech in this country?” Mason wonders.
A joke about how all the Gentiles in the audience will be drunk within an hour of leaving the show also got Weber’s knickers in a knot.
He called it “an ad hominem insult and the perpetuation of a disparaging stereotype.”
“Is there a Gentile in the world who would be insulted by that joke?” asks Mason. “I’ll pay [Weber] $1,000 if he can find one Gentile who says, ‘I can’t stand Jackie Mason because he says I drink.’ “
“Every joke depends on a stereotype,” the comedian adds. “You have to exaggerate something in order to make fun of it.”
For example, Mason’s crack about Indian doctors – “I hope you never get an Indian doctor. Cab driver? Perfect.” – which Weber called “nasty and diminishing.”
“You exaggerate the stereotype to get the laugh,” says Mason. “But if you make a literal translation of the joke – which Weber does in his review – you turn it into hate.
“Can you imagine this guy? This sick bastard thinks I hate Indians. Who hates Indians? You take the worst Ku Klux Klansman, and no matter who he has on his list, I guarantee you, it’s not an Indian.”
STICKS AND STONES
Weber calls Mason:
Reactionary
Jingoistic
Intolerant
Mason calls Weber:
Insane
Sick bastard
Vicious hater of Jackie Mason