Jackie Mason: Unplugged, Unstoppable

Trying to have a conversation with Jackie Mason is roughly the equivalent of sticking out your foot to stop a runaway train. In the course of a two-hour lunch, the comic compares President Clinton to Adolf Hitler, insists his Jewish vs. Gentile world view is as relevant today as it ever was, and calls you a “sick bastard” any time you beg to disagree.

Mason is in the midst of a 10-day run at the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard that continues through June 28, and he is working out material for his sixth one-man show, set to open this fall in London. The club shows promise new jokes, but for Mason’s audience it hardly seems to matter; the laughs come, as they always have, from his inflection and remarkable timing, from the way he seems to scat-sing his Yiddishisms. Who knows if this show is called “Love Thy Neighbor” or “Politically Incorrect” or “Much Ado About Everything”--think of it as “Jackie 6.”

“Jews have to know exactly what the temperature is outside,” he told a packed house of 400 in the Comedy Store’s main room on opening night, Wednesday. “Is it 68? Is it 69? Is it 70? If it’s 68 and not 69 they’ve got an entirely different outfit. For Gentiles, it’s good enough if it’s hot or cold.”

On Thursday, over lunch, Mason is the same battering ram of a comic-rabbi-reactionary that he is onstage, as implacable and ultimately hard to fathom as the orangish-brown hue of his hair. You can ask him questions, but the exercise is nearly futile; there are stretches without eye contact, long intervals where you feel you could replace yourself at the table with a cardboard cutout, and he would still keep going.

Ask, for instance, whether the difference between Jews and Gentiles--and, by implication, his comedy--is less topical these days with assimilation and intermarriage, and Mason heads you off at the pass:

“Every time I ask a Jewish father, ‘What does your son do for a living?’ I get the same three answers: ‘He’s an investment banker, he’s a doctor, he’s a lawyer.’ Once in a while he’s in insurance. Ask a goyishe father [the same question], you get professions you never heard of. That’s just as true today as it was 100 years ago.”

It’s a relentless stream pretty much from the time he steps off the elevator at the Regent Beverly Wilshire and escorts you to “that fish place across the street,” McCormick & Schmick’s. Mason is thinner these days, having shed 20 pounds, and when the waitress arrives to take his order he never bothers to look at the menu.

“You got some kind of a salad here?” he asks. “Something light? Tomatoes?”

The waitress suggests the mixed greens, which comes with radicchio, romaine lettuce. . . .

“I don’t like those type of things,” Mason stops her. “I like that cheap Jewish lettuce, what’ya call it?”

“Iceberg?”

“Yeah, iceberg. What kind of vegetables you got? You got any hot vegetables? Do you have portabello mushrooms? You have tomatoes and onions, and that cheese, what’ya call that cheese?”

It is difficult, then, to know where the stage act stops and the real person starts, or if there’s any use trying to figure that out. Now in his 60s, Mason keeps a tireless, gotta-be-working comedian’s schedule. There is no wife, no children. He admits to having three or four close personal friends back in New York, where he lives. But the only time he betrays anything resembling a personal, shtick-free feeling is when he’s asked about his years as a rabbi (in his 20s, Mason led congregations for one year in Latrobe, Penn., another in Weldon, N.C.) and his Orthodox Jewish father, who lived long enough to see his son become a rabbi, but not a comic.

“I still find it very difficult to talk about my father somehow,” Mason says. “The guilt in my system never left me. The realization that my father would have hated everything I’ve done makes me nauseous.”

It is tempting to want to seize on this as the visceral source of his art, to connect the inner tumult with the stage persona (are the unresolved issues with the father Mason’s Rosebud?). The comic, of course, has little use for armchair psychology or self-awareness.

“I don’t see myself as angry because I’m not angry,” he says. “You don’t have to be angry to be funny, you have to see the peculiarities of life, the contradictions.”

But on the subject of Clinton (“that no-good-[expletive]-liar”), Mason is at the very least incensed. For years in his act, he’s been attacking the president, whether over Travelgate, marijuana use or his alleged extramarital affairs. In his latest show, however, as he rails against Clinton and any “sick bastard” who would support the president, there is a sense that the invective has supplanted the humor--much the way Lenny Bruce left audiences in the cold when, in his obsession with the John F. Kennedy assassination, he would read verbatim from the Warren Commission report onstage.

“You happen to be a hundred percent full of . . . ,” Mason says when this is suggested to him during lunch. “There was nothing but screaming laughter for 30 minutes. You wanna hear the tape? You didn’t hear the laughs because you were so sick to your stomach about what I was saying that you convinced yourself there were no laughs there.”

Minutes later, referring to conservative conspiracy theorists’ tales of the president’s alleged involvement in the death of top aide Vincent Foster, he says: “Clinton would just as easily kill as Hitler would. He has no conscience.”

Does Mason really mean to compare Clinton, whom he obviously hates, with Hitler, whom he should maybe hate a little more?

“Who cares if a person kills one person or a million people? What is the difference in the morality? The difference isn’t that profound to me.”

Mason, odds are, is just engaging in his typically reckless rhetoric, the sort of stuff that has gotten him into trouble in the past and will spice up “Jackie Mason Live,” a weekly live local talk radio show to air on Glendale-based KIEV-AM (870) Sunday nights from 6-7 p.m. Station managers say Mason will do the show by phone even while traveling; it debuts Sunday night.

It makes sense that Mason would find himself in radio and not television. There have been dalliances with sitcoms (remember ABC’s “Chicken Soup”?), but Mason has never been a good bet for a medium that cleaves to the mainstream.

“In England,” he says, “they see me as a performer, they study my work in terms of the history of Jewish humor, they have banquets in my honor. Here, [people] see me as a clown, as a character. I don’t think they respect me as much partly because of my Jewishness. The guttural Jewish sound of my voice reminds people of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn and social philosophy doesn’t sound like a combination to people.”

It’s 3 p.m., and Mason has to be getting back to his hotel. Despite all the invective he has spewed, he has managed to convey an odd kind of warmth. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he cares about things, people and current events, even if they mostly move him to caustic stereotypes.

“He’s interested in the world around him,” says writer Larry Gelbart, a friend and topical humorist himself. “He has a very restless, curious mind. God knows he’s got a million comfortable routines, but he doesn’t want to do that.”

What he wants to do now is leave the restaurant.

“You’re stupid,” he tells a reporter in closing. “And I say that with the highest respect.”