Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 30, 2021

Jackie Masons career was an illustration of the value of believing in a product despite others doubts and finding, through trial and error, an effective way to market it.

The product was Mr. Masons distinctly Jewish brand of stand-up comedy. The first hurdle was his familys expectation that he would follow his father and three older brothers by becoming a rabbi. He complied, but only halfheartedly, while slipping gags into his sermons. I had gentiles coming to hear the sermons, thats how funny I was, he said decades later.

The reluctant rabbi gave up his religious vocation in his 20s and established himself in the late 1950s as an entertainer in the Catskills resorts favored by older Jewish couples. When he sought a wider audience, Jewish agents and producers told him his accent was too Jewish.

Spurning their advice, he found work in the early 1960s in Los Angeles clubs and then on national television. A disastrous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show derailed his TV career, and it wasnt until the mid-1980s that he finally found the right mass-market formula by agreeing to try a one-man show on Broadway, The World According to Me!

Mr. Mason, who died July 24 at the age of 93, won a Tony award, went on to star in half a dozen more one-man shows, appeared in movies, wrote books and remained popular into the 2000s, despite a penchant for racial and ethnic humor in an increasingly sensitive age.

Read the rest here:

Jackie Mason, When Told He Was Too Jewish, Stuck With His Shtick - The Wall Street Journal

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