Jackie Mason

Origins and early life

Jackie Mason was born Yacov Moshe Maza on 9 June 1928 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, into a rabbinical family: his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather were rabbis, and three of his brothers became rabbis too.

Work and career

He followed them, was ordained an Orthodox rabbi at twenty-five, and led congregations in North Carolina and Pennsylvania before leaving the pulpit for the Catskills comedy circuit, telling audiences that he had gone into the family business and found the hours better. His act was built on Jewish speech, on the rhythm and the argument of the Yiddish-inflected English he had grown up with, and he refused all his life to soften it for a general audience.

In 1964 a dispute with Ed Sullivan over a gesture Sullivan read as obscene got him banned from the biggest stage in American television, and it took two decades and his own one-man Broadway show, The World According to Me, to bring him back; it opened in 1986 and won him a special Tony Award. He was not without controversy, and this fiche says so plainly: a remark he made about the mayoral candidate David Dinkins in 1989 forced him off the Giuliani campaign and drew wide criticism.

Recognition

From 1991 he voiced Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky on The Simpsons, the father who disowns Krusty the Clown, and he won a Primetime Emmy Award for it in 1992, returning to the part for more than twenty years. He died in New York on 24 July 2021.