"Even if the show is not too hot, I don't care. I'm not coming back," says Jackie Mason in his new standup show at New World Stages, referring to this purportedly being his "final one-man comedy." Well, it's pretty lukewarm.
Mason is one of the Last of the Mohicans of Borscht Belt comics. At 71, he has honed his delivery and timing over decades. He can handle a heckler, spin a one-liner out of recent headlines (as he does with Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace), and knows his audience. His right-of-center political comedy and retro ethnic-stereotyping gags went over well with the mostly over-50 crowd on the night I saw the show, but the whole thing had a tepid quality.
Mason is the son and grandson of rabbis and was one himself in his young adulthood, and his comedy is in the Jewish tradition of puncturing an inflated ego and exposing hypocrisy. That's a wonderful basis for comedy, but Mason's delivery feels pretty rote in this two-hour show. The two main topics are skewering the Democratic presidential candidates and riffing on the American obsession with status. In the second act, Mason pulls out some chestnuts with impersonations of his old boss Ed Sullivan and of midcentury figures like Liberace, Alfred Hitchcock, and even newsmen Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley.
While it's a pleasure to see someone do something he knows how to do superlatively well and to gain appreciation for an old-school style of performance, Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew feels too much like overheated leftovers.
Presented by Jyll Rosenfeld, IAG, and Allen Spivak/Adam Spivak/Larry Magid
at New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., NYC.
March 18-Aug. 31. Tue.-Fri., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2 and 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (Additional performances Wed., March 26, April 9 and 23, and May 14, 2 p.m.)
(212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7250 or www.telecharge.com.