Jackie Mason: The Ultimate Jew

DVD review

Purportedly his last ever Broadway show, The Ultimate Jew has Jackie Mason deliver the exact-same shtick that has sustained him thoughout his 50-year career: the grumpy, narrow-minded know-it-all kvetching about all the idiots who just can’t see how right he is about everything.

But these days, that act seems tired, and not just because of the weary performance that gives a sluggish air to the whole show. Also missing is any self-deprecating glint that the arrogance just might be misplaced, meaning he comes across as a miserable, reactionary old fart.

Not that grumpy old men can’t be hilarious, but Mason lacks the humanity, the vulnerability and often the wit that would make his bitter intolerance understandable. He’s no Victor Meldrew, that’s for sure.

Instead, he appears as an out-of-touch grouch complaining that it’s just not fair that you can’t say ‘nigger’ any more. Not as parody, but as a genuine point he wants to make, in a routine far too uncomfortable to be funny.

One Mason joke is that Barack Obama ‘looks like a Jew with a tan’, which pretty much sums up his whole act: gratuitous mention of the word Jew and a gag that observes nothing more than the fact that the President is half-black, put into cringe-worthy terms. Carol Thatcher would love him.

Such embarrassing stereotyping runs through the show. He gets huge laughs for suggesting some one in the front row might be gay. If only the punter had stood up and said: ‘Yes I am, why’s that funny?’

Of course, anyone who disagrees with him is dismissed as a ‘Nazi bastard’, and surely, he would argue, gays and blacks are fair game since no one gets more stick than the Jews. But even with his own ethnic group, the generalisations seem broad and lazy. Not every Jew behaves in the exact same way as Mason would have it – haven’t we long left behind such ideas?

Sloth pervades much of the rest of his writing, too. He’ll make an easy observation, then milk it dry, making the same point time and time again in slightly different ways. The routines don’t crescendo, but just get stuck in a rut. When you’re moaning about the small portions of nouvelle cuisine (a fad long passed) or that complaining that sushi isn’t cooked, you need do more that just state the obvious facts with an air of distain, don’t you?

Mason seems to have become increasingly humourless in his advancing years, rather a drawback for a comedian. If this 80-minute DVD – which seems to suffer from relatively poor sound quality – is the pinnacle of his career, he’s ending not with a fanfare, but with a raspberry.