“I love the Puerto Rican people. I go to Puerto Rico every year just to visit my hubcaps.” -Jackie Mason, The World According to Me (1988), 16:30
Here’s the first thing I should have said when I met the rabbi: “That’s very funny. Have you ever thought of being a comedian?”
It’s one of several times I regretted choosing peace over confrontation. I was in New Jersey with my fiancée, where her mother had taken both of us to see Rabbi Maza, whose brother Yacov was better known as the comedian Jackie Mason. I thought about that meeting this weekend when I heard that Jackie Mason has just died. I don’t remember what exactly we were seeing Rabbi Maza for. I know we were trying to figure out where in the NY/NJ area to have our wedding. Back home in Somerville, MA, my fiancée regularly went to Shabbat services at The Hav (Havurat Shalom), the hippy synagogue down the street where people kept kosher and didn’t drive on Shabbat but changed the liturgy to refer to God in the feminine.
As soon as we walked into Rabbi Maza’s office, he looked at me and made the following hilarious joke: “Which one of you is the man?”
I’m a strong believer in avoiding needless conflict. Also I think we can learn more from people when we aren’t antagonizing them. But some conflicts are needful. It was a mistake to just grimace and to move on to the business at hand. When old men make fun of you as a way to reinforce their own stupid beliefs, an appropriate response is to turn around and walk out instead of bowing to their authority or professing interest in their opinions. Another appropriate response is to argue with them. Either way opens the possibility that they will experience at least a little discomfort when they feel entitled to display rudeness in the service of prejudice.
I never liked the stream of prejudiced stereotypes that served as Jackie Mason’s act. Based on the clips my Dad like to play for me, they were not incidental to his humor, they were at the core of it. Humor is the shock of recognition when you use the absurd to illuminate the true. And the truth as Jackie Mason saw it is that certain characteristics define Puerto Ricans, such as that they are the ones that will steal your hubcaps. Just like a truth to Rabbi Maza is that a guy with long hair is too confused to realize that there are specific male and female roles that the husband and wife are supposed to play.
The New York Times obituary described Mason as someone who “made comic capital as a Jew feeling his way — sometimes nervously, sometimes pugnaciously — through a perplexing gentile world.” Publications that put the statements of non-Jews under a microscope to search for any hint of anti-semitism feel empowered to say things like “Long before ‘political correctness’ had any meaning, legendary comedian Jackie Mason turned ethnic and racial humor into art—without the culture threatening him with cancellation.” Long before polical correctness – you know, the 1980s.
The truth is that Jackie Mason was a clever man who spewed racist garbage to feed the prejudices of his audience. Any obituary that doesn’t call attention to the prejudiced messages of Mason’s act is continuing them.