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Mason's machine-gun monotone is a rhythm he picked up from studying the Talmud in yeshivas on the Lower East Side

feat. "In a night club a guy comes in with all sorts of other thoughts in mind. Usually, he's a guy who took out a girl to impress her and see if he can have an affair with her. Every time she orders a drink, he wonders if you get a return on his investment. And she's wondering if she got the right guy. They haven't got much interest in what I have to say so I have to fight for their attention – plus all the extraneous stuff going on: the waiters, the service, the steak, the this, the that...."

Compared to cabaret chaos, Broadway is a month in the country for Mason. "In a theatre you can talk about more intellectual subjects, bring more dimension to your comedy. I cover so many topics it feels like a commentary on every facet of life going on everywhere in the world."

"World," indeed: The World According to Me!, as Mason's marquee has it, permits him to run barefoot all over the place – politics, parking a car, sexual relationships, Ronald Reagan, TV, Chinese restaurants, Hollywood producers, Nazis, gangsters, Arabs, Italians and the ever popular Jews-versus-gentiles.

All of the above is taken about 90 mph. "I try to be as funny as I can with everything I say. I challenge myself to get as big a laugh as I can, minute by minute, so I can get more laughs than anybody can possibly package into these two hours. I want to run with people's intelligence, not try to prove anything about stretching their intelligence. I'm not here to educate people. I'm here to entertain them."

By now, he has it down to a science. "I don't bother clocking laughs. I do it by rote. I make sure there's a consistency of laughs throughout the show. If I go more than 30 seconds without a laugh, I either throw it out or develop something else. I want to make sure they're constantly laughing, except for those purposeful spots I put in between – the serious speech that sets up the next idea. People have to feel there's more substance to a subject than just laughs. I want them to see the comedy comes out of an idea that's meaningful, a point of view that is thoughtful. I want them to get excited about the joke."

Like his material, there is more to the man than just jokes. There is an actor trying to get out – a natural actor, you might rightly think from the gallery of quick-sketch caricatures he trots out every night (Sylvester Stallone, Al Jolson, Ted Kennedy, et al). "I've almost never spent any time working on technique. How I produce an imitation of somebody happens to me by osmosis, almost subconsciously. I watch Henry Kissinger on television, and I imitate him to a few friends. I see them laugh, then I do it on the stage.

"I think of myself as an exceptionally good actor," he allows without a lot of coaxing. The trick has been to prove it. "I haven't pursued acting for one reason: nobody offered me any jobs at it. The Jewish people, who are usually the producers in this industry, felt I was too Jewish.

"Truth is, Jewish producers come from places like Brooklyn or the Bronx. They spent a lifetime trying to prove they don't sound Jewish. Jewishness to them represents the misery, the poverty, the refugee status of their parents. Other accents are somehow charming, but a Jewish accent to a Jew is – ugh! – an embarrassment."

Mason delivers this diatribe in the same machine-gun monotone he uses onstage. It's a rhythm he picked up from the Talmud, which he studied incessantly as a child in yeshivas on the Lower East Side. The idea back then was to become a rabbi like his father, but it wasn't his idea, and his boyhood was much like a stand-up comic's version of The Jazz Singer. "Even when I became a rabbi, I knew I was doing it to please my father. I always pretended to him that I wasn't serious about comedy and that I was going back to being a rabbi. It was a very rough period. But after some analysis, I made up my mind that the better side of life is compassion, not truth. I

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