There comes a point when comic scepticism shades into cynicism – about halfway through Jackie Mason's West End show, to be precise. I enjoyed the first half of this farewell-to-London set by the septuagenarian standup, in which Mason pricks the pomposity of opera-goers, nouvelle cuisine and anyone who pays $1,200 for a hotel room. The expert technique is intact, and the scampish spirit, too. But the more Mason belittles – and the more crudely – the lower my spirits sank. Married life is a sexless penance, wives are all parasites and – worst of all – "Barack Obama doesn't look black; he looks like a Jew with a tan."
That's how bad it gets – but it starts promisingly. Mason's pugnacity is funny: he doesn't care if we enjoy the show, because he's not coming back. His Manhattanite bluntness is funny. His absolutism is funny. Don't call it a 4x4: "You're in a truck, schmuck." Yes, he divides the world into Jews and everybody else, which is an odd way of looking at things. But you'd have a job not laughing at his portrait of the finicky Jew buying theatre tickets, or the greedy Jew blaming his slow metabolism. Mason isn't having it: "Did you ever see a Jew timing his metabolism?"
Best of all is a routine about Mason and his therapist's search for "the real me", which ties the listener in conceptual knots. Given that he can rise to these heights, it's depressing to trudge through Mason's section about henpecked husbands and gold-digging wives. The best one can say about his comedy Indian accent, his Alfred Hitchcock impersonation and his gags about homosexuals, meanwhile, is that they offer a window to a different era. Of course, Mason is a master craftsman. But too often here, he is working with threadbare material.
