Some philosophical musings on the eternal human dilemma from a man who’s managed to have his bagel and eat it, too.
Free Masonry
Jackie Mason, a comic scholar from the “old school,” took the world by storm in 1990 with his international tour of The World According to Me. Last year, after two World tours, Jackie won the Tony Award for Best Show and is now working on his third World extravaganza. Luckily for us, he was never trapped into TV fame — since the sitcom “Chicken Soup” was a turkey, Jackie’s back doing what he does best, working with live audiences. “If that sitcom had ever become No. 1,” says Jackie, “I would have been nauseous for the rest of my life.”
Now Jackie stars on his talk show, “The Jackie Mason Show,” debating a gritty spectrum of issues facing real people. Says Jackie, “It’s about lawyers discussing why people like John Gatti deserve a defense, or the Supreme Court decision allowing women to go topless on beaches, or the riots in L.A. and Washington Heights — it’s not about contrived problems like transvestites making love to horses, shirts making love to buildings, crazy stories about animals and maniacs — it’s real issues in the news.” On a short break from his TV audience, Jackie held court in Manhattan’s famous New York Deli and — in between bites of a bagel — gave us a little piece of his mind.
Mason on THE CAMPAIGN
The way I see it, we’re in a time of incredible transition — even “revolution” is not too strong a word for what’s happening to America, psychologically, economically, sexually. Now, as if we don’t have enough to do, we have to pick a new president.
Clinton is fighting with everybody about his draft record, about his girlfriends, about his hairstyle — but besides these things, I can’t see him keeping his mind on running the country anyway, because I don’t think he could stay out of the bedroom long enough to sign important things. He’s like Ted Kennedy, only with a better driving record. But I think I know why people still like him after cheating on his wife. I think people realize all the greatest presidents we had committed adultery — Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Jefferson. The only one who never thought of committing adultery was Nixon. Instead, he cheated on the country. I’d rather they get the cheating out of their system in the bedroom.
The main thing they had against Perot was that he never took a position on any subject. Clinton took too many positions. And not in foreign policy, either, which is what got him into trouble. Perot was great for the grass roots because every time he opened his mouth it was more fertilizer. He wants to be the boss of a constituency without a candidate. He wants to lead them in a direction that he can’t explain to follow a person he doesn’t know in a direction that’s going nowhere.
Perot’s definition of policy is to say nothing. But he’s firm about nothing, and that’s it. If you ask him a question, he says I don’t have to tell you. We ask what we should do about the trade bill. He says pay it. What about unemployment? He says sit in the house. We say what about crime — he says the crime is that you have to ask me questions.
I think the biggest fraud of the whole game is Quayle. He’s hollering family values, but he’s really talking about cash. The way he got ahead in life isn’t family values — it’s from the value of his family. When your family is worth a hundred million dollars, that’s all the family values you have to know about. He can’t spell a word of English, but he wants family values. What is a family value? Children who can’t spell? He says he’s against abortion, make sure you have a child, but if you’re a single mother with a child, he tells you, you should be ashamed of yourself. You should be embarrassed; you should have family values. What does he want, that you should shoot the child in the heart once he’s out of the womb? Once he’s out of the womb, he should drop dead?
Mason on GEORGE BUSH
I don’t know about George Bush committing adultery, but I do know he’s a president with no convictions. First he said “no new taxes.” He says he’ll give back all the money in case you want to buy a house, in case you don’t want to buy a house, in case you want to buy a boat, in case you want to buy a cigarette, in case you want to feed the dog, in case you want to lie down for an hour. He found out 50,000 reasons to give back all the money he says he didn’t want from us in the first place but had to take because the budget was out of control. Now he forgets there is such a thing as a budget. He reads the paper, then has a policy. If he misses the paper, there is no policy. He says, “Wait a minute, they didn’t deliver the paper yet.”
Mason on THE VOTERS
But you know as well as I do, people don’t vote on issues anyway, though maybe this time around will be different. Usually, you ask people, why are you voting for this guy, they say, “He looks, you know, what, I don’t know. He has good hair, he looks firm, he looks busy, what, I don’t know.”
Americans want a leader, but finally, now that we’re hitting bottom, everybody’s getting busy on their own again. It either takes a war or a depression to do this to Americans. People are losing so much, they can’t lose any more. When you’re really in trouble, you go to work and survive. The reason things got so bad is we were spoiled with too much prosperity we couldn’t pay for. Now people will apply themselves to the job they used to complain about because they’re grateful to have a job. They’ll work harder, produce more, and produce better products.
Mason on OUR PRIORITIES
Today we’re worried about saving the whales, the rain forest, the earth — and we should be. I feel sure that the environment is being destroyed. I hope we can save it. The ozone layer I don’t understand yet. Scientists disagree about this ozone layer. Some say we’re about to get burned to death and others say it’s just a hole over Pittsburgh, it’s not even in this neighborhood, so we shouldn’t worry.
I think what we have to save ourselves from more than anything is a government whose greatest pride is deregulation and special-interest groups that don’t care who they hurt. Deregulation allowed the S & L crisis, which wiped out hundreds of billions and left us with the bill. We’ll never finish paying this off. “Deregulation” sounds like “freedom,” but it’s not freedom, except for thieves to steal and rob from you. It’s like saying you should wipe out the police department. You would have to be an idiot to think deregulation is a good thing for America. It’s good for thieves and murderers. The government convinced people that every time you have regulation, you’re stifling business. You’re not stifling business, you’re stifling crooked business. When you want to buy a home, do you ask for deregulation?
You want every regulation there is to protect yourself.
Mason on SEX
There’s still a sexual revolution going on in America and we’re still finding out a couple of things. Some things I can tell you, because I’ve dated a couple of women. For instance, we always thought women were vulnerable and men were tough. That’s a lie. The begging, the pleading, the crying a man has to do, just to make love to a woman! A man reduces himself to a vulnerable, helpless idiot when it comes to sex. You can yell and holler at a football game, but it’s hard to get an orgasm from it. Sex is the thing that costs the least, maybe not in my neighborhood, but it’s worth more than anything else.
A girl that turns me down when I’m trying to make love to her drives me nuts. A woman that asks me for money when I’m trying to make love to her drives me nuts, too. Why does a woman think she’s doing me a favor by letting me make love to her? Because in most cases, I’m a much better sex partner and I think she should pay me a few bucks for the pleasure. It’s preposterous for a man to assume that the woman should get paid for sex and not the other way around. I don’t know if you know this, but there was a time when an unmarried woman who had sex was a social outcast. She had to do it secretly — it was subversive, the same way homosexuality was 20 years ago. It was such a degradation for an unmarried woman to have sex that if a man wanted to make love to a woman, he had to pay for it — to find a woman who was so crude to actually do such a disgusting thing, she deserved to get paid for it.
Now things are different and women have sex as freely as men do. But some women are still stupid enough to think that they’re doing the men a favor by having sex with them. We know that women are men’s equals in everything — in brains, in talent, and they’re even better than men in a sexual capacity. They’re getting as much pleasure from sex, or more, than men.
So why do you think it is — after weeks of pursuing a woman and finally making love to her after she’s protesting about how could she think of doing such a thing with you — that the role changes and she becomes the one who does the crying and pleading and begging? Because women need sex more than men. Biologically and psychologically, she has the superior sexual capacity. A man has to store up for the next approach. So while he’s struggling to store up energy, she’s ready again in a minute and a half. Meanwhile, she’s grabbing his body and he’s pleading for forgiveness, begging her to understand why he’s busy, why he’s unavailable — there’s a revolution in Cuba; he has to go to China for a meeting. He has to beg, cry, and flee to get out of her way for something she claims she never wanted in the first place. So even if she has a far greater sex drive than a man, she still has to pretend, even today, that she has no sex drive at all. There is still a stigma against a woman wanting as much sex as a man, and it’s not fair to either women or men. So in these situations with money, who owes who, they should get a judge first and see who had a better time.
Mason on THE FAMILY
Now, you see, there’s a lot of different ways to look at freedom in this country — economic, sexual. We have trouble with this word freedom. Look at how we’re raising our kids in this generation of parents. This country mistakes love for freedom in raising their kids. Stupid. Children need discipline — it’s not rejection of the child, it’s the love of a child. Then parents feel self-conscious and guilt-ridden because they don’t pay enough attention to their children, so they invented the words quality time. So let me ask you, how come nobody says things like “I’m giving quality time to my girlfriend”? The girlfriend you have daytime, nighttime, all the time. Quality time is something you give your father in a condominium. You’re giving the children time away from something you really want to do, so you call it quality time.
Mason on JACKIE MASON
This is just my opinion. These are some of my thoughts about this country that is the greatest country in the world, in my opinion. This is still the place where you can live the American dream, work hard, have the greatest opportunity, and be who you want. I really wanted to run for president in this election. But I decided not to because I’m too busy having a good time.
Although Mr. Mason died in 2021, as of this publication you could still read his own “about” interpretation. You can get a radically brief, but more newswothy (perhaps) perspective on his career via CNN. Honestly we’re not quite sure how to categorize CNN these days, but that will be a discussion for another day.
Money is not the most important thing in the world. Love is. … Fortunately, I love money.Jackie Mason
