Jackie Mason, the New York stand-up, looks very strange. It’s as if somebody shrank Tony Bennett and microwaved him for two hours. Mason is short, dark, troll-like, densely built, with shining bulbous lips and a twinkly expression of diabolical mischief. His hair gathers over his head in a wave of red-brown crinkliness. For his solo show he wears a sharp, grey business suit. He could be Rumpelstiltskin selling real estate.
All his jokes are Jewish. And none of them are. He uses ‘the Jew’ as a catch-all tag for a fretful, brow-beaten loser. ‘The Gentile’ is his relaxed, prosperous and self-confident counterpart. The Jew wants to impress people by sporting designer outfits but everyone who talks to him spends all their time reading labels. The Jew hates opera but goes there so that he can boast that he went. And what is opera? ‘Two Gentiles yelling and 3,000 Jews sleeping.’
The Jew is always put-upon, left out, second-rate, overlooked. He may find happiness but only when comprehensively defeated. The Jew finally marries his eldest daughter to an octogenarian. ‘Eighty-seven?’ he rejoices. ‘It’s a very nice age. They’ll have a wonderful year and a half together. He may not be hot in bed but he’ll be great on the toilet.’ These ancient jokes feel up-to-date because the racial idiom is being used to disguise standard observational comedy. And Mason’s overt references to ethnicity create a flavour of naughtiness and transgression. But none of his stuff is racist. Only one quip — he says he was offered a job in Palestine which included funeral expenses — feels a bit icky.
We’re told this is Mason’s ‘farewell tour’. Usually that means a cry for help from a celeb with a tax demand. But Mason may be sincere. He claims that he feels no obligation to perform well. ‘What are you going to say to me?’ he shrugs. ‘You’re not coming back? Nor am I!’ His material is chock-full of comic treats, as it should be after 50 years’ preparation, and he varies the pace and the mood with unobtrusive brilliance. The heretical thought — this is just a guy with a mike and two hours to fill — never surfaces. Some routines have lost audibility through repetition. A more relaxed delivery might help. And he may not have the sparkle and concentrated energy he had ten years ago but Mason is still pretty much the best in the world at what he does. One health warning. An efficient, costly (and presumably needful) marketing firm has been hired to promote the show. As a result, seats are very ambitiously priced.
Snookered at the Bush is a vicious, hard-edged play by newcomer Ishy Din. In a northern pub, four young Asian geezers gather to salute the memory of a school-friend who died in mysterious circumstances. The rites of commemoration involve vast quantities of lager being swilled down while violent taunts and bursts of sexual aggression are exchanged.
Each lad has a secret to hide. Billy has been rejected by his family. Kamy, a halal butcher, is struggling with a pork-sausage addiction. Mo can’t get his wife pregnant. And Shaf, a junior drug-dealer, wants to launder his profits through a fried-chicken outlet, ‘Clucking Gorgeous’.
There’s much to dislike about this play. The focus is narrow, the moral world is ugly, and the emotional mood is brutish and repetitive. And Din’s dramatic lay-out — four blokes, four hidden tragedies — is both too tidy and too threadbare. But once you by-pass the barrack-room atmosphere (and a pub is just a barracks for the unenlisted), the script yields great dividends as a social document. It tells us what Muslims really think about our culture and it does so in a way that TV never can because TV is a best-behaviour medium that forces participants to show themselves as granny would like to see them because granny might be watching.
Islam affects these kids fitfully and unpredictably. Shaf, though a proud Muslim, denies the existence of God. His atheism outrages Kamy even though he, too, sins by snaffling pork. Pious Mo has forsworn alcohol not in deference to the Koran but on the advice of his fertility doctor.
Their faith becomes an analogue for their dead friend. It lingers in the shadows of their lives like an irksome bolus of loyalties which they must somehow placate and honour. And they discover the solutions informally, between themselves, in a pub, without any reference to scripture or to clerical diktats. Islam comes out of this very badly (or very well, depending on your viewpoint). It’s a strictly regulated creed which is quite compatible with every violation of its strictures. Perhaps all faiths are like that.
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