Word: jewishness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Gentiles are allowed in the building?" asks Jackie Mason as he scans the audience to start his new one-man show, Much Ado About Everything. Indeed, it's a wonder that they are let in the building--Mason realizes his audience is virtually 100 percent Jewish and tailors his comedy appropriately. Sure, he occasionally delivers the universally appealing punch line, but even those seem unintentional--Mason knows his audience and boldly refuses to make his comedy broadly palatable. A gutsy approach but one that pays off in spades...
...doesn't an Italian woman cheat on her husband?" he asks, confounding his predominantly female Jewish audience. "Because if she did, WHAM!" he adds with a gesture to match. "But a Jewish wife," he continues, "has nothing to lose. She cheats on her husband and what happens--he runs and call his mother." The audience, of course, roars its approval and the consensus of nodding heads makes it clear that no one is taking offense. He proceeds along similar lines for most of the show: "There are no Jewish athletes. All we had was Mark Spitz. He took one swim...
...Rush Limbaugh, he would just rant and rave, regardless of the consequences. Jackie, however, tries to find a balance that seemingly doesn't exist, between speaking freely and still trying to qualify dangerous statements (like his brazenly racist quips). For instance, he offers us the previous comment on Jewish wives and their timid husbands and elicits audience hysteria; the mood, however, turns somber when he immediately adds "But adultery is nothing to laugh over. Adulterers are no subject for comedy." Why ruin the mood? Why make the audience nervous to laugh...
October 28, like January 1, December 25 (I am Jewish, but that just makes it worse) and December 26 (Canadian Boxing Day), had always been an anticlimactic experience. But because this birthday would be less a fleeting blur of metallic balloons and singing cards than a crossing over into the world of the initiated, there would be no disappointment. The "day" was not the important part of this year's commemoration of my aging; 21 was the gift that would keep on giving...
Pollard, 44, grew up Jewish in South Bend, Ind. He attended Stanford University and failed in a 1977 bid to land a CIA job. But two years later, the Navy put him on the payroll just outside the capital as a civilian intelligence analyst. He went to work assessing the Soviet navy but soon was granted top-level security clearances that essentially gave him a library card to the shelves holding the nation's most tightly guarded secrets...