at least you'll have a good time before you go. 'They tell you, fly on a plane, it can only crash once. He doesn't blame people for being afraid, though, and pounces with relish on the politicians who tell us all to keep on travelling, shopping, spending and carrying on as normal because it's our patriotic duty. I flew Concorde on the day after the crash. Or maybe Mason is not the first wiseguy to sound like a schmuck, nor the first comedian to look stupid when trying so hard to be serious.Īt least he's here, unlike so many of his compatriots, famous and not, who are terrified of flying. To say they're primitive - they wouldn't be able to make the hydrogen bomb if they were so primitive. I thought I'd read this column - you know, we agree on all the major issues - but I don't know why he wrote this. 'I just read this for the first time,' he says. This is an extract from their column of 24 September: He writes a column under a joint byline with the lawyer Raoul Felder for The Jewish World Review. Mason not only sounds like a columnist, he is one. The comedian in him thinks that's the way people are, you can't change them, so why not get them to laugh at themselves? The rabbi in him is nauseated at the dishonesty and seediness in the world ('almost everything people say is a lie'). He has a columnist's eye and a polemicist's gob. Forget the billboards: Jackie isn't always up with the news. Its typically alert and sensitive staff tried to charge rescue workers for the water they needed to attend victims at the World Trade Center. For example, he didn't know about the disgrace suffered by the faddish institution he most loves to deride, Starbucks. The material is fluent and funny, if not newsworthy as such. Madonna fans, healthy-food fads, people who drive Bentleys, voters who reject candidates because they don't have enough hair or wear the wrong tie (Iain Duncan Smith should get a speechwriter down to Shaftesbury Avenue there's a performer in need of some new gags). Everywhere are these fabulous expressions of compassion.' People are offering their blood, more than they need. People are normally so fearful of strangers, because the next person you meet may be a pimp, a hoodlum, a gangster. 'People have come together, they're humanised, they care for each other. 'New York has changed personality,' he says, just as I am about to repeat the question. He thinks for a second - more than a second, more like 40, a professorial trick he uses a lot. I want to know how this most New York of performers (he was five miles uptown when the attack happened) finds his city now. We are about to canter off into a routine, so - emotionally correct myself, perhaps - I rein him in. They're forgetting to have sex too - but then sex can be miserable. All the comedy shows are tripling their ratings - Blockbuster video, you know, the comedy section is empty. 'Anyone doing comedy is doing four times the business.

'People in New York are desperately searching for jokes,' he says. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENT.

Humorous antidote