Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My cast away this week is Jackie Mason, one of the greatest comedians of all time according to Mel Brooks.

Who knows he could have been one of the greatest rabbis of all time, but he didn't stick at it.

Instead, in pursuit of laughs, he's applied the discipline of deductive reasoning to everything from

fat-free cookies to foreign policy. Along with the laughter he's court a danger and controversy too,

dodging a bullet from the mafia and frequently getting up the noses of those on the

liberal left. He says I'm trying to get to the core essence of things, trying to

separate lies from truth. You make comedy sound like a very serious business,

Jackie Mason. Yes, it is a serious business because in order to be funny, you have to understand what's going on in the world and you have to know the basic situation in order to make comedy out of it.

An ignorant person has to do a kind of a vapid empty-headed comedy which says nothing and

reflects nothing. It's boring to death to me. When you're 19 and you talk about

a love affair, it's fascinating to them. When you talk about romance to a 70 year old. It's not so fascinating.

You're right to hear about how you get rid of this woman who's bothering him all the time.

There's a brilliant Yiddish word for a constant rolling body of laughter. Is it

Tumul or Tumul? I'm not sure. So Tumultor, yeah, a Tumul is good.

It fits the description of what you get from your audiences because I've noticed when I watch you, when I listen to you, your audience seems to constantly laugh. There isn't a rise and a stop and they are always always in this sort of rolling state of laughter

hard work that's that's exactly what I am at that's my that to me is the ultimate

goal to keep the left bouncing continuously if I tell a joke that doesn't quite get a

live what is a transition to it's a little too long between lives

I try to get rid of it as first as possible

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