Comedy: The oral surgeon in chief

JACKIE MASON used to be a rabbi, but he had to give it up because he couldn't take it seriously. He still can't take anything seriously, but he's in a rather more suitable job now - he's a comedian. And a remarkable one at that.

As he slouches on stage in an ordinary black, double-breasted suit, the stout, 64-year-old Mason, by his own admission, looks like nothing so much as an accountant. But once the monologue begins, his whole body springs into life - never has one man's shrug been so expressive. There is just no stopping him; some ideas simply drown in a gushing tide of words.

At the Playhouse on Monday night, he made a joke of the fact that he had unsuccessfully attempted to exit the stage four times. Imagine a wise- guy New York cabbie setting the world to rights - on fast-forward - and you get the picture.

Mason occasionally gives off the air of being the man that PC forgot. Some of his routines - particularly about blacks and gays - would have the right-on brigade penning hand-wringing letters to the New Statesman. It is not hard to see why he has been dubbed "the Bernard Manning of Brooklyn". But even his most offensive material is delivered with such a twinkle that you can't be sure it's not just another joke - on people's PC sensibilities.

All the same, he is on much safer - and funnier - ground with his overriding obsession - the difference between Jews and Gentiles. He is constantly toying with racial stereotypes, but in a way that is playful rather than pernicious. He can't, for instance, imagine John Glenn being Jewish. "If an old Jew came back to his house in Miami Beach and said, `Hallo, I'm going into space', can you picture the reaction of his wife? The whole family would get together and say, `what happened here?' Then she'd get suspicious - `why can't you take me?'"

He extends his reflections about Jewish characteristics to Israeli Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu's attitude to the West Bank: "He'd like to give it back, but right now he can't. It's in his wife's name."

Mason even manages to weave his preoccupation into the Lewinsky case. "I don't believe a word of it. A Jewish girl is not interested in oral sex - an oral surgeon, maybe. To a Jewish girl, oral sex is talking about a condominium. The climax is when her mother moves in." He derides President Clinton's assertion that oral sex is not sex: "people are going up to hookers to get their money back."

Any stand-up who can still mine gems from the Clinton and Lewinsky saga - perhaps the most overworked seam in the history of comedy - is no comedy klutz.

To November 28. Box office: 0171-839 4409