Providing a humour antidote

Jackie Mason hasn't heard of the phrase "emotional correctness". For a comedian whose neon signs on Shaftesbury Avenue promise "If it's in the news, it's in the show", this is surprising.

Emotional correctness is the self-censorship of entertainers desperate not to get the mood wrong after 11 September. In short, telling jokes has become a problem. The American papers are full of it, but Mason hasn't seen the phrase and doesn't believe in the phenomenon either.

"People in New York are desperately searching for jokes," he says. "Anyone doing comedy is doing four times the business. All the comedy shows are tripling their ratings - Blockbuster video, you know, the comedy section is empty. They're not even buying pornography. They're forgetting to have sex too - but then sex can be miserable. Depends who turns up."

We are about to canter off into a routine, so - emotionally correct myself, perhaps - I rein him in. I want to know how this most New York of performers (he was five miles uptown when the attack happened) finds his city now. He thinks for a second - more than a second, more like 40, a professorial trick he uses a lot. "New York has changed personality," he says, just as I am about to repeat the question. "People have come together, they're humanised, they care for each other. People are normally so fearful of strangers, because the next person you meet may be a pimp, a hoodlum, a gangster. But everyone's forgotten about crime. Crime is down 90 per cent. People are offering their blood, more than they need. Everywhere are these fabulous expressions of compassion."

So for Jackie - the ex-rabbi whose act is one long rant about the stupidity, the rip-offs, the deceit and above all the faddiness of modern urban life - the world is now a better place. People are nice to each other. They perform charitable acts. They love their families, there's no crime. And they buy comedy videos instead of pornography.

Fortunately for his show, there's still enough stuff around to make him, in his favourite expression, nauseous. I get a sample of the latest targets:

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).

The material is fluent and funny, if not newsworthy as such. For example, he didn't know about the disgrace suffered by the faddish institution he most loves to deride, Starbucks. Its typically alert and sensitive staff tried to charge rescue workers for the water they needed to attend victims at the World Trade Center. Forget the billboards: Jackie isn't always up with the news.

It doesn't matter. He has a columnist's eye and a polemicist's gob. The rabbi in him is nauseated at the dishonesty and seediness in the world ("almost everything people say is a lie"). 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?

Here's one thing I didn't laugh at. Mason not only sounds like a columnist, he is one. He writes a column under a joint byline with the lawyer Raoul Felder for The Jewish World Review. This is an extract from their column of 24 September: