Satire? Comedic Relief? What Was BBC Thinking?

Jackie Mason came.

Is he among the living?

BBC hired him.

7/19/95

While the trial was trying to determine if O.J. Simpson had done it, I was wondering why BBC had done it. Jackie Mason? I had to reach into the recesses of my memory to figure out who that was.

Here’s how I described him and his “day in court” in Anatomy of a Trial:

Then one day in July, there in the courtroom audience sat New York comic Jackie Mason. Word was BBC had hired him to do commentary.

“What a weird looking character,” I recorded in my journal. “His hair weave was so tight and what looked like the results of a face peel or face lifts gave him the appearance of someone who had suffered first-degree burns. He had this real slick smooth, almost wrinkle-free kind of skin.”

His behavior was also kind of bizarre.

“He looked and acted as if he were not really with it, kind of spaced out or something,” I recorded.

The session he sat in on concerned a motion to exclude testimony of an expert witness during closing arguments and lasted less than an hour. Even so he appeared to doze off several times and when not snoozing, just gazed around.

“He took no notes,” I observed. “All in all a very strange-looking guy, and you wonder what the heck his commentary for BBC will be like.”