With an unprecedented run on Broadway and a sell-out season in the West End in recent years, Jackie Mason is one of those old-school comedians who refuses to step out of the limelight.

Not so much a renaissance man (for he has never really felt the need for reinvention) as a curio of old-school comedy and a massive influence on countless funny folk, Mason carefully balances on the margins of taste and decency while ranting about the world as a whole.

You'd think that telling "the difference between Jews and Gentiles" jokes all night long might go down as well as Jim Davidson in a room full of paraplegics but such is Mason's charmingly different generation shtick that you can't help but forgive the old fella.

Aside from the over-use of a derogative Yiddish word for homosexual, the crinkly wisecracker won us over with his time-worn gags on sex, religion and politics, chucking in some fresh stuff concerning Tony Blair's pre-disposition for lying and the nation's obsession with Wayne Rooney's foot.

Looking and sounding like Krusty The Clown without make up, the man who was raised in a family of rabbis and became one of the hottest comedians of the Sixties and beyond may not have the same vitality he used to and he certainly isn't a subscriber to political correctness but there's no doubting the man can hold a crowd - as evidenced by the massive applause at the end of an anti-French diatribe.

Not of this time he may be but then that's what probably makes a legend.