Jackie Mason
Whenever I’m in London, my criminologist friend Katrin H. and I go in search of stand-up comedy. Since it’s Saturday night (and I’m in London), we’re setting out in search of a good comedy club (I’ll complete this post upon return). A few years ago we heard Jackie Mason do his shtick, a one-man show billed as his swan song to England. It was like a repertoire of his “Greatest Hits” without a new or updated joke in the mix. Still, hearing his rants for the nth time was often quite hilarious. It turns out that he has already been back doing another “final shtick tour” in England, but not tonight.
A sample: If you want to eat nothing, eat nouvelle cuisine. Do you know what it means? No food. The smaller the portion the more impressed people are, so long as the food’s got a fancy French name, haute cuisine. An empty plate with sauce!
As one critic wrote, Mason’s jokes “offer a window to a different era,” one whose caricatures and biases one can only hope we’ve moved beyond:
But it’s one thing for Jackie Mason to scowl at a seat in the front row and yell to the shocked audience member in his imagination, “These are jokes! They are just jokes!” and another to reprise statistical howlers, which are not jokes, to me. This blog found its reason for being partly as a place to expose, understand, and avoid them. I had earlier used this Jackie Mason opening to launch into a well-known fallacy of rejection using statistical significance tests. I’m going to go further this time around. I began by needling some leading philosophers of statistics: Continue reading
Error Statistics Philosophy 