Stand-up comedy is a tough business; it's even a tough business to watch. I hadn't been to a stand-up gig in many years . . .

I think a decade. Then I got a ticket to Jackie Mason.

The thing about being a stand-up is that you have to look like an alien. I'm thinking here about Ken Dodd and to a lesser extent about Russell Brand . . . who presents Big Brother's Big Mouth and looks like Lord Byron waiting for The Operation. And I'm also thinking about Jimmy Carr who is kind of scary and looks like Chucky. They all look like they've just landed from Mars.

And so does Jackie Mason.

The taxi driver had never heard of Jackie Mason. He had never heard of Vicar Street either. Or Dylan Moran.

But he had his views. "I hope you're not going to see that Tommy Tiernan, " he said. Although what Tommy Tiernan had ever done to offend him I did not enquire. "Dirty, " said the taxi driver.

"Just dirty." We ran through a brief list of comedians who had succeeded in amusing the taxi driver and came up with Leslie Nielsen (Naked Gun; no argument there) and Norman Wisdom (Albania; don't care really).

The audience for Jackie Mason had an average age of about 55, and that was with a couple of teenagers thrown in, who were accompanying their dads. This meant the prostate routine got a lot of laughs, but then it was amazingly funny, even to those of us who don't have prostates.

The age profile meant that at the interval people were ordering gin and tonics, a drink whose name you do not hear in Irish bars too often, for obvious reasons. And that no one stopped to do their make-up in front of the mirrors in the ladies . . . which was good.

Jackie Mason is no chicken himself.

Our party estimated that he must be 75.

This was his second night in Vicar Street, due to popular demand. Jackie Mason's trousers did not match his jacket because, we decided later, it is hard to match black items in the dim light of a hotel room. The jacket was double breasted, which was a mistake, because Jackie has a bit of a tum. That's the only negative comment I can make about the whole night.

It was a strange evening, because Jackie Mason's routine rests firmly on his home ground, a critique of American Jews. In a city whose Jewish population has been decimated, in a country where the option of Jewishness was not even included on the recent census form, this was peculiar. It could appeal to good old Irish anti-Semitism, which as we all know is considerable.

But the strangest thing of all was that the more Jackie Mason talked about American Jews, the more Irish they sounded. The Puerto Ricans are far too happy, said Jackie Mason. They walk down the street saying 'I'm so happy'.

Jews are angry. They walk down the street saying 'Those Nazi bastards. I'm going to sue'."

When he went into his routine about status symbols, and about how the Mercedes Benz is not the miracle of engineering that it is made out to be, but merely a status symbol for the gullible, there was a cry of protest from the audience. (I know this is true because it turned out I knew the man who made the cry of protest. He gave me a lift home. In his Mercedes. I'm counting that as a second source. So there. ) Jackie Mason, he told us, had been a failure for 35 years. Most of what you got when you got rich was worthless, he said. He did a brilliant piece on hotels.

And on mini-bars. The audience roared with recognition. It was fascinating. He was so good. He was also dirty.

But, as he would put it, that's not nice to say.