He kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had closed and eventually brought it, triumphantly, to Broadway.

Jackie Mason, whose staccato, arm-waving delivery and thick Yiddish accent kept the borscht belt style of comedy alive long after the Catskills resorts had shut their doors, and whose career reached new heights in the 1980s with a series of one-man shows on Broadway, died on Saturday in Manhattan.

Mason’s death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his longtime friend, the lawyer Raoul Felder, who said the comedian was 93.

Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his personal sense of dignity.

“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”.

Mason made comic capital as a Jew feeling his way — sometimes nervously, sometimes pugnaciously — through a perplexing gentile world.

Describing his comic style to The New York Times in 1988, he said: “My humor — it’s a man in a conversation, pointing things out to you.”.

Mason later said.

“My accent reminds them of a background they’re trying to forget,” he later said.

Mason’s career was off and running.

He became a regular on the top television variety shows, recorded two albums for the Verve label (“I Am the Greatest Comedian in the World Only Nobody Knows It Yet” and “I Want to Leave You With the Words of a Great Comedian”) and wrote a book, “My Son the Candidate.”.

Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”.

1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

Mason set about rebuilding his career with guest appearances on television.

His new manager, Jyll Rosenfeld, convinced that the old borscht belt comics were ripe for a comeback, encouraged him to bring his act to the theater as a one-man show.

After attracting celebrity audiences in Los Angeles, that show, “The World According to Me!,” opened on Broadway in December 1986 and ran for two years.

Mason said.

Mason at first refused to apologize but did so later

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status (and earned him a second Emmy)

Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property

Mason once said of his career turnaround