Royal Variety Show 1996 - Victor Borge, Joan Rivers and Jackie Mason

The 1996 Royal Variety Performance was given at the London Dominion in the presence of Prince Charles and featured three American comedians. Victor Borge was born in 1909 to a Jewish family living in Denmark, both his parents being musicians. He took to music at an early age and was giving concerts and piano recitals while still a teenager. He soon began combining humour with music and this resulted in a long-running comedy routine. The German invasion of Denmark in 1940 occurred while he was on tour in Sweden but he managed to escape the Nazis and cross the Atlantic. There he began his now famous comedy act in vaudeville and on the radio and TV, as well as becoming an American-naturalized citizen. He's seen here, at the age of 87, performing much the same routine he'd been doing for the previous 50 years but still getting the laughs.

Joan Rivers also had a long career as a comedienne, actress, writer, producer and television host. Her comedic style was often controversial, often acerbic and scatological but according to one New York critic, she was "quite possibly the most intuitively funny woman alive," while Rolling Stone Magazine once ranked her as "one of the best 50 stand-up comics of all time." She was also a long-standing friend of Prince Charles and attended his wedding to Camilla in 2005. Doubtless he enjoyed her performance here several years earlier, even though she had to tone it down somewhat!

Jackie Mason is another American stage performer who is ranked as one of the greatest 100 stand-up comics of all time. He comes from a long line of rabbis and became a rabbi himself at the age of 25. However, three years later he resigned his job as a rabbi in order to become a comedian because, he said, "somebody in the family had to make a living." Like Borge and Rivers, he had a long career on the stage, radio and TV, not without some controversy, and won numerous awards, his routines being described as "roaringly funny." In this Royal Variety appearance he touches on English food, diseases - this being all too topical these days - the ballet, the opera and TV weather forecasters. He had some fun with audience members in the front row and was given a great round of applause at the end.

Incidentally, these three performers were introduced by Bob Monkhouse, himself a noted British comedian.

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