As he makes his seventh trip to Broadway, devoted fans will say that Jackie Mason and his unswerving Borscht Belt comedy are a New York institution: Like the Empire State Building, he may change his colors, but you always know where he stands. Those who find him unfunny and retrograde (and there is room for both camps) will say that his shows are more like the Holland Tunnel: inexplicably crowded and endless to get through.

“This is going to be one of the great shows of all time,” says Mr. Mason, mere seconds into his act at the Helen Hayes. Self-puffery is crucial to the Jackie Mason shtick. How much is sincere and how much just part of the fun? Who knows? Early in the act he takes a swipe at his last Broadway show, the failed musical “Laughing Room Only.” Thanks to a round of harsh reviews and tiny audiences, it closed after 14 performances in 2003.

“It stunk,” he says. But the explanation contains a dodge: The experience taught him that people just want to see him, not a bunch of singers and dancers. So here he is, solo once more.

“Jackie Mason: Freshly Squeezed” promises all new material, if not a new format. (The subtitle runs “Just One Jew Talking!” and if it sounds remotely apologetic, I direct your attention to the exclamation point.) Strictly speaking, these may be new jokes, but not new premises. In Mr. Mason’s world, every doctor is an Indian, and so is every cabbie. He admires gay people for being proud of their lifestyle, but indulges in gross anti-gay stereotypes. Suddenly he’s skipping around the stage in his double-breasted suit, impersonating an interior decorator. The next thing he says is: “That’s why I don’t make fun of them.” He doesn’t?

At 73, Mr. Mason is Broadway’s cranky uncle. His own happy self-absorption, the sense that he resists inconvenient realities, has become part of the joke. Never, never, he says, will you see a straight version of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” (Comedy Central ran a series called “Straight Plan for the Gay Man” last year.) Women never want to pay their share of a dinner check, he says, even though they work the same jobs as men and earn almost as much money. His list of gender-equal occupations begins with “stevedores,” not, last I checked, a hotbed of feminist agitation. He makes fun of Christo’s “Gates” because orange is “the one color nobody likes” – unaware or unconcerned that his own show has the brightest, loudest orange curtain ever to grace a Broadway stage.

You won’t catch Mr. Mason sweating this stuff, or what you might think about it. “Most of my life in this business, I was starving to death,” he says at one point. “Now I don’t care. . . . I live like a king.” Like Dame Edna, Mr. Mason rags the people with the iffy judgment to sit in the first few rows: gay-baits some, suggests others are idiots. Fail to answer one of his questions, or react with insufficient devastation to a punchline, and you risk one of his favorite putdowns. As ever, these are “Notzi bastids” and “sunsuvbitches.”

The act falls flat now and then, but he’s been at this for so long that usually he’ll find a new thread and keep rolling. Some of the new material really is funny: why toilets are better than movies, the slim possibility of life on Mars, the special treat of getting a prostate exam at a teaching hospital. And there are laughs for the old favorites, of course. “There’s actually gentiles here!” he declares, startled. “Who let them in?”

“Well, ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad I was such a hit,” he says, beginning to wind things up. Two hours is longer than this material can support, unless you’re a hard-core aficionado, in which case maybe it flies. Even his biggest fans, if they’re passionate about the theater, may grumble a little about Mr. Mason taking up precious Broadway real estate for what is essentially a stand-up act. But there’s no dislodging him. For the next little while, at least, you can find him across the street from the Shubert, where “Spamalot” reigns supreme. “They get my overflow,” he says with a shrug.

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