Free Republic

During the course of his six-decade career, Jackie Mason was declared one of the greatest comedians of all time, by Mel Brooks; played hundreds of sellout shows, on Broadway and in London; won a Tony, an Emmy and was even nominated for a Grammy; and performed for the Queen and the Queen Mother. He also had career-damaging feuds with the TV host Ed Sullivan and the singer Frank Sinatra, the second of which would end with Mason’s Las Vegas hotel room being strafed with bullets. Mason, who has died aged 93, was a pioneer of a modern, personalised form of...

Bill Cosby admitted to plying teens with booze and drugs before having sex with them, and to having girls regularly dispatched to him by a modeling agency, newly unearthed court papers show. The comic said that at one point in his career, the agency would provide “five or six” young women each week, according to depositions he gave in 2005 and 2006 for a lawsuit. Among other revelations made by Cosby under questioning by lawyers for Andrea Constand, who claims he sexually assaulted her in 2004, was the description of a 1976 encounter with a 19-year-old model named Therese Picking.