Dangerfield's, he says, is the only club in New York where major comedians still perform. "Seven, eight, nine years ago, there was about 12 clubs that played comedians. There was the Copacabana, the Waldorf Astoria, the Latin Quarter, the Plaza: all those rooms were wiped out." Consequently, Jackie does a lot of performing in such clubs as the Riviera in Las Vegas and the Fontainebleau in Miami. Nowadays, however, he's more interested in making movies. His first one, directed by John Avelson of _Rocky_ fame, was "a big success without anybody seeing it." His second film, _The Jerk_, is now being heavily promoted for its December 14 opening. Also starring Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters and Catlin Adams, it is about a poor black sharecropper's adopted son (Martin) who leaves home and begins wandering on the road until he ends up at the gas station of Harry Hartounian, played by Mason. "He's an uneducated kid who doesn't know anything," explains Jackie. "He doesn't know how to handle himself, how to talk, how to act. I give him a part-time job at my place, and I give him a room. He doesn't know what a job is, and he doesn't understand that you get paid. He never saw money. He thinks you're supposed to eat it. He's a crazy lost kid and I play the father figure." On December 20, Jackie will appear on the _Merv Griffin Show_ with Steve Martin and Carl Reiner, the movie's director. Jackie loves being a comedian because "I'm my own boss and I do what I like ... When young comics say it's a hard business to enter, it's because they have no talent. If a young comic has talent, he's more likely to make a big living than in any business you can think of, with comparatively less effort, and more opportunity, and greater longevity. I never saw a good comedian in this business who hasn't made a comfortable living at it." ******** WESTSIDER MALACHY McCOURT Actor and social critic 9-22-79 "I never take anything seriously -- least of all myself," says Malachy McCourt, one of the wittiest, most outrageous Irish personalities in New York. "I find my life is cyclical, and so I move every five or six years from one interest to another. Now that I'm doing acting sort of full-time, I thoroughly enjoy the uncertainty of it. But I do appear almost also every Wednesday at the unemployment office at 90th Street. I do a matinee from 2:15 to 2:45." He concludes the remarks with his customary gust of laughter. As opinionated as he is entertaining, Malachy McCourt is one of those larger than-life characters who has mastered the art of conversation to such a degree that no matter what people think of him, they cannot help being magnetically attracted by his words.