“My dad wasn’t a hugger and he never said ‘I love you’,” says Maier. “He would kiss the back of my head at dinner time, largely to annoy me. But the house was full of laughter, mimicry and off-colour jokes. My dad did a very good impression of my mother’s older sister, Elsa Strauss, who came from Vienna.”
The comedian's father, Werner, as a young man[Missing Credit]
The Maier family made their home in Newcastle – “they probably thought they were landing in New York” – and Werner’s father set himself up as a tailor, changing his name to Mar Mair, setting up a company called Distinctive Clothing. He sent his son to the city’s Royal Grammar school.
“When Dad was at school, the other kids used to tell him: you started the war,” says Maier.
Maier senior mostly lost his German accent, became an obsessed Newcastle United fan, and rarely talked about his life in Nazi Germany
Maier senior mostly lost his German accent, became an obsessed Newcastle United fan, and rarely talked about his early life in Nazi Germany. “It’s not as if he said, ‘I won’t talk about it’, but he just got on with life,” says Maier. In the Fifties, he met and married Edna, who more commonly goes by the name Vicky. Vicky was born in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine and spent her childhood in Westchester, New York, where her father was a professor. She later became a magistrate.
Maier's father, Werner, with his wife Edna[Missing Credit]
Werner went into the same trade as his father and became the head of a successful manufacturing business. They moved to the Newcastle suburb Gosforth and at one point counted footballer Alan Shearer as a neighbour. Maier passes on a story from his mother. “A story that sticks in my mind about Werner is that, near the start of our marriage, we were at the Arab market in Jerusalem,” writes Vicky. “A man who had a stall offered him 100 camels in exchange for me. Dad said to him that if he would throw in a villa on Mount Carmel, he might consider it. The man said he would shake on it: I had to persuade Dad not to shake on it. He later said the only reason he didn’t is because he’d look rather silly walking up [Gosforth’s] Montagu Avenue with 100 camels.” Safely back in the UK, the couple had three sons: Mark, now 62, Stephen, 64, who is a solicitor in Oxford, and comedy writer Daniel, 57, who worked on the Harry Hill TV shows.
Maier, who is married to Jane and lives in Muswell Hill with his three sons, first worked in advertising as a radio copywriter. He changed the pronunciation from the Germanic sounding “My-er’ to the ‘May-er’, “I just thought it sounded softer, more British,” says Mark.
But his father’s German-Jewish wit runs through the show, from jokes about how Jews can’t attend a function without knowing when it’s time to eat, or where to park – and a thoroughly unsentimental tale about a dead budgie.
What does Maier think is the secret of Jewish comedy? “Well, we are the eternal victims, we have a certain history of being ‘put upon’,” he says. “There’s an air of self-deprecation, and the Jew is never the hero. We also have an obsession with food. I really thought we’d missed a trick by not setting up a bagel stall at the 7th October memorial in Hyde Park.”
During the course of the interview, Maier launches into (actually not bad) impressions of Woody Allen and Jackie Mason. “I’m a big fan of American Jewish comedy,” he says. “There are only really a few of us here: David Baddiel, Simon Brodkin, Bennett Arron, though I do consider myself one of the better British Jewish comedians – I nudniked my way in.”
When Maier won the Jewish performer of the year award, his apparently reserved father stood up in the auditorium and shouted: “That’s my son!” Maybe he wasn’t a “hugger” but we can all agree that Werner would be so proud that his boy is once again topping the bill on a West End stage.
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