No Dave Chappelle or Hannah Gadsby Without Mort Sahl


Mort Sahl for the first time in this article, theater critic Brooks Atkinson it was referenced as a “room speaker,” because that’s more or less how comics were in the 1950s. Of course they still are. But now they’re also philosophers, political sages, conspirators, thugs, rebels, and outcasts. And no one deserves more credit for expanding his portfolio than Mort Sahl.

When news broke that he had died at the age of 94 on Tuesday, a common reaction was, wait, was Mort Sahl still alive? Call it a cautionary tale about living long enough to be forgotten.

Before comedy clubs even existed, Mort Sahl brought the news of the day to punchlines to acclaim and spearheaded the now-expanding branch of political comedy. While his contemporary, Lenny Bruce, died young, and Bruce’s reputation fraught with death, Sahl was past its heyday in the mid-1960s and was wildly out of fashion in the next decade. That same year when he tried to make a comeback on Broadway in 1987. Jackie Mason Laurie Stone of The Village Voice revived her career there, giving Sahl a stinging tribute: “He’s irrelevant now.”

Unlike other legends of his era, Mel Brooks or Bob Newhart, Sahl, who was generally not generous with his colleagues, was too abrasive to be widely loved. Chris Rock foretold “Carrot Top is better than Mort Sahl.”

But Sahl has champions, none more consistently enthusiastic Woody Allen. “He was an original genius who revolutionized the media,” he said. “He made the country listen to jokes that made them think.”

Of course, some of this talk is exaggerated (including the occasional one by Sahl). Redd Foxx released a comedy album years before that. Sahl did not invent a current comedy about news topics (see Rogers, Will), and some of these arguments are based on a narrow definition of politics. Sahl has largely spoken of how radical it was for him not to wear a tuxedo on stage, but for Timmie Rogers, a Black comic that began in the 1940s, wearing a tuxedo was just as meaningful.

The best example of Sehl’s legacy was his style and presentation. It represented a clean break from the borscht past, a rejection of the shtick and canned staple lines. Sahl moved stand-up out of the age of joke books and into an era where the material was not only original and unique to an actor, but a reflection of a different personality.

The only time I saw Mort Sahl performing in person at Café Carlyle in 2013, his delivery was jerky and quick, with punch lines from President Barack Obama on the sidelines or cuts. What stood out most was his demeanor: constantly puzzled, cheerfully, without an ounce of anger in his mocking speeches. She gave the audience exactly what they wanted, from her outfit to the traditional V-neck sweater that was once a symbol of high school solemnity. The cigar bore as much a signature as for Groucho Marx.

Watching it made me wonder if if you do something long enough it will inevitably get crappy. Was the first time Henny Youngman said “Take my wife – please” personal? It’s hard to say, but one of the things that makes Sahl so important is that he’s famous for doing comedy that predicts our current scene. He may be the only comedian to pave the way for both Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle to take on the competition of the moment. Let me explain.

Long before Gadsby formally integrated art history and feminist criticism into their demanding stand-up routines, comedians had to underestimate their intelligence. You had to play the fool to earn smart points. After the work of Jon Stewart, Dennis Miller, and John Oliver, among others, Sahl took the opposite stance, a movement that now seems banal. However, a significant portion of Sehl’s early press attention focused on an intellectual curiosity that made jokes. Variety called him “the darling of minds” and Bob Hope once mocked him as “the favorite comedian of nuclear physicists everywhere.”

Along with his intervening style, this made Sahl the patron saint of lower comedy, but he was not a niche artist. By 1960, he was a major star, host of the Oscars and the first Grammy Awards, writing jokes for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, who were featured on the cover of Time magazine. His rise was swift and short, and his fall was just as sudden. It can be traced roughly back to the Kennedy assassination.

Sahl stuck with the Warren Commission’s report on the killing, devoting years of his life, including stage time, to tearing it apart, franticly denouncing groupthink and swaying alternative theories. Decades before Joe Rogan found the gold by becoming a clearinghouse for conspiracies, Sahl dug this ground. In 1966 he hosted a satirical TV show focusing on Kennedy. as his biographer James Curtis to put “Comedy almost gave way to anger.” It sounds familiar.

One of Sahl’s lines was asking if there were any groups he didn’t offend. His reactionary ideas on gender and outright sexism drew backlash. After gaining a reputation as a quintessentially liberal critic, Sahl became a Nixon voter who spoke fondly of Ronald Reagan. His image has gone from professorial sage to mid-American outlaw, and he put a cowboy in silhouette on the cover of his loud, disgraceful memoir “Heartland,” which was advertised with a flat face on its front page: “Here is the pain. and the euphoria of an out-of-control conscience.” Later, Lenny called Bruce “ignorant” before bragging about the time Marilyn Monroe placed her hand on his chest and said, “Don’t be afraid, Mr. Sahl.” This is a trip.

In this book you can hear echoes of the current Chappelle: self-mythologizing, sensibility, outbursts of grandeur. Sahl cleverly plays the victim, saying that after joining the Warren Commission, he was unable to sign a single record deal. If the term cancellation culture was around then, he would have used it.

Like many “canceled” comics today, Sahl continued to work and never retired, although he never regained his old self. I didn’t know it was still active until a few years ago when someone told me that it not only performs at a theater in Mill Valley, California every week, but is also broadcast live. And of course, I looked at him and he was there in his 90’s, still confused and glowing with that wolfish grin. It was inspiring and not a little weird, like discovering Fat Arbuckle was still alive and acting.

In popular narratives of stand-up history, Lenny Bruce is often positioned as the founding father, and his struggle for freedom of expression is a great romantic story to build on. It doesn’t have the same meaning in a biopic called “Mort”. But look at the comedy scene today, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and this lounge speaker seems more relevant than ever.



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