Comedians are something like the front-line workers of show business. As the recent death of Norm Macdonald and the controversy surrounding Dave Chappelle show us, stand-up comics are often among the first in society to confront conventional wisdom. They stick their necks out, state obvious truths, and make us laugh in the process.
If comedians in general are to be compared to front-line workers, Mort Sahl, who died on Tuesday at the age of 94, ought to be regarded as the Florence Nightingale of the field: a pioneer, a front-runner, a shining star of his profession. In applying his gifts of perception to the issues of the day, Sahl, no less than his peer Lenny Bruce, made room not only for Macdonald and Chappelle but George Carlin and Richard Pryor, too. “He made the country listen to jokes that required them to think,” Woody Allen, one of his most notable proteges, said in 1975. “Watching him made me want to be a stand-up comedian.”
Like all genuine groundbreakers, Sahl was sui generis, and his background offers few clues about where he found inspiration. Born in Montreal, where his New York-born father, Harry, had for a time relocated after his dreams to become a playwright were dashed, Sahl was reared in Los Angeles. During World War II, the future jokester, overcome by pangs of patriotism, ditched high school, added a few years to his age, and joined the Army. The ruse didn’t last beyond a couple of weeks, but after getting his diploma, Sahl again signed up for military service, enlisting in the Army Air Forces. Returning to civilian life, he made his way to the University of Southern California, where he majored in traffic engineering and city management.
Mort Sahl, a civil engineer? Just as Sahl’s unremarkable wardrobe masked his trenchant wit — he was noted for donning a V-neck sweater — his modest, strait-laced credentials disguised a freethinker waiting to burst forth. Deciding to establish himself as a comic, Sahl tried and failed to get gigs at numerous nightclubs before, finally, finding a home at the hungry i, a now-legendary San Francisco nightclub synonymous with comic talent.
“It took about three months to get a laugh because I was talking in a strange language, and I was dealing in politics in 1953,” Sahl recalled in an interview with David Letterman in 1988. He broke the ice with a joke about the McCarthy-era blacklist, which he retold to Letterman: “Every time the Russians put an American in jail, we put an American in jail to show them they can’t get away with it.” Sahl continued: “It was this kind of subtle humor.”
Sahl’s understated, thinking man humor, though, did not make his routines any less surprising. Trotting onto stage armed with a newspaper that he would reference throughout his act, Sahl had the manner of a fun, friendly uncle who had read up on everything and took none of it too seriously. In 1961, on a representative appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Sahl had fun with the new Kennedy administration: “The vice president is in Laos. Are you aware of Laos? Well, it would be easier if I could tell you who the leader was there, but we haven’t chosen him yet.”
In fact, John F. Kennedy was just one of several movers and players who became his personal friends. After Kennedy was assassinated, Sahl’s life took some unusual turns. Reasonably enough, he was an early and vocal skeptic of the Warren Commission, but with the country in no mood for such cynicism, his comedy career floundered. Sahl apparently fell victim to conspiracy fever. In an almost unbelievable detail, the comic was at one point involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s investigation to get to the bottom of the president’s death.
Looked at charitably, perhaps this lapse is best understood as an unfortunate side effect of Sahl’s active, buzzing mind — the same intelligence that gave birth to his brilliant comedy. In a 1967 routine, Sahl stood before a blackboard and mapped out an increasingly convoluted chart of political groups and subgroups in America, including the expansive category of “right-wing social Democrat,” a list purported to include Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney, as well as Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. Sahl said Robert F. Kennedy started somewhere on the right side, relatively speaking, but, as the comic put it, “Occasionally, he’ll make a speech, and he moves over here.” Sahl drew a long, long line to make his point.
Sahl took the measure of the world and told us about what he saw more honestly than the comedians who preceded him. In heaven right now, like all front-line workers, he’s probably entitled to some hazard pay for his efforts.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
