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Satirist Mort Sahl, who revolutionized stand-up comedy during the Cold War with his ongoing commentary on politicians and current events and became the darling of a new, troubled generation of Americans, died Tuesday. He was 94.
His friend Lucy Mercer said he died “peacefully” at his home in Mill Valley, California. The cause is “old age,” she said.
At a time when many comedians wore tuxedos and told mother-in-law jokes, in the 50s and 60s Sahl stood facing his audience in pants, sweaters, and an unbuttoned collar, and carried a rolled up newspaper with sticky notes about his act on it. He read the news as if he were sitting across from you at the kitchen table, making his inevitably cutting comments, often joining in with an equine roar for laughter, and ending his routines with the question, “Is there a group that I haven’t offended? ? “
“Any comedian who doesn’t joke his wife has to thank him for it,” actor-comedian Albert Brooks told The Associated Press punchline in 2007. “
Sahl prided himself on mocking every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump, despite admitting that he privately admired the Democrat John F. Kennedy and that his closest friends were the Republican Ronald Reagan. Commenting on President George W. Bush, he said, “He is born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you had the unusual opportunity to be reborn, why should you return as George Bush? “
Sahl became famous in 1953 in the hungry i (which i stood for intellectual) in San Francisco, the perfect place for a comedian of his kind. The town was a hangout for beatniks and college activists, and they crowded the tiny club to meet someone to hear their contempt for the status quo. The young comedian with the unmistakable style got around quickly. Soon, Sahl was making $ 7,500 a week in nightclubs across the country and was appearing on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar. In 1960 he made the cover of Time magazine and was portrayed in the New Yorker.
A new generation of comedians, including Bill Cosby, George Carlin, and the team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, were inspired by Sahl. David Letterman continued the iconoclastic tradition, and more recently Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver. Woody Allen would compare his work to Charlie Parker’s jazz, and reviewers compared him to Will Rogers, who tweaked politicians more gently.
“I don’t have the image of myself as a comedian,” said Sahl himself. “I never said I was one. I just tell the truth and everyone breaks off on the way. “
Sahl was cast as a funny GI in two war films, “In Love and War” (1958) and “All the Young Men” (1960). He starred in his own TV special. His comedy albums became bestsellers. At the Academy Awards in 1959 he co-hosted with Bob Hope, Laurence Olivier, Jerry Lewis and others. Fearing he would join the establishment, Sahl collapsed: “We just lost the college audience; all over the country they are shouting: ‘Sale!’ “
He often ridiculed his friend Reagan in the 1980s, but said the president was never offended.
“If you’re his friend, it doesn’t matter if you’re an escaped con man,” Sahl once said of Reagan. Democrats, he added, are often not so lenient. In the 1990s, Sahl had fallen out of favor with them when he complained that President Bill Clinton’s only lasting legacy would be his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky at the White House.
“A lot of the people I have met in the Democratic Party are extremely helpful,” he said. “When it’s over, they don’t want to know you anymore. Of course, that’s not universal for the Democrats. “
However, Sahl loved Kennedy so much that he even wrote jokes for him during the election campaign, including one that inspired JFK’s joke at his own expense – via a telegram from his wealthy father. “Don’t buy a voice more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I have to pay for a landslide. “
But when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl was devastated, and the tragedy foreshadowed years of decline in the comedian’s fortune. Quickly convinced that Kennedy had been killed as part of a CIA conspiracy, he accused the government of orchestrating a massive cover-up. He devoted a large part of his monologues to reading long passages from the report of the government’s Warren Commission, which had been tasked with investigating the attack. The audience stopped laughing and their bookings plummeted.
Sahl also suffered personal tragedy in 1996 when his only child, Morton Jr., died at the age of 19. Ten years later the subject was so raw that the mention of his son’s name brought him to tears.
“My child was like a more human version of me,” he once said.
He continued to work in college circles and small clubs during the troubled times. Although he never regained his former stature, he eventually returned to making a living doing comedy
He continued to carry his newspaper with him on stage, despite joking at the beginning of the 21st century that he probably should have replaced it with a laptop.
At the age of 80, he also began teaching a critical thinking class at the prestigious Claremont McKenna College in Southern California.
It was a return to academic life that Sahl had known decades earlier when he graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in urban planning in 1950.
He put plans to study on hold and decided to make money writing jokes for comedians. He once said that he went on stage himself when he discovered that those for whom he was writing were “too stupid” to get the material.
Morton Lyon Sahl was born on May 11, 1927 in Montreal to a Canadian mother and a New York father who ran a tobacco shop. The family moved to the United States, where Sahl’s father Harry worked for the Justice Department in various cities.
They eventually settled in Los Angeles, where young Morton attended his high school ROTC program and distinguished himself for his language. His mother said he started speaking at the age of 7 months and already spoke like a man of 30 by the age of 10.
After high school, Sahl joined the Air Force and spent 31 months at a remote Alaska airfield, editing the postal newspaper Poop from the Group. Dismissed in 1947, he entered college.
He took on a number of jobs before his girlfriend Sue Berber persuaded him to audition for the hungry in 1953.
The couple married two years later, but divorced in 1957. Sahl married his second wife, former Playboy Playmate China Lee, in 1967. They also got divorced.
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The late Associated Press writer Bob Thomas contributed biographical information to this report. AP National Writer Hillel Italie and retired Associated Press writer John Rogers also contributed.
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