Mort Sahl, Social Satirist

Crowned as leading the new breed of modern comedians by Time magazine in 1960, Mort Sahl was the first entertainer ever to appear on its cover.  Before comedy clubs existed, Sahl began performing at the hungry i music club in San Francisco in the early 1950s. He differed from other comedians, appearing in casual clothing rather than a suit, skewering popular politicians such as Eisenhower, Joe McCarthy and JFK.  Sahl’s approach is energetic, tangential, and deep and wide in both social and political scopes, inspiring Woody Allen, George Carlin and countless other comedians.  

A 1955 performance with Dave Brubeck was recorded and released (without Sahl’s permission), selling as Mort Sahl At Sunset, and recently recognized by the Library of Congress as the first stand-up comedy record album.  

When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl regularly targeted the government’s official Warren Commission Report during his routines, resulting in the loss of much of Hollywood’s support, while maintaining audience popularity with college tours and a best-selling book, Heartland.  

Sahl is the longest active performing American social satirist, spanning sixty years and eleven presidents.

Excerpt from Roger Ebert’s Review of Sahl’s Performance, 1971

“I went back to Mister Kelly’s the other night to catch Mort Sahl again[…] watched the finest, quickest, most intelligent comic mind in America at work. […]”

The fundamental difference in style between Sahl and other comedians is that he doesn’t do a monologue, he does a tapestry. Almost all comedians do linear routines. The old-fashioned comics string together jokes – that most linear of all literary forms – and the newer comics impose some kind of an outside structure like autobiography, in order to give their essentially unrelated material the appearance of hanging together.

Sahl works in the opposite way, seeming to glory in the fact that his material seems incredibly diverse and unorganized. He moves from Muskie to air in your hot dogs to Radical Chic parties to Lenny Bruce to Freud, and then reminds himself he was talking about Muskie, and doubles back, and free-associates off the track in a new direction, and doubles back again, and keeps all of these subjects going for ten minutes at a time and then snatches a line out of thin air that somehow, miraculously, gathers everything together into one penultimate vision of America.

This style cannot be imitated because it’s more of a personal revelation than it is a method. It is probably the most complex verbal style yet produced by an American humorist, and in the way it reflects the moment-to-moment functioning of a restless mind, it is the spoken equivalent of some of William Faulkner’s prose.