People: Still standing up for what he believes in
Mort Sahl tosses his head back in delight upon being reminded that the elderly man calmly sipping his latte and commenting on the state of the world was once comedy’s angry young man.
“Angry?” asks Sahl, 80, amusement registering in his deeply set but still-piercing blue eyes.
Disappointed, maybe. Definitely heartbroken, 44 years after the death of John F. Kennedy – whom he mocked publicly but admired privately.
But angry?
“Since I talked about social and political hypocrisy I guess that was considered angry,” he says, adding with a wry smile: “I had a pretty good time along the way.”
He also helped redefine stand-up comedy, taking it from one-liners to a form in which comics began talking about things that mattered.
“He really was the first, even before Lenny Bruce, in terms of talking about stuff, not just doing punch lines,” says comedian Albert Brooks.
When Sahl arrived on the comedy scene in the 1950s, he was clearly the hippest guy in the room – dressed in a V-neck sweater at a time when everyone else was still wearing a coat and tie.
Pacing like a caged lion, talking in a staccato, stream-of-consciousness voice punctuated with a nervous laugh, Sahl would keep the jokes on current events flowing rapid-fire as he held that day’s newspaper under one arm.
While time has turned his thick, dark hair white, some things haven’t changed, including the sweater and newspaper – although Sahl jokes that he’ll have to replace the latter with a laptop.
Then there’s the pointed wit, as in this comment on President George W. Bush.
“He’s born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you were given the unusual opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush?”
Sahl is proud to have met – and made fun of – just about every president since Eisenhower.
He doesn’t list favorites, although he notes that he and Ronald Reagan became good friends. Richard Nixon, he says, liked being portrayed as a raving lunatic, once telling him that image intimidated other world leaders.
Sahl fell out of favor for several years when he became interested – some would say obsessed – with the Kennedy assassination and spent years helping the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, investigate conspiracy theories.
He suffered his own personal tragedy when his only child, Mort Sahl Jr., died at age 19.
“My kid was like a more human version of me,” he says, voice trembling. “Great sense of humor.”
In the fall, he’ll begin teaching a college class in critical thinking, hoping to turn students into his kind of iconoclast – one who underneath it all still has a deep-seated affection for America.
“I think you have to believe in all those movies written by all those communists they blacklisted in the 1950s,” he says, “who said the good guys are going to win and they’re going to get the girl.”
The birthday bunch
Singer Steve Lawrence is 72. Actor Jeffrey Tambor is 63. Actress Anjelica Huston is 56. Actor Kevin Bacon is 49. Country singer Toby Keith is 46. Actor Billy Crudup is 39. Singer Beck is 37. Actor Milo Ventimiglia (“Heroes”) is 30. Actress Sophia Bush (“One Tree Hill”) is 25.