Back in December 2003, I hear Terry Gross interview Mort Sahl on N.P.R.'s Fresh Air program. I remember being very disappointed at the way he kept knocking today’s comedians for not being really funny.
When Gross asked him what he didn’t like about current comedy, he kept saying meaningless things like “ya gotta have politics!” and explaining that he was a Marxist, so he had a point of view whereas comics today didn’t. And he kept saying “ya gotta make it bleed!” and gave as an example some lame dig he took at Nixon when they happened to meet face-to-face by chance.
He sounded like a talentless hack to me and none of the political material he recounted seemed to have anywhere near the trenchant quality of The Daily Show. It all seemed like the kind of tame, vaguely resentful type of humour of a put-upon mid-level functionary, someone who wanted to show how clever he was without actually incorporating any meaningful criticism into his supposedly “political” humour.
Like a lot of other things, it was funny at the time – the time being about 1965.
Sahl was a “smart” comedian like Nichols and May, Godfrey Cambridge, Bob Newhart and a lot of others who came up around that time. He mixed in current events, some politics and stayed away from the Henny Youngman-style vaudeville, Allen & Rossi shtick and Bob Hope the-gag’s-the-same-just-change-the-name jokes.
My favorite Mort Sahl line of all was just a little throw-away line when he was describing middle-of-the-road political types. The typical suburban MOR
Woody Allen was a huge Mort Sahl fan and cites him as a major influence, for what that’s worth. (I find Woody Allen screamingly funny to this day, but the little Sahl I’ve read and heard didn’t do anything for me.)
Gerald Nachman in Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s devotes a 50-page opening chapter to Sahl. Sahl was the first current events improvisational comic. His schtick was carrying a copy of the day’s newspaper and doing a running commentary on the politics and culture. We all take that for granted today but nobody else was doing anything even close in those days. Late-night monologs on the day’s issues didn’t exist. Heck, television news didn’t exist. Intelligent people got their news from the newspapers.
So Sahl in the 50s was a perfect connection to his time and place, that being a hip, upscale, progressive slice of society. He doesn’t really work on records, because his odd timing and thinking-as-he’s-talking style comes across as bumbling to those of us used to comics who have their whole routines slickly memorized. He doesn’t work well on television either, because his contempt for the mass audience comes through in his humor.
And he became a crank after the Kennedy assassination, just when the audience for his earlier brand of comedy began to boom.
Nachman, for me, makes the case for his greatness and importance as a you-had-to-be-there innovator. I wasn’t there, and there may not be even one person on the Dope who was. Looking in from the outside, Sahl doesn’t live up to those who could adapt their styles outside nightclubs. He’s part of the ranks of those performers whom you have to see live and in their prime. But there is a long and honorable list of performers like those, so he’s in good company.
I saw him in Jupiter Beach, Florida in February. Some of it was blindingly funny, some of it fell on its tired butt. And yes, some of it was very much dated. He was never Lenny Bruce.
Of course, that’s only true if you’ve never heard of Will Rogers who started doing that in the 1920s or so. Mort Sahl definately was funny back in his day, and if you are familiar with the events that started his comments, you can still find them funny. However, Mort has turned into like Charles Grodin and Alan King who seemed to think that if a comic isn’t telling the same kind of jokes they were, they aren’t funny.
Good point. Rogers was just sui generis, though. He didn’t really have any successors and the whole stand-up tradition developed entirely separately. Sahl’s persona was also wildly different from Rogers’ and from everyone else in his day, even the early Lenny Bruce.
I’d also argue about how much improvisation Rogers did. Even though he commented on the news, he carefully worked out his act ahead of time and didn’t riff in the middle of it. Most of the one-liners he became famous for are actually from his newspaper column and not his stage act.
Of course, we have even less evidence of Rogers live at his peak than we do of Sahl. I wish I could have seen him.
True, but he was an iconic figure, and his commentary was as sophisticated as it was funny, whereas a lot of modern comics, who comment on things are funny, but not nearly as sophisticated.
From my understanding, his act was a mixture of both. He did go through the papers before walking out on stage, but like any good comic, he wasn’t afraid to milk a joke that went over well.
There’s some footage of Rogers doing his “stand up” act, but I don’t know if it was a live performance that they filmed, or if it was staged to look like it. Ever read his last column? It’s unusually brief, and I could swear that he knew he and Wiley weren’t going to make it.
Right. But my point is that Rogers’ captured work in radio and on newsreels is like Sahl’s captured work on television shows: a carefully constrained and unnatural variant of his true métier, the live act. Even Sahl’s comedy albums apparently are not good representatives of his act, even though they are a recording of a small part of one night’s worth. But that small bit is still more than we have of Rogers live at the Ziegfeld Follies.