Did Media Commentators Make Fun Of The Funeral Service
Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Upwards, Dies at 94
A cocky-appointed warrior against hypocrisy, he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social bug.
Mort Sahl, who confronted Eisenhower-era cultural complacency with acid stage monologues, delivering bitter social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changing the nature of both stand up-upward one-act and social commentary, died on Tuesday at his dwelling in Mill Valley, Calif., near San Francisco. He was 94.
The death was confirmed by Lucy Mercer, a friend helping to oversee his diplomacy.
Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as "a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily" — Mr. Sahl had a long, upward-and-downwards career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Committee report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; so, over the post-obit decades, he occasionally faded dorsum in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.
He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences total of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited every bit "the earliest instance of modern stand-upwards comedy on record," the album "At Sunset." (Though recorded in 1955, it was non released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official get-go album, "The Future Lies Ahead.") By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy's presidential campaign, hosted the University Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).
An inveterate contrarian and a broad-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a cocky-appointed warrior confronting hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he alleged that Brooks Brothers stores didn't have mirrors; customers merely stood in front of one some other to encounter how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: "Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they tin feel adept for 10 minutes."
Paradigm
But more than anything else, it was politicians who were the fuel for his acrimony. For that reason he was oftentimes compared to Volition Rogers, whose expiry in 1935 had left the field of political humor substantially arid, though Mr. Sahl had none of Rogers'southward homeyness and detested the comparison.
"I never met a human being I didn't like until I met Will Rogers," he once said, turning the famous Rogers line confronting him, despite never having met him. He described Rogers as a man who pretended to be "a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government," whereas Mr. Sahl himself pretended to be "an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government."
In Dec 1953, when Mr. Sahl outset took the phase at the hungry i — the hip nightclub in San Francisco that he helped make hip, where he would routinely be introduced every bit "the adjacent president of the U.s.a." — American comedy was largely defined past an unadventurous joke-book mentality. Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman may have been indisputably funny, but the rimshot gag was the prevailing course, the dial line was male monarch, and mother-in-law insults were legion. It was humor for a cocky-satisfied postwar society.
"Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming," Gerald Nachman wrote in "Seriously Funny," his book-length 2003 study of comedy in the 1950s and '60s. "When he arrived, the revolution had non nonetheless begun. Sahl was the revolution."
Blazing a Trail
Mr. Sahl was a daze to the comedy arrangement. Other groundbreaking comedians — Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them — would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for claiming rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century afterward he began to speak his listen — from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart — Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer besides.
(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not render their honey. He said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy "kind of soft" and urged them to "accept more than chances.")
"He but doesn't bring to mind whatsoever other performer in the history of show business," Mr. Cavett said after watching Mr. Sahl perform in 2004.
Epitome
For one thing, he looked different from other comics of the fourth dimension, eschewing the expected jacket and tie in favor of a more collegiate, informal look in an open up-necked shirt and a Five-neck sweater. And he peppered his routines with the linguistic communication of youth and jazz — he was bugged, he dug this or that, he dated a lot of chicks. He took the stage carrying a rolled-up newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr. Sahl's performances, he talked about, anguished over and ranted at the news, spinning it with sardonic digressions, cryptic asides and blistering zingers.
"I'm for capital penalization," he alleged. "Y'all've got to execute people — how else are they going to learn?"
In a vitriolic riff on the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev'due south 1959 visit to the United States — Mr. Sahl was virulently anti-Soviet — he spoke of an run across betwixt Mr. Khrushchev and Adlai Stevenson: "Khrushchev said to Stevenson, 'If you lot want to be president, I want to tell you how to seize power,' and Stevenson admonished him and said to him, 'You lot know, that'south not the style we do things in this country,' just several members of the Democratic advisory quango who were nowadays admonished Stevenson to proceed quiet and listen to this man!"
Over the years he directed a venomous wit confronting Democrats and Republicans alike, famously supporting Kennedy in his presidential campaign confronting Richard Nixon and so lampooning him after his ballot: In choosing Kennedy, he said, the country was "searching for a son figure."
His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, peculiarly early in his career, just they couldn't quite exercise so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-wiggle liberal dogma on the field of study. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama'southward presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton every bit he was nigh Donald Trump.
"Are in that location any groups I haven't offended?" he was wont to ask from the phase. If nothing else he was a pure iconoclast.
"If yous were the simply person left on the planet, I would have to attack you," he in one case said. "That's my chore."
The Barbs Begin
Morton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, ran a tobacco shop, though he had grown up in New York as an aspiring playwright, and by the time Mort was seven, Harry Sahl had moved the family to Los Angeles and institute work as a clerk for the Department of Justice. At 15, Mort joined the R.O.T.C. and left high school, lying about his age to join the Ground forces; after two weeks, his mother, Dorothy, got him out.
After high schoolhouse, he enlisted again and served in the Army Air Forces in Alaska, where his anti-authoritarian impulse offset flowered. He edited a base paper called Poop From the Group, which needled military construction and routine and which earned him, he said, 83 straight days of mess-hall duty.
Following his belch, he attended Compton Inferior College and the University of Southern California, earning a caste in city management, and so followed a young adult female — Sue Babior, whom he would eventually marry — to Berkeley. Prompted by Ms. Babior, he approached the owner of the hungry i, Enrico Banducci, for a performing gig, though it was mostly a music club. He got a tryout.
"I didn't tell anyone, merely I didn't remember he was so great," Mr. Banducci recalled in "Seriously Funny." He added: "I really looked at him and said, 'Poor kid, he looks so skinny.' I thought for 75 bucks a week he can't hurt the place."
Mr. Sahl'southward early performances stayed away from politics. But within weeks he was commenting on the national scene, and that's when his audience began to build.
He twitted Dwight D. Eisenhower for his dullness. Senator Joseph McCarthy became a favorite target: "Joe McCarthy doesn't question what you say so much as your correct to say it." Lines from his deed began appearing in paper columns, and when Herb Caen, the powerful San Francisco Chronicle columnist, gave Mr. Sahl's human action his imprimatur, his popularity took off.
He fabricated record albums. He played higher concerts. He appeared on tv set with Steve Allen and Jack Paar.
Image
It was later on Kennedy's victory in the 1960 election that Mr. Sahl'due south career starting time veered off track. He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, just when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family's money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably absurd.
On the occasion of Kennedy's presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Mr. Sahl remarked slyly to a crowd estimated at 100,000 that Nixon had sent a congratulatory telegram to Joseph P. Kennedy, the president'due south father: "You haven't lost a son, y'all've gained a land."
Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, equally he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame — he bickered with producers and missed a number of engagements, and he was fired from a starring role in a 1964 Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry's "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window" — gigs were fewer and further between in the 1960s. In 1966, his attempt to open his own nightclub in Los Angeles failed when, he said, backers vanished after printing previews.
"My so-chosen liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment," he said from the stage at one preview. "The aforementioned people who similar jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater all of a sudden freeze when they hear satirical sense of humour about Vietnam or the war on poverty."
Sahl the 'Disturber'
Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn't help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission written report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district chaser, who claimed to accept uncovered hole-and-corner bear witness that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassinator, and who defendant a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, cloak-and-dagger or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw's trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
"I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination," Mr. Sahl wrote in "Heartland," a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, "and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don't think Cistron McCarthy is bad company. I don't call back that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don't call up that Garrison is bad company.
"I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are non my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades." He concluded, "I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice."
Image
Mr. Sahl was married and divorced four times, beginning to Ms. Babior; then to China Lee, the first Asian American model to exist a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009. Mr. Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in 1996 of a drug overdose. No immediate family members survive.
Though he never reclaimed his central place in the entertainment empyrean, Mr. Sahl was somewhat resurgent in the 1970s, partly because Watergate had reinvigorated the public appetite for derision aimed at politicians. He recorded an album, "Sing a Song of Watergate"; was booked past idiot box hosts like Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and David Frost; and continued to do college concerts.
"I'm not 18 anymore," he lamented in "Heartland," "but I'k the angriest man on any campus I visit."
Indeed, Mr. Sahl never lost his fervor for pointing out life's ironies and the hypocrisies of public figures. In 1987, in the wake of Jackie Bricklayer's successful ane-man show, "The World According to Me!" he reappeared on Broadway in i of his ain, "Mort Sahl on Broadway," and he continued to perform in clubs long after that.
In recent years, feisty as ever despite deteriorating health, he had been performing 1 night a week in Mill Valley, where he had moved after iv decades in Beverly Hills. His performances, at the Throckmorton Theater, were as well streamed online and continued until the onset of the pandemic.
"I work as a disturber," Mr. Sahl said in a Times interview after a 2004 performance, a reminder of lines from other decades and how little he had changed.
Even at the height of his fame, in 1960, he was sardonic, bitterly ironic, unsparing.
"I'm the intellectual voice of the era," he said to Time magazine, "which is a good measure of the era."
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
Did Media Commentators Make Fun Of The Funeral Service,
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/arts/television/mort-sahl-dead.html
Posted by: arnoldforthemight.blogspot.com
0 Response to "Did Media Commentators Make Fun Of The Funeral Service"
Post a Comment