Mort Sahl

Morton Lyon Sahl (May 11, 1927 – October 26, 2021) was a Canadian-born American comedian, actor, and social satirist. He pioneered a style of social satire that pokes fun at political and current event topics by means of improvised monologues, using only a newspaper as a prop.

Sahl spent his early years in Los Angeles and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he made his professional stage debut at the hungry i nightclub in 1953. His popularity grew quickly, and after a year at the club, he traveled the country doing shows at established nightclubs, theaters, and college campuses. In 1960 he became the first comedian to be featured in a Time cover story. He appeared on various television shows, played a number of film roles, and performed a one-man show on Broadway.

The television host Steve Allen said that Sahl was "the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy". His social satire performances broke new ground in live entertainment, as a stand-up comic talking about the real world of politics at that time was considered "revolutionary". His act inspired many later comics to become stage comedians, including Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Lewis Black and Woody Allen. Allen credits Sahl's new style of humor with "opening up vistas for people like me".

Numerous politicians became his fans, with John F. Kennedy asking him to write his jokes for campaign speeches, though Sahl later turned his barbs at the president. After Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Sahl focused on what he said were the Warren Report's inaccuracies and conclusions and spoke about them often during his shows. This alienated much of his audience and led to a decline in his popularity for the remainder of the 1960s. By the 1970s, his shows and popularity staged a partial comeback that continued over the ensuing decades. A biography of Sahl, Last Man Standing, by James Curtis, was released in 2017.

Sahl was born on May 11, 1927, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the only child of Jewish parents. His father, Harry Sahl, came from an immigrant family on New York City's Lower East Side, and hoped to become a Broadway playwright. Harry had met his wife, Dorothy (Schwartz), when she responded to an advertisement he placed in a poetry magazine. Unable to break into the writing field, they moved to Canada where he owned a tobacco store in Montreal.

Sahl's family later relocated to Los Angeles, where his father, unable to become a Hollywood writer, worked as a clerk and court reporter for the FBI. Sahl notes, "My dad was disappointed in his dreams and he distrusted that world for me." Sahl went to Belmont High School in Los Angeles, where he wrote for the school's newspaper. Actor Richard Crenna was a classmate.

When the U.S. entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Sahl, then aged 14, joined the school's Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). He won a medal for marksmanship and an American Legion "Americanism award". Wanting to express his patriotism, he wore his ROTC uniform to school and in public and, when he turned fifteen, he dropped out of high school to join the United States Army by lying about his age. His mother tracked him down and brought him back home two weeks later after she had revealed his true age.

After Sahl graduated from high school, his father tried to get him into West Point and had received his Congressman's help, but Sahl had by then already enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces. He was later stationed in Alaska with the 93rd Air Depot Group. In the military, however, he resisted the discipline and authoritarian control it exerted over his life. He expressed his nonconformity by growing a beard and refusing to wear a cap as required. He also wrote articles for a small newspaper criticizing the military that resulted in his being penalized with three months of KP duty. In an interview, Sahl stated he found his military experience a good one, that he described as "spiritual".