COMEDIANS: The Third Campaign

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The citizen has certain misgivings. “Politics aside,” he wonders, “is Richard Nixon worth $100,000 a year? I admit his chances look pretty good, but what about ours?” Waging a sort of personal third campaign, he has a captious eye on Hyannisport as well: “The choice is between the lesser of two evils, anyway,” he says. “Some people claim Nixon is trying to sell the country, and Kennedy is trying to buy it. At the Los Angeles convention I had a hunch about how things were going right from the start, when the minister delivered the invocation and said, ‘A little child shall lead them.’ You know, Kennedy had to have Lyndon Johnson on the ticket with him because he can’t get into Washington without an adult. And Nixon picked Lodge because conservative Republicans approve of anyone getting out of the United Nations. Right? Right.”

quot;Right!”, echoes an almost fanatical following—dedicated fans who are sure that by Election Day Comedian Mort Sahl will have reduced the major candidates to little more than a 5 o’clock shadow and a few odd wisps of singed hair. Often introduced in nightclubs as “the next President of the United States,” Sahl is unlikely this year to achieve his stated ambition to overthrow the Government. That will take time. His audience is still narrow and his appeal is anything but universal. But he is the freshest comedian around; he is a permanent and popular attraction in a nightclub circuit that includes San Francisco’s hungry i, Chicago’s Mister Kelly’s, Manhattan’s Basin Street East; he is carefully monitored by fellow comedians and politicians; and his Los Angeles TV shows during the Democratic Convention made him the most entertaining voice within reach of a microphone. This fall, new territory will be opened up by Sahl when he launches a national tour, with the Lime-liters providing a folk-song counterpoint to his humor.

Revolt Against Pomposity. In the view of his followers, Mort Sahl represents a new and growing feeling, described rather breathlessly by Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as “a mounting restlessness and discontent, an impatience with clichés and platitudes, a resentment against the materialist notion that affluence is the answer to everything, a contempt for banality and corn—in short, a revolt against pomposity. Sahl’s popularity is a sign of a yearning for youth, irreverence, trenchancy, satire, a clean break with the past.”

At 33, Mort Sahl is young, irreverent, and trenchant. With one eye on world news and the other on Variety, he is a volatile mixture of show business and politics, of exhibitionistic self-dedication and a seemingly sincere passion to change the world. The best of the New Comedians, he is also the first notable American political satirist since Will Rogers.

“Whenever there is a political bloat, Mort sticks a pin in it,” says Hubert Humphrey. Among his constituents Sahl counts Adlai Stevenson, who sees him regularly when Sahl is in Chicago. Says Adlai: “I dote on him.” Sahl contributed a joke bank that John Kennedy drew on for his witty performance at last November’s Al Smith Dinner, once discouraged a Nixon worker who approached him for a similar purpose. As for President Eisenhower, he has never heard of Mort Sahl —possibly because the comedian refers to Press Secretary Jim Hagerty as “Ike’s right foot.” But Sahl is no court jester to the Democrats; he often wounds Democrats and often amuses many Republicans (among them: Herb Brownell); he picks off any and all targets in what Kennedy last week called “his relentless pursuit of everybody.” The Heavy Steel. As a topical satirist, Sahl has relatively few U.S. models to draw on. Stunted by frequent periods of political apathy on the one hand and by a chronic, expanding-frontier optimism on the other, political satire has never particularly thrived in the U.S., with some notable exceptions.

In colonial America, Thomas Morton had the undiluted, courage to hate Puritans and say so, calling little Miles Standish “Captain Shrimp.” Between Thomas Morton and Morton Sahl, most political satirists shielded themselves with pseudonyms and fought with fairly heavy steel. Charles Farrar Browne, city editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, set himself up in mid-19th century as the cracker-box philosopher Artemus Ward, announced that the D.C. after Washington stood for “Desprit Cusses,” and advised President Lincoln to fill his Cabinet with show-business types since they would know how to cater to the public. Mark Twain was often deserted by his light touch when he contemplated politics, though he contributed a pair of memorable definitions: a Senator is someone who “makes laws in Washington when not doing time”; and “public office is private graft.”

Finley Peter Dunne, whose Mr. Dooley is the alltime choice of many political connoisseurs, swaddled his man in an Irish dialect that magically permitted him to speak his mind. He once called John D. Rockefeller “a kind iv society f’r th’ prevention iv croolty to money,” and had a skill at reworking slogans that has turned up again in Sahl. “Hands acrost th’ sea and into somewan’s pocket,” said Dooley. Sahl rallied for Ike with the line: “He kept us out of Mars.”

Will Rogers, the country-boy conscience of the ’20s and early ’30s, who insisted that “there is no credit in being a comedian when you have the whole government working for you,” could be biting, but most of the time he was jovially rustic where Sahl is urban and hip. Rogers was lovable, and even his fans do not claim that quality for Sahl. But in his own way, Sahl has taken his place on the center line of the Ward-Dooley-Rogers tradition. The Depression and war years produced only minor political satire. Among comedians, Bob Hope —who still typifies the older, machine-tooled and essentially safe topical joke—might crack about Eleanor Roosevelt’s never staying home; Fred Allen liked to say that Tom Dewey seemed to be eating a Hershey bar sideways. But satire on the whole was caught between social protest and safe, sponsor-tested lampoons. With Mort Sahl, political satire has come alive again.

Verbal Mobiles. Says Sahl mockingly: “I’m the intellectual voice of the era—which is a good measure of the era.” It may well be. Bright and nervous, frenetic, full of quick smiles and dark moods, shouting “Onward, onward” between laughs, performing in a cashmere sweater, always tieless, he manages to suggest barbecue pits on the brink of doom.

Holding a rolled newspaper in his right hand, flashing baby-blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation—or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought; joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, till the whole structure spins but somehow balances. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much part of the whole to be called a punch line, but puts that particular theme away forever.

The U-2 was still smoldering in Sverdlovsk last spring when Mort Sahl began smoldering in Los Angeles. Building toward the big one, he waved the Examiner choppily, noted that Khrushchev had threatened war. “Then he modified it. He said, ‘There will be no war for six to eight months. R.S.V.P.’ ” Still, K. always had the initiative, and Washington was just sitting around like a neglected girl, with Herter fretting: “Has he called today?” Returning to Pilot Francis Powers’ possible fate (“They’ll let him go to please the French”), Sahl again skirted off the subject to note that some religious groups believe in capital punishment—”even though they made a very large Mistake once.”

Dozens of similar cracks, far and near to the downed plane, some made up on the spot, others refashioned from earlier monologues, clustered about the main stem before Sahl decided the time had come. Nathan Hale, he said, regretted that he had only one life to lose for his country. But Powers, ignoring that suicide needle, merely said: “This shatters all my plans.”

Counterpoint to Laughter. When Little Rock entered the news, Sahl approached the theme from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at the President: a critic had said that if the President were really a man, he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. “That’s easy to say if you are not involved,” said Sahl, fingering the trigger. “But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip.” Wild laughter always greeted that one, but with a nod and a nervous chuckle, and a characteristic “It s true, it’s true,” he would slide off into a skein of digressions, usually with an aside for interested conservatives, telling them that they could get the Chicago Tribune anywhere in the U.S., “flown in, packed in ice.” Following Stevenson in Africa, he reported that the natives were suspicious of Adlai’s quick smile and thought he lacked warmth. Then, circling back toward Arkansas, he would press on to the famous line that put Little Rock into permanent and absolute focus: “I like Orval Faubus.” he admitted, “but I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister.”

Talking jumpily and a little like a phonograph record running too fast, he sprays his monologues with far-out terms such as chick, drag, gasser, cool it, bug, dig, weirdo and all that jazz. He also mixes in a never-ending supply of phrases parodying academic jargon (“We must learn to differentiate between generic and relative terms”). Between jokes, he draws on a fat little glossary of verbal rialtos that counterpoint the laughter, indicate his attitude to the material. “Wild, huh?” he will say, standing in the ruins of his most recent target, or “You can’t go too far, fellas,” or “Is there any group I haven’t offended yet?”

Crazing Crazes. Sahl works out every line himself, although he rarely writes anything down, and in collecting material buys newspapers and magazines by the long ton. Skimming, dipping, darting from headline to picture caption, he reacts like a pellet of pure sodium dropped in a glass of water, always has some fresh material for each new audience. There is usually some wild variation of the news, and a routine remark at a presidential press conference might come out as a caricature of the sort of bromide Sahl thinks the Administration is forever administering: ”The President says the Russians are terrified of the Turkish cavalry.”

While politics is always the trunk line, his humor ranges everywhere. Crazes craze him. His masterpiece on hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. When he read that people were daubing themselves with instant skin tan, he moaned: “If you can’t believe in the sun, what can you believe in?” Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, says Sahl, a bank robber slipped the teller a note saying: “Give me your money and act normal.” The teller replied: “First you must define your terms. After all, what is normal?”

Some of Sahl’s jokes are rather rarefied. Once he began talking about a fellow in a statistical analysis course who would never use sigma but preferred his own initials instead. When someone laughed, Sahl looked up in surprise and said: “If you understand that joke, you don’t belong here. You had better call the Government at once; you are desperately needed.”

On the Trampolin. Mort Sahl often points out that he more or less ignores the facts to get at the truth, and no set of facts could be more misleading than those surrounding his birth. It occurred on May 11, 1927 in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a hard fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. Harry Sahl, his father, had come out of an immigrant family on New York’s Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway and Hollywood gave him just enough encouragement to make him sure that he had the art, but his failure to make a living in his field turned him into a black cynic whose philosophy is “It’s all fixed,” and “They don’t want anything good.”

Mort’s mother, on the other hand, is an intractable optimist. On this trampolin Mort was raised, an only child, soaking up skepticism and idealism, respect for creativity and contempt for show business. His father’s retreat to the tobacco shop in Montreal was soon followed by a new retreat to a government clerkship in Washington, and eventually by his return to Los Angeles, this time as a clerk for the FBI. From 2½ little Mort liked to stand behind the radio and shout through it his own version of the news. At eight he hung around radio stations, picked up discarded scripts from the floor or out of garbage cans, read them into a dummy microphone he had made for himself at home.

In high school, younger and thinner than most of his classmates, and usually alone, he found a haven inside an ROTC uniform, wore it every day everywhere—always with field jacket, so that no one could see from the shoulder patch that he was not a real soldier. He won a marksmanship trophy and the American Legion’s Americanism Award, and he became so gung-ho that he tried to get into World War II at 16, lied about his age and spent two weeks in uniform before his mother took him home. Noting all this, Harry Sahl began pondering a military career for Mort—a secure field one or two light-years from show business—and initiated what might have been one of the cooler footnotes to military history when he got a Congressman to agree to give Mort an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. Mort Sahl at West Point seems roughly twice as hard to imagine as Dwight D. Eisenhower (West Point, ’15) rapping out bi-nightly monologues in a cave on Sunset Strip.

Poop from the Group. Long before Sahl could take the West Point exams, he could no longer take the U.S. Army. Drafted after graduation from high school, and assigned to the 93rd Air Depot Group in Alaska, Private Mort Sahl grew a beard and refused to wear a cap. He edited the post newspaper Poop from the Group, won 83 straight days of K.P. for his editorials discussing various types of military payola.

Discharged in 1947, Sahl went to Compton College and the University of Southern California, got his bachelor of science degree and started a master’s thesis on city traffic flow in his new field, public administration (Harry was sure it would be safe). But his collision with the social sciences was even more disillusioning than his romance with the military. “I couldn’t get with it,” he says. “It was Conformity City. All the organization men were swinging.” With a friend, he rented an old theater, called it Theater X, wrote and staged plays (one title: Nobody Trusted the Truth]. But mostly he kept hanging around Los Angeles nightclubs, looking for a chance to try out the comic-ironic monologues that were developing from his growing catalogue of hostilities. From 1950 to 1953 he tried to get into 30 nightclubs, earned an average of $46 a year in his new profession, learned officially from NBC that he would never become a comedian.

Falling in love with a teen-ager named Sue Babior (he married her June 25, 1955), Sahl finally fled Los Angeles, followed her to the University of California at Berkeley, and became the academic equivalent of a ski bum. Auditing classes off and on, he drank a tun of coffee a month in all-night campus snack bars, argued art, social science and politics into the abstract hours. He slept mainly in the back seat of his moldering Chevy, and ate cold hamburgers provided by a Nietzsche-soaked friend who worked in a short-order bin. Sometimes he slept on the window seat in the apartment Sue shared with two other girls, now says he scrupulously disappeared at mealtimes to preserve his dignity. It is more likely that he was avoiding the filets of horsemeat that one of the girls regularly fingered from her job in a pet shop.

The Lower Depths. While all this seemed to be leading to the Steinbeck orchards in the Salinas valley, it was actually leading to $300,000 a year. From the wooden microphone of his childhood to the hamburgers with Nietzsche relish, Mort Sahl had accumulated experience, intelligence and enmity until just one more shattering blow was needed to complete his training. He got it when he disgustedly walked out of a beat-liberal campus party, picked up a tangerine on the way, and swallowed a seed that—according to Sahl—lodged in his appendix. A doctor at a Berkeley hospital referred him elsewhere when neither he nor Sue had the $450 for an emergency operation, ran after him to demand $10 as an examination fee. The appendix ruptured, Sahl recovered in a veterans’ hospital, and the American Medical Association joined his repertory (his mildest joke about the medical world is that “the A.M.A. opposes chiropractors and witch doctors and any other cure that is quick”).

Late that fall (1953) he arranged an audition before a live audience at San Francisco’s lowercase, lower-depths hungry i (for intellectual). It was Sue’s suggestion: “If they don’t understand you,” she said, “they’ll label it whimsy.” Onstage, Sahl began talking about the McCarthy jacket, explained that it was like the Eisenhower jacket except that it had “an extra flap to go over the mouth,” added that “Senator McCarthy does not question what you say so much as he questions your right to say it.” No one even smiled. Then up from the bar came a muscular laugh from Enrico Banducci, the club’s proprietor, and Mort was in at $75 a week.

The New Life. In 6½ fast years he has raised that figure to $7,500 a week (the hungry i still gets him for a sentimental $5,000). Hollywood has put him in two films (All the Young Men opens this month) on a contract under which he writes his own lines; in Jerry Wald’s In Love and War he picked up a field telephone up front in battle, said: “Good morning. This is World War II.” As for television: “I think their spoon-feeding of the American public has resulted in a corruption and an ignorance that may sink this country,” says Sahl solemnly. He wants, however, to destroy all the admen and network executives who have kept him at harm’s length and most of the time off the air.

With the proceeds of his fame—some $700,000 in all—Sahl supports his now-retired parents, pays $900 a month alimony to Sue, who divorced him in 1957 and now dates his best friend, Jazz Saxophonist Paul Desmond. Once short on toys, he can no longer make the claim, has filled his rented home in West Hollywood’s hills with 14 radios, four TV sets and two hi-fi sets that blare until 4 a.m., wearing out his Stan Kenton and Dave Brubeck records. The unshaven campus rat looking for work has become a hard-working future millionaire in need of a shave: he attacks himself twice a day with one of eleven electric razors. Standing 5 ft. 10 in., weighing 150 lbs., he eats little, smokes seldom, drinks ”only with chicks.” On his wrist, on a single band, are two monstrous, oyster-shaped gold watches worth $610 apiece. At one time he had 40 watches. A friend, visiting him one day, picked up a magazine and out fell a $300 chronometer.

Sahl still spends much of his life in motor cars (he owns three); once a friend borrowed his Lincoln and found in it a huge pile of magazines, dirty laundry and $5,000 in cash. He dates beautiful women sporadically (Actresses Nancy Olsen, Haya Hayareet), has almost outgrown the starlet stage and has outlived a two-year romance with Actress Phyllis Kirk. Sometimes he prefers the company of carhops and waitresses (“Yes, I’ve worked that beat, too”). With an independent grin, he says: “I feel if you have enough of these healthy interests—watches, razors, automobiles—you will have no need for human relationships at all.”

The New Comedians. The biggest symbol of Mort Sahl’s success, bigger than the salary, the cars, the watches, is the fact that he is the patriarch of a new school of comedians that has grown up with him. Their material is less political, but, like Sahl, they all stay close to an essentially offbeat and imaginative style.

Far removed from the old standup, joke-book comedians, they mostly do set pieces that are almost playlets. Using the telephone as a trademark prop, Shelley Berman prefers to find his material in the living room rather than the newspaper. Now a father talking to his daughter before her first date, he tells her that a car is a motel room on wheels; now Dr. Sprocket, child psychologist, he tells a patient’s mother: “I know your little boy. His name is Oedipus.” (While Sahl’s four published recordings have sold only 125,000 copies, the closer-to-the-fingertips comedy of Shelley Berman has sold nearly 1,000,000 copies in three releases, a surprising figure for a “talking” record.)

More bizarre than Berman and more emotionally engaging than Sahl are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who brilliantly exaggerate sophistication until it bursts with humor. A dentist and his patient fall in love (“I knew it when I looked into your mouth and saw you were English clear through”). In a sequence called Bach to Bach they are two symphonic phonies comparing sensitivities in bed (“I can never believe that Bartok died on Central Park West”). Newest of the offbeat generation is Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind opens up some odd pockets of history—Khrushchev getting a head spray to cut down the glare for television—all related in a tone so quiet and dry that the wildest caricature has the ring of truth.

If Newhart, Nichols and May are warmer personalities than Sahl, other new comedians can be cold enough to freeze the marrow, and are the real source of the term “sick comedians.” Chief among them is Lenny Bruce, who whines, uses four-letter words almost as often as conjunctions, talks about rape and amputees, and deserves distinction of a sort for delivering the sickest single line on record. Taking a minority view of the Leopold-Loeb case, he said: “Bobby Franks was snotty.” In a class by himself is Jonathan Winters, who finds material in such experiences as being tested for inguinal hernia, enjoys discussing what it is like to be naked in front of a dog.

Cool & Deep. Anxious not to be linked with that sort of thing, Mort Sahl insists that he will not say anything for a laugh: “I am not a sick comedian. I’ve never uttered a negative word in my life about the status of man, and I don’t tell jokes about amputees.” Mounting a platform of his own, Sahl adds: “Bad taste can’t count as a form of insight.” He also says he objects to “historical irreverence,” and was disdainful when, in his Los Angeles acceptance speech, Jack Kennedy paraphrased Lincoln’s second inaugural address with a crack about Nixon’s “malice toward all.”

Mort Sahl built his original audience of students who came in from the University of California and other regional campuses to hear him in San Francisco. No such common denominator applies any more; his following has increased to multitudes, mainly in the big cities, which he has, in his own word, “saturated” by long stands of up to six months. He calls his followers “my people.” Some have peach fuzz on their cheeks, and others have it on the tops of their heads. The one thing they share is a fondness for articulate irony and a sense of feeling “in.” Occasional strays get up and walk out muttering “Communist,” but the in-group would all understand the college freshman who says, “He has a cool way of digging deep.” There is an out-group too, people who find Sahl too brash and offensive. Warmth is simply not his gift, but this is not to say, as is often claimed, that he is a nihilist or that he hates everything. “His people” see him as the black knight of the implied positive—an idealist whose darkly critical moods really imply a yearning for perfection. “If I criticize somebody, it’s only because I have higher hopes for the world,” he says in a solemn moment, “something good to replace the bad.” And, he might have added, because high hopes in a bad world are invariably good for a laugh.

Working toward his goal as he sees it, Sahl has night by night over the past decade compiled a strong anthology of criticisms, a sort of Sahl’s-eye view of the less-than-fabulous fifties (see box). “Nobody here is proud of our times, although you hear a lot about our way of life,” Sahl points out. “I’m not saying what the Beat Generation says: ‘Go away because I’m not involved.’ I’m here and I’m involved.”

His involvement for the next few months will be with the 1960 presidential campaign, and, as always, he is facing the stump with a two-edged adz. “It’s all over but the doubting,” says Mort Sahl. “My considered opinion of Nixon versus Kennedy is that neither can win.”