Mort Sahl
Two summers ago Mark Crispin Miller wrote a cover story for the Nation about the “national entertainment state,” which he identified as the ownership of America’s major news outlets by Disney, Time Warner, General Electric, and Westinghouse. This creeping monopoly of electronic and print media, he argued, has poisoned our democratic culture with sleaze, violence, and corporate propaganda, choking off informed dissent and turning our political process into a tightly scripted soap opera. “Two of these four corporations are defense contractors,” Miller pointed out, “while the other two are mammoth manufacturers of fun ‘n’ games. Thus…the news and much of our amusement come to us directly from the two most powerful industries in the United States.”
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At 71 Sahl has disappeared into a comedy landscape largely of his own making. “He changed the face of comedy the way Stravinsky changed music,” Woody Allen said in Woody Allen: A Biography. “He made the country listen to jokes that required them to think.” Before Sahl came Sid Caesar, Red Skelton, and Danny Kaye; after him came Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. Instead of wearing a tuxedo and carrying a violin he wore a V-neck sweater and carried a copy of the day’s newspaper. Instead of setups and punch lines he delivered frenetic, looping monologues whose startling asides and frequent digressions were often as insightful as they were hilarious. His favorite targets were Eisenhower and Nixon, but he was equally wicked in his mockery of the beat generation that claimed him as its own. His observations were “truthful, not actual,” and he had an extraordinary gift for the put-on, spinning ludicrous scenarios out of current events. From Dennis Miller to Eric Bogosian to the Onion, his influence on American humor is so pervasive that he belongs in a class with Mark Twain and Will Rogers.
But for all his political humor Sahl was smitten with show business. He grew up in Los Angeles, and a 1960 profile in the New Yorker noted that while he devoured books and periodicals in general, he read entertainment news religiously; even as a starving bohemian in Berkeley he’d shelled out 25 cents a week for Variety. His second LP, Mort Sahl 1960, or Look Forward in Anger, features a spoof of Walt Disney that’s every bit as sharp in the Michael Eisner era. Sahl describes the newly opened Disneyland as “Sodom and Gomorrah in Anaheim” and the theme song of The Mickey Mouse Club as “this ritual in which they pay reverence to this rodent who is their leader.” He says that he stumbled upon the TV show after listening to a speech about nuclear fallout from Nevada; on seeing the kids with their enormous mouse ears he decided, “Maybe they ought to stop these tests after all.” His sketch of the ultraconservative Disney was decades ahead of the prevailing wisdom: “The only time he had any union troubles was in 1947 when they had a strike in the industry, and people were striking at his studios in Burbank. And his artists didn’t know how to strike because they were inanimate, so they went out and drew pickets on his wall, right? And then he went out and drew Burbank policemen beating them.”
But as Sahl wrote in Heartland, paraphrasing Conrad, “When a man is born, a bullet is fired, his conscience–some will say his soul–and it ricochets off the events of his time until he is struck by it.” And when Sahl saw Garrison on TV in 1966, announcing that Kennedy might have been the victim of a conspiracy, he was struck. From 1967 to 1971 he lived in New Orleans, volunteering his services to Garrison; his annual income had dropped from $1 million to $13,000. Critics charged that he’d grown boring and strident, that the ugliness of the late 60s had outstripped his satiric abilities. His only record album from the period, Anyway…Onward, gets some mileage out of Johnson and Humphrey but steers clear of what Sahl later called “the terrible, awesome jokes of our time.” Judging from the material he recycled for Heartland and for TV interviews much later, they were terrible and awesome all right, but not very funny.
Mort Sahl’s America began as a one-man show that drew excellent reviews in New York and then moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, packaging Sahl’s stand-up act for small theater audiences. Though he’s grown more avuncular with age, Sahl hasn’t lost his delectable sense of the absurd. At the Republican convention, he meets Jack Kemp: “He said to me, ‘I plan to be Dole’s right hand.’ So he’ll be carrying the pen for four years.” And at the Democratic convention he hears a speech by Jesse Jackson, “who they introduced as the moral successor to Martin Luther King–‘I have a scheme!’” The funniest part of the record is Sahl’s farcical account of how he exploited the “Mulholland Drive daisy chain” to forge a career as a Hollywood screenwriter. Robert Redford hired him to write dialogue for Ordinary People, and though they fell out during the picture, Paul Newman had heard that Sahl was working for Redford and hired him for another film; from there he continued to fail upward, scoring assignments from Beatty, Nichols, and Sidney Pollack although none of them had any proof that he could actually write.
