His name largely faded from headlines and nightclub marquees, Mort Sahl was arguably the most influential comic of his generation.
Sahl died Tuesday from what friends called “old age.” He was 94 years old and had for many years been living in Mill Valley, California, north of San Francisco. He was in residence at the Throckmorton Theatre there, where he performed when not on the road.
That road began in Canada when Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927. When he was a child, his family moved to Los Angeles where, after a stint in the Air Force, he graduated from the University of Southern California in 1950 and started his career.
In Gerald Nachman’s “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s,” there are sections on 25 influential comedians, among them such forces as Lenny Bruce, Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Mel Brooks.
Sahl is on the cover of that 2003 book and Nachman writes, “Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming. When he arrived, the revolution had not yet begun. Sahl was the revolution.” He pinpoints the start of the revolution to Christmas night 1953 when Sahl performed at the hungry i, a San Francisco folk music club. “He was unlike any comedian who had ever been,” Nachman writes.
About those early years, Sahl once told me, “At first I had been trying to do impressions of movie stars and trying to get a commonality with the audience so they would accept me. The oral style started because there weren’t any laughs and I wanted to fill holes and make it look like I didn’t need the audience. But the more I digressed and trusted what I really cared about, the more it caught fire.”
That he did, becoming the host of the first Grammy Awards in 1959, co-hosting the 1959 Academy Awards and a year later becoming the first comedian to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, which called him “Will Rogers with fangs.”
He also guest hosted “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” many times and released what is considered the first modern stand-up album in 1955, “Mort Sahl at Sunset.” Other albums followed as did film roles in such movies “In Love and War” and “Johnny Cool.” He was also a guest star on TV series and a frequent treat on TV talk shows.
His career took a slight tumble when he got passionately involved in investigating the 1963 assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But he never stopped working, playing college campuses and small clubs, writing screenplays, working in TV and radio.
In the late 2000s, Sahl relocated to Mill Valley, where he would become close friends with neighbor Robin Williams.
During his life, people were ever putting Sahl in the same sentences with Lenny Bruce, as if they had once been a comedy team. Bruce came along a few years after Sahl. He was a savage comic who was less cerebral than Sahl and whose material explored sex, linguistics and drugs. He died in 1966 of a morphine overdose at the age of 40 but continued to be an influence, part myth, part messiah.
A few years ago Sahl told me, “I’m not Lenny Bruce. I don’t think crucifixion is the answer. I like the resurrection part of the story. I remain optimistic. I want to stay around for the third act.”
He and Bruce had been friends, working together at a couple of Hollywood jazz clubs. “I worked the (400-seat) Crescendo and Lenny worked the smaller (150-seat) Interlude upstairs,” he told me. “We knew each other well and watched each other all the time. He was funny but I never cared for some of the harsher language. I’m Victorian in that way and it bothered me. … Lenny was never politically aware and not worldly. … He was interested in three things: jazz, drugs and chicks.”
Sahl’s career was solidly tied to Chicago. His main stage here from 1956 to the early 1970s was at Mister Kelly’s, the famous Rush Street nightclub; he is featured in the new film “Live at Mister Kelly’s.” Reviewing one of his shows there in 1971, the late movie critic Roger Ebert wrote that he was “the finest, quickest, most intelligent comic mind in America. … He doesn’t do a monologue, he does a tapestry. … This style cannot be imitated because it’s more of a personal revelation than it is a method. It is probably the most complex verbal style yet produced by an American humorist.”
His shows were wickedly topical, with him standing on stages alone but for a microphone. Dressed in slacks, loafers and a red V-necked sweater, and with the day’s newspaper tucked under him arm, he wove magic of a sort. “Though much of his material concerns politics and politicians, I think it is wrong to call Sahl, as so many label-lovers do, a political satirist,” I once wrote. “Certainly, he devours the follies and horrors of the daily headlines with a voraciousness and thoughtfulness that few match. But for the most part his humor skips past the obvious into a more complicated area, a deeper and frequently darker place.”
I reviewed him many times, knew him since I was a kid, since he was often a guest at some of the parties my parents hosted at our family’s apartment Old Town.
He later played such bygone clubs as Byfield’s and George’s, and at Steppenwolf Theater. I wrote of one of those performances that “No jokemeister, Sahl provides something richer and more fulfilling: an evening of images, ideas, observations, outrages and stories that prod the mind in the most pleasurable ways. … Like a jazz musician he is (or gives the impression that he is) continually improvising.”
I was not alone in my admiration. When Sahl turned 80, fellow comics and admirers gathered at the Wadsworth Theatre in Los Angeles, with such celebrants as George Carlin, Jay Leno, Albert Brooks, Harry Shearer, Shelly Berman, Drew Carey, Jonathan Winters and Richard Lewis.
Naturally, in the wake of news of his death, social media was filled with praise from many, including David Steinberg (“Mort was a hero to all of us who used current events as raw material. He never backed down from controversy. He was a mentor and a friend.”) and Albert Brooks (“Most young people have no idea who he was, but he was one the few comedians who yanked comedy out of vaudeville type humor into the modern age.”).
His biography appeared in 2017. Author James Curtis subtitled the book, “Last Man Standing” (University Press of Mississippi), with this spot-on appraisal: “Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy.”
Sahl was married and divorced four times. He has no surviving immediate family members, his son, Mort Sahl Jr., having died in 1996.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
