Headlines and Punchlines

 

 

In 1953, the hungry i--no, you didn't accidentally just stumble upon some e e cummings web site--was one of those San Francisco basement night clubs that featured mostly folk singers and catered to a bohemian crowd that the press in a few short years would dub "beatniks". Stand-up comedians usually weren't part of the mix--it's hard to do a BA-DUM-TSS with bongos--but a young playwright-turned-comic named Mort Sahl was looking for a different venue for his cerebral style of humor than some seedy strip club, and a girl he was dating at the time directed him to hungry i. Owner Enrico Banducci liked what he heard, and more importantly, laughed at what he heard, and gave Sahl his first steady gig in comedy. And soon enough audiences also liked and laughed at what they heard. And what they saw they found refreshing. Sahl's routine was anything but routine in 1953. Instead of a tuxedo or suit he wore a V-neck sweater and usually had with him a newspaper from which he riffed on the events of the day. Sahl set off a revolution in stand-up, as suddenly folk music--as well as anything else vaguely bohemian or intellectual--and comedy did mix, and folk clubs and tea rooms and bookstores across the land began employing stand-up comics. In Sahl's Borsht Belt-and-burlesque-blitzkrieged wake came Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Shelly Berman, Phyllis Diller, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and many others. Soon everyone was hip to the new kind of humor, including...

...Henry R. Luce. At least he knew what moved magazines. Meanwhile, vaudeville had found a home on television, and TV's chief vaudeville impresario, Ed Sullivan, knew what got viewers, and put Sahl on the air. Here's one of Sahl's Sullivan appearances. Keep in mind his humor was very topical and very up-to-date, which or course means much of it's terribly dated today. If you don't know why Shepard got a medal or that once there was a nation-state named Laos (actually there still is, though nobody pays much attention to it anymore,) or the type of girls Liz Taylor and Shirley Jones were playing that got them those Oscars, these jokes will go over your head. Still, you can at least appreciate his laid-back delivery:

I think the math-philosophy-psychology joke has at least withstood the test of time, though to tell it today I'd think you'd have to apply it to both sexes and all sexual orientations and identities.

As laid-back as he may have seemed, Mort Sahl could be as obsessive as the rest of us, and the above news story is what obsessed him the most. Not so much the assassination itself, but its official explanation--Oswald acted alone--which Sahl rejected. He made it part of his act, reportedly reading verbatim from the Warren Commission report but doing so in a sarcastic way. Audiences who just wanted to move on from the tragic event stopped laughing and attending his shows. By the end of the 1960s, Sahl was more or less seen as a has-been. Here's where the laid-back part comes back into play. By most accounts, Sahl accepted his fall from grace with good humor, and considered himself fortunate that he ever attained such heights to fall from in the first place. And he still found work, mostly on the college circuit. Sahl died yesterday at age 94.