Sahl, comedian who satirized politics, dead
NEW YORK (AP) — Satirist Mort Sahl, who helped revolutionize stand-up comedy during the Cold War with his running commentary on politicians and current events and became a favorite of a new, restive generation of Americans, died Tuesday. He was 94.
His friend Lucy Mercer said that he died “peacefully” at his home in Mill Valley, California. The cause was “old age,” she said.
During an era when many comedians dressed in tuxedos and told mother-in-law jokes, Sahl faced his audiences in the ‘50s and ‘60s wearing slacks, a sweater and an unbuttoned collar and carrying a rolled-up newspaper on which he had pasted notes for his act. Reading news items as if seated across from you at the kitchen table, he made his inevitably cutting comments, often joining the laughter with a horsey bellow of his own and ending his routines by inquiring: “Is there any group I haven’t offended yet?”
“Every comedian who is not doing wife jokes has to thank him for that,” actor-comedian Albert Brooks told The Associated Press in 2007. “He really was the first, even before Lenny Bruce, in terms of talking about stuff, not just doing punch lines.”
Sahl took pride in having mocked every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump, although he acknowledged he privately admired Democrat John F. Kennedy and counted Republican Ronald Reagan among his closest friends. Of President George W. Bush, he observed: “He’s born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you were given the unusual opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush?”
Sahl became famous in 1953 at San Francisco’s hungry i (the i stood for intellectual), the perfect place for a comedian of his type. The city was a meeting ground for beatniks and college activists, and they crowded into the tiny club to hear someone who spoke to their disdain for the status quo. Word spread quickly about the young comedian with the distinctive style. Soon Sahl was earning $7,500 a week at nightclubs across the nation and appearing on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar. He made the cover of Time magazine in 1960 and was profiled in The