Revolutionary satirist influenced comedians from Bruce to Chappelle
Satirist Mort Sahl, who helped revolutionize standup 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 motherin-law jokes, Sahl faced his audiences in the ‘50s and ‘60s wearing slacks, a sweater and an unbuttoned collar and carrying a rolledup 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,” actorcomedian 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.”
His casual, conversational style would influence a generation of comedians, from Lenny Bruce to Dave Chappelle.
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?”