"... when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.... Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame... gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s... 'My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,' he said from the stage at one preview. 'The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.'... His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin.... 'I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,' Mr. Sahl wrote in 'Heartland,' a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company... I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.... I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice."
1. Mort Sahl is before my time, really, so what I'm going to do is listen to at least one of his comedy albums, which I see are streamable on Spotify.
2. I remember Mort Sahl as he was on TV in the 1970s, as in this TV appearance where he goes on and on about how women are never intellectuals, which I assure you seemed creepy and out-of-it at that time:
3. He obsessed about the Kennedy assassination, and we are still waiting for the release of the files that have been held secret all these years. Here's an Intercept article from a few days ago about the current issue, whether to take the 1992 JFK Records Act seriously. Trump could have released these documents but "acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021," and now here we are in October 2021, and here comes Biden, pushing the deadline out to December 2022. What's going on?
4. [ADDED] I listened to the album “The Future Lies Ahead.” I enjoyed his very fast, smart talking, though I couldn’t experience it as very funny because it was all tied to the politics of the late 50s. It’s hard to see anything funny about Eisenhower!
I listened to a couple of his records when he came up (I think it was) in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. They were intriguing and intermittently pretty funny. It seemed like the style would have been quite groundbreaking for the time.
The only thing before that that I knew about him was an anecdote I heard about an early screening of Exodus (produced and directed by Otto Preminger) where, around the 2 hour mark, Mort Sahl, who was in the audience, yelled out: "Otto, let my people go!"
Trump could have released these documents but "acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021," and now here we are in October 2021, and here comes Biden, pushing the deadline out to December 2022. What's going on?
My guess is that DC and the people within it are hiding 99% of what they are doing and that is just what they do.
Because if the American people found out what they were up to DC would be burned to the ground and the earth salted.
I'm sure the political shift around him didn't help, but humor can be really context-specific and can get stale fast. Also, the Boomers were so youth-obsessed at that time that Sahl would have already seemed like an old guy. He would have reminded them of that one history teacher, the dowdy little guy who drove a VW Beetle, never wore a tie, and always talked about the military-industrial complex. The one their dad said was a pinko.
He forged the New Model Comedian, the one who was smarter and hipper than the people he made fun of. He was there before Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Woody Allen claimed he was the reason that he got into comedy.....I haven't thought of Sahl in years. He really did go off the deep end, and people lost interest in him, but he was an ultra cool guy for a time. He allowed comedians to think of themselves as heroes rather than court jesters. His comedy was more influential than enduring, but he was the first... On the plus side, he himself was more enduring than his comedy or the controversies he was involved in. He died a peaceful death in his bed at ninety four so he literally had the last laugh on the lot of them.
With regard to my earlier comment about Boomers, I thought you all might find it absurdly amusing that my auto-correct wanted to change "Boomers" to "vomiters."
I saw Mort Sahl at the Interlude in Hollywood when I was in college. One of his lines was calling Korea "World War 2 point 5." It was so clever it has stayed with me all these years.
A mob hit from a marriage of convenience with the Cubans using Oswald as the patsy he admitted to being. Buglosi might pooh-pooh it, but it’s entirely plausible.
I hope someone can write a great book on the JFK assassination. A massive conspiracy theory, or rather many different and contradictory theories, with many followers, long before the internet. If JFK was the great hope, his assassination was the great disappointment, and it just wasn't Homeric enough to say some weird left-wing guy just went ahead and killed him. Ike and JFK had tried to kill Castro many times; Oswald may simply have decided to turn the tables, and do it right. I'm not pro-Castro.
I went looking for Sahl on YouTube. In 1960 he commented on the Nixon-Kennedy debates (not necessarily the famous one on TV). Both veterans of the Navy, Kennedy got the big decoration. During and after World War II, there got to be so many decorations, a lot of service members were "processed" in a short time. Kennedy was in a fairly big group, and he met Truman for the first time. Truman made a point of saying to many people getting decorated: I'd rather receive one of these than be President. According to Sahl: young Lieutenant Kennedy said "well ...."
Those secret files on the JFK assassination are in the same location as Adam Schiff's Russian files: fantasy land. If they really exists, Garrison should have released them.
Jim Garrison? Really?? The is how he spoke truth to power?
It is clear what happened to Mort Sahl. He became a bore. His obsessions were absurd. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hip. He became ridiculous. The jester became a joke himself. And a weak joke at that. If you have Oliver Stone, why do you need Mort?
I used to read a lot of books about the Kennedy assassination, and I came to the conclusion was that the cover-up was not about the killing -- yeah, it was Oswald all along, by himself -- but all the stuff the FBI and CIA were doing, in Cuba and here.
(Note, I came to the Warren Commission's conclusion after being a conspiracy buff. I've read a lot of true crime books, and realized the difficulties in getting accurate witness information as time moves on, and that in every case there are always going to be some unanswered questions. Life simply doesn't work as neat and clean as it does in fiction.)
'My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,' (Sahl) said from the stage at one preview. 'The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.'
Cancel culture, 1960s-style. (And the people who cancelled back then were leftists, too!)
I vaguely remember Sahl telling a story about meeting someone affiliated with Kennedy sometime after the election. This person asked him why he was making fun of Kennedy and said "after all, we did this for you!" Sahl said his response was "you really shouldn't have gone through all that trouble." I thought it was funny.
Talk show format 50 years ago: various guests appeared, spoke their mind, engaged each other in conversation from their own POV. Sometimes it got un-PC by their own standards. The host tried to keep everyone between the lines.
Talk show format today: one guest (a bigshot in the biz) appears to sell the latest project. Conversation is tres jolie. The host obliges because the ads must be sold. (Cavett does hold up a bottle of Gatorade in the YT.)
Cavett was the best because he was smart and agile. (Want proof? Watch his episode with young Robin Williams when they improv Shakespeare.) I would rather watch his style of loose, spontaneous, & even creepy interaction than the nothing burgers they peddle today. Sahl was the salt in the stew.
And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin.... 'I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,' Mr. Sahl wrote in 'Heartland,' a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976 ...
To add a little context ...
The New Yorker, July 13, 1968 P. 35 REPORTER AT LARGE about the investigation of the murder of Pres. Kennedy, conducted by Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana.
The article runs from page 35 to page 81 of that issue of The New Yorker. A younger me remembers trying to read it and finally giving up because the story was ... confusing. It made no sense. Stream of consciousness. Or gibberish. Maybe some editor at The New Yorker was using the same drugs as Garrison seemed to be using. It was a strange time and there were strange people loose in the world.
You're not a thinking human if you don't think that Johnson was in on it. On his own he probably toyed with the idea, but didn't know the launch sequence. When the CIA and the military types sensed they had a live one on the line, they reeled Johnson in. And he was happy to have been caught in their snare.
Just spent 10 minutes in my life listening to bits of Saul on YouTube. He was garbage. Not the least bit funny. Surprised how outright bad the guy was. Nothing redeeming about it at all. Lefties must have liked him because all he did was stand there and mock Republicans, which any imbecile can do. He is the ancestor of the smug, unfunny, politicized garbage which passes for comedy now.
Can someone explain why Sahl would give up such a successful artistic career (albeit one starting to turn downward) to volunteer to become an unpaid volunteer for Jim Garrison? And why after all of the other conspiracy theorists had become disenchanted with Garrison and flown the coop, why would Sahl stick it out to the bitter end- in this case the bitter end being right after the New Orleans jury took about 10 minutes to find Clay Shaw not guilty.
Sounds to me like Kennedy deserved his decoration:
"Despite re-injuring his back in the collision, Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth.[54] Kennedy made an additional two-mile swim the night of August 2, 1943, to Ferguson Passage to attempt to hail a passing American PT boat to expedite his crew's rescue and attempted to make the trip on a subsequent night, in a damaged canoe found on Naru Island where he had swum with Ensign George Ross to look for food.[55]
On August 4, 1943, he and his executive officer, Ensign Lenny Thom, assisted his injured and hungry crew on a demanding swim 3.75 miles (6.04 km) southeast to Olasana Island, which was visible to the crew from their desolate home on Plum Pudding Island. They swam against a strong current, and once again Kennedy towed the badly burned motor machinist "Pappy" MacMahon by his life vest."
“he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues”
Oh come on! Have they not heard of Will Rogers?
From the Wikipedia page for Will Rogers:
“By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit.... Rogers was not the first entertainer to use political humor before his audience. Others, such as Broadway comedian Raymond Hitchcock and Britain's Sir Harry Lauder, preceded him by several years. Bob Hope is the best known political humorist to follow Rogers's example.”
I also found Sahl in 1991 telling a quick Trump joke that some people might enjoy today. "So here we are in Atlantic City. The other day we went to that new Trump building, and the sign fell off. Maybe it jumped." 1991!
Of course there's also the movie "Scrooged," 1988. Bill Murray, whose character is used to living in luxury, wakes up in a kind of sewer in Manhattan and says "where is this, Trump Tower?" So I guess it was pretty standard at least in NYC and environs. Of course Trump actually had a cameo in "Home Alone 2"--apparently it has been cut.
I don’t remember him from his heyday, but he would show up on television from time to time in the 70s. At that point he was poking fun at Jimmy Carter — the joke was (paraphrase):
My name is Jimmy Carter, I have to tell the truth/‘cause every time I tell a lie I grow another tooth.
A lot of comedians used his approach — he was doing a standup version of “Weekend Update” 15-20 years before Chevy Chase. RIP.
Darn. Late to this one so no one will see this - except for the two who really count. lol..
For those who are smacking on about Sahl and his obsession with the Kennedy assassination being so whacked and no one tossed out John Barbour? Judyth Baker?
"This blog isn't an obituary column. I'm not here to acknowledge passings. People are continually crossing over." De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But only up to a point.
I'm curious ... how does a lady extend the same invitation to a gentleman? "Come inside & look at my etchings"? It must happen. Maybe I have heard those words but didn't know the code.
So many derivative opinions; I even know the book, but if you click on the channel of the video above (on Cavett), you can witness the truth for yourself. I know 99% won't, but if one does, maybe I can have my first true conversation. I was born in the 80s, but it's very easy to research a few names. And still, the way he worked - free-association, stream-of-consciousness, digressions - make it necessary to listen to a record a few times. It's worth it, though.
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45 comments:
'Whether Mr. Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed...'
Why not both?
As for the assassination...aliens.
"he goes on and on about how women are never intellectuals"
I hope rhhardin is ok.
I listened to a couple of his records when he came up (I think it was) in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel. They were intriguing and intermittently pretty funny. It seemed like the style would have been quite groundbreaking for the time.
The only thing before that that I knew about him was an anecdote I heard about an early screening of Exodus (produced and directed by Otto Preminger) where, around the 2 hour mark, Mort Sahl, who was in the audience, yelled out: "Otto, let my people go!"
Trump could have released these documents but "acquiesced to the demand of CIA Director Mike Pompeo to keep portions of thousands more secret until October 2021," and now here we are in October 2021, and here comes Biden, pushing the deadline out to December 2022. What's going on?
My guess is that DC and the people within it are hiding 99% of what they are doing and that is just what they do.
Because if the American people found out what they were up to DC would be burned to the ground and the earth salted.
Why did the use Covid as an excuse NOT to release the Kennedy files?? Hiding something relevant??
they...not the
I'm sure the political shift around him didn't help, but humor can be really context-specific and can get stale fast. Also, the Boomers were so youth-obsessed at that time that Sahl would have already seemed like an old guy. He would have reminded them of that one history teacher, the dowdy little guy who drove a VW Beetle, never wore a tie, and always talked about the military-industrial complex. The one their dad said was a pinko.
He forged the New Model Comedian, the one who was smarter and hipper than the people he made fun of. He was there before Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. Woody Allen claimed he was the reason that he got into comedy.....I haven't thought of Sahl in years. He really did go off the deep end, and people lost interest in him, but he was an ultra cool guy for a time. He allowed comedians to think of themselves as heroes rather than court jesters. His comedy was more influential than enduring, but he was the first... On the plus side, he himself was more enduring than his comedy or the controversies he was involved in. He died a peaceful death in his bed at ninety four so he literally had the last laugh on the lot of them.
With regard to my earlier comment about Boomers, I thought you all might find it absurdly amusing that my auto-correct wanted to change "Boomers" to "vomiters."
I saw Mort Sahl at the Interlude in Hollywood when I was in college. One of his lines was calling Korea "World War 2 point 5." It was so clever it has stayed with me all these years.
A mob hit from a marriage of convenience with the Cubans using Oswald as the patsy he admitted to being. Buglosi might pooh-pooh it, but it’s entirely plausible.
I hope someone can write a great book on the JFK assassination. A massive conspiracy theory, or rather many different and contradictory theories, with many followers, long before the internet. If JFK was the great hope, his assassination was the great disappointment, and it just wasn't Homeric enough to say some weird left-wing guy just went ahead and killed him. Ike and JFK had tried to kill Castro many times; Oswald may simply have decided to turn the tables, and do it right. I'm not pro-Castro.
I went looking for Sahl on YouTube. In 1960 he commented on the Nixon-Kennedy debates (not necessarily the famous one on TV). Both veterans of the Navy, Kennedy got the big decoration. During and after World War II, there got to be so many decorations, a lot of service members were "processed" in a short time. Kennedy was in a fairly big group, and he met Truman for the first time. Truman made a point of saying to many people getting decorated: I'd rather receive one of these than be President. According to Sahl: young Lieutenant Kennedy said "well ...."
Always enjoyed him. Walking onstage and riffing on the newspaper. He defined informed, topical humor: the sarcastic critic.
There aren’t and weren’t many stand-up comics who are funny. Mort Sahl? Not funny.
Those secret files on the JFK assassination are in the same location as Adam Schiff's Russian files: fantasy land. If they really exists, Garrison should have released them.
Jim Garrison? Really?? The is how he spoke truth to power?
It is clear what happened to Mort Sahl. He became a bore. His obsessions were absurd. It wasn’t that he wasn’t hip. He became ridiculous. The jester became a joke himself. And a weak joke at that. If you have Oliver Stone, why do you need Mort?
The Mrs. grew up in Texas. She tells me that she's never met anyone from that place who thought LBJ didn't have a hand in it.
I used to read a lot of books about the Kennedy assassination, and I came to the conclusion was that the cover-up was not about the killing -- yeah, it was Oswald all along, by himself -- but all the stuff the FBI and CIA were doing, in Cuba and here.
(Note, I came to the Warren Commission's conclusion after being a conspiracy buff. I've read a lot of true crime books, and realized the difficulties in getting accurate witness information as time moves on, and that in every case there are always going to be some unanswered questions. Life simply doesn't work as neat and clean as it does in fiction.)
Biden put it off again to give someone time to die of natural causes. Or the plan is to put it off forever one year at a time.
As a child, his name always reminded me of Morton Salt.
"When it rains, it pours."
The Kennedy thing is something, yes, but I want to be around when/if they unseal MLK's FBI file next year. Trump has got to be itchin.
'My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,' (Sahl) said from the stage at one preview. 'The same people who like jokes about John Foster Dulles and Goldwater suddenly freeze when they hear satirical humor about Vietnam or the war on poverty.'
Cancel culture, 1960s-style. (And the people who cancelled back then were leftists, too!)
I vaguely remember Sahl telling a story about meeting someone affiliated with Kennedy sometime after the election. This person asked him why he was making fun of Kennedy and said "after all, we did this for you!" Sahl said his response was "you really shouldn't have gone through all that trouble." I thought it was funny.
always talked about the military-industrial complex
Eisenhower?
The one their dad said was a pinko.
Oh, I guess not Eisenhower.
Talk show format 50 years ago: various guests appeared, spoke their mind, engaged each other in conversation from their own POV. Sometimes it got un-PC by their own standards. The host tried to keep everyone between the lines.
Talk show format today: one guest (a bigshot in the biz) appears to sell the latest project. Conversation is tres jolie. The host obliges because the ads must be sold. (Cavett does hold up a bottle of Gatorade in the YT.)
Cavett was the best because he was smart and agile. (Want proof? Watch his episode with young Robin Williams when they improv Shakespeare.) I would rather watch his style of loose, spontaneous, & even creepy interaction than the nothing burgers they peddle today. Sahl was the salt in the stew.
And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin.... 'I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,' Mr. Sahl wrote in 'Heartland,' a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976 ...
To add a little context ...
The New Yorker, July 13, 1968 P. 35 REPORTER AT LARGE about the investigation of the murder of Pres. Kennedy, conducted by Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana.
New Yorker
The article runs from page 35 to page 81 of that issue of The New Yorker. A younger me remembers trying to read it and finally giving up because the story was ... confusing. It made no sense. Stream of consciousness. Or gibberish. Maybe some editor at The New Yorker was using the same drugs as Garrison seemed to be using. It was a strange time and there were strange people loose in the world.
'Talk show format 50 years ago...'
Don't forget smoking. Lots of smoking : )
You're not a thinking human if you don't think that Johnson was in on it. On his own he probably toyed with the idea, but didn't know the launch sequence. When the CIA and the military types sensed they had a live one on the line, they reeled Johnson in. And he was happy to have been caught in their snare.
Just spent 10 minutes in my life listening to bits of Saul on YouTube. He was garbage. Not the least bit funny. Surprised how outright bad the guy was. Nothing redeeming about it at all. Lefties must have liked him because all he did was stand there and mock Republicans, which any imbecile can do. He is the ancestor of the smug, unfunny, politicized garbage which passes for comedy now.
Can someone explain why Sahl would give up such a successful artistic career (albeit one starting to turn downward) to volunteer to become an unpaid volunteer for Jim Garrison? And why after all of the other conspiracy theorists had become disenchanted with Garrison and flown the coop, why would Sahl stick it out to the bitter end- in this case the bitter end being right after the New Orleans jury took about 10 minutes to find Clay Shaw not guilty.
Sounds to me like Kennedy deserved his decoration:
"Despite re-injuring his back in the collision, Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth.[54] Kennedy made an additional two-mile swim the night of August 2, 1943, to Ferguson Passage to attempt to hail a passing American PT boat to expedite his crew's rescue and attempted to make the trip on a subsequent night, in a damaged canoe found on Naru Island where he had swum with Ensign George Ross to look for food.[55]
On August 4, 1943, he and his executive officer, Ensign Lenny Thom, assisted his injured and hungry crew on a demanding swim 3.75 miles (6.04 km) southeast to Olasana Island, which was visible to the crew from their desolate home on Plum Pudding Island. They swam against a strong current, and once again Kennedy towed the badly burned motor machinist "Pappy" MacMahon by his life vest."
Wiki
"You're not a thinking human if you don't think that Johnson was in on it."
Well you've had over 50 years- think you might come up with a little evidence in support of this idea at some point?
“he revolutionized comedy in the 1950s by addressing political and social issues”
Oh come on! Have they not heard of Will Rogers?
From the Wikipedia page for Will Rogers:
“By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit.... Rogers was not the first entertainer to use political humor before his audience. Others, such as Broadway comedian Raymond Hitchcock and Britain's Sir Harry Lauder, preceded him by several years. Bob Hope is the best known political humorist to follow Rogers's example.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers#Politics
'He was garbage. Not the least bit funny. Surprised how outright bad the guy was.'
Like, Margaret Cho bad?
I am kind of surprised that you let the passing of the actor who played Gunther, from Friends, pass unnoticed.
"I am kind of surprised that you let the passing of the actor who played Gunther, from Friends, pass unnoticed."
This blog isn't an obituary column. I'm not here to acknowledge passings. People are continually crossing over.
I also found Sahl in 1991 telling a quick Trump joke that some people might enjoy today. "So here we are in Atlantic City. The other day we went to that new Trump building, and the sign fell off. Maybe it jumped." 1991!
Of course there's also the movie "Scrooged," 1988. Bill Murray, whose character is used to living in luxury, wakes up in a kind of sewer in Manhattan and says "where is this, Trump Tower?" So I guess it was pretty standard at least in NYC and environs. Of course Trump actually had a cameo in "Home Alone 2"--apparently it has been cut.
I don’t remember him from his heyday, but he would show up on television from time to time in the 70s. At that point he was poking fun at Jimmy Carter — the joke was (paraphrase):
My name is Jimmy Carter, I have to tell the truth/‘cause every time I tell a lie I grow another tooth.
A lot of comedians used his approach — he was doing a standup version of “Weekend Update” 15-20 years before Chevy Chase. RIP.
Darn. Late to this one so no one will see this - except for the two who really count. lol..
For those who are smacking on about Sahl and his obsession with the Kennedy assassination being so whacked and no one tossed out John Barbour? Judyth Baker?
"This blog isn't an obituary column. I'm not here to acknowledge passings. People are continually crossing over."
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But only up to a point.
wendybar said...
"Why did the use Covid as an excuse NOT to release the Kennedy files?? Hiding something relevant??"
The date is telling...after the Nov 2022 election.
Mort was the last honest liberal.
I don't mean that literally, but it makes a great epitaph.
RIP Gunther. He was a much better match for Rachel than Ross (or Brad or Justin).
I'm curious ... how does a lady extend the same invitation to a gentleman? "Come inside & look at my etchings"? It must happen. Maybe I have heard those words but didn't know the code.
"Like, Margaret Cho bad?"
That's going to leave a mark.
So many derivative opinions; I even know the book, but if you click on the channel of the video above (on Cavett), you can witness the truth for yourself. I know 99% won't, but if one does, maybe I can have my first true conversation. I was born in the 80s, but it's very easy to research a few names. And still, the way he worked - free-association, stream-of-consciousness, digressions - make it necessary to listen to a record a few times. It's worth it, though.
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