Mort Sahl made people laugh at things he wanted them to be angry about

From the 1950s, Mort Sahl stood up to tell complacent audiences that they couldn’t trust their leaders who were in any case stupid.

Mort Sahl with his traditional prop — that day’s newspaper.

OBITUARY

Morton Lyon Sahl, comedian
Born: May 11, 1927, in Montreal, Canada; died, aged 94, October 26, in Mill Valley, California.

Two men changed American humour: Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. The fearless, furious-paced Bruce was confronting, challengingly profane and his 1964 obscenity trial, along with his First Amendment defence, changed American society (he was found guilty then, but in 2003 posthumously pardoned). Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Paul Kelly have written songs about him. He’s on the cover of Sgt Pepper. But it is still vigorously ­debated today: was he funny?

There will be no such debate about Sahl. Until he emerged from a small club in the late 1950s, American stand-up comedians had routines about mothers-in-law and the funny things that happened on the way to the venue.

Instead, Sahl, with a newspaper in his hands, spoke of current events, critical of what he saw as a smug, self-regard of many Americans, even as their government sent young men to fight and die in countries they knew little about.

Talking of foreign affairs on the Ed Sullivan show in 1961, he told the audience the vice-president was in Laos. “Are you aware of Laos?” he asked. “Well, it would be a little easier if I told you who the leader was there, but we haven’t chosen him yet.”

And he was routinely critical of American presidents: “Nixon’s the kind of guy that if you were drowning 50 feet offshore, he’d throw you a 30-foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the president had met you more than halfway.”

And he was able to explain how Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 “because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.”

Apparently, things didn’t improve. In the run-up to the 1996 US election, he pointed out that with just four million people America produced the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. “Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!”

He was likened to the comedian, columnist and early film star Will Rogers who ran a fanciful campaign for the presidency in 1928, one of his few policies being to resign if he won. After Rogers’ death in an aeroplane crash in 1935, political comedy in America waned, and war would render much of it obsolete.

Sahl believed that by the 1950s, the US needed a few sticks poked at it. He would say: “Will Rogers used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a yokel criticising the intellectuals who ran the government. I come out with a newspaper and pretend I’m an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.”

Sahl was born in Canada but moved to Los Angeles as a child as his father tried to make it as a scriptwriter. At school there, a classmate was Richard Crenna who would later star in the first Rambo movies. Sahl evolved as a sort of conservative rebel dropping out of school to enlist in the army after the attack on Pearl Harbour and staying there until his mother explained to them that he was just 15. He would join the air force, but rebelled against its discipline.

He studied traffic engineering, but dropped out with plans to act and perhaps become the playwright his father had not. In 1955, he met 16-year-old Sue Babior whom he would marry. They hung about with a bohemian crowd that would read Trotsky and Nietzsche: “Things were simple then – all there was to worry about was the destiny of man.”

He was doing small gigs unnoticed until Babior suggested he apply to the famed Hungry I nightclub at which he would revolutionise humour and where Bill Cosby, Bruce, Joan Rivers and Woody Allen would follow.

It all happened quickly. Stars were seen in the modest venue and queues snaked down the street. Soon he was earning a fortune, starring on the Ed Sullivan and Tonight Show. he was on the cover of Time and even appeared as the punchline in a Peanuts cartoon strip.

And just as quickly, it was over. Liberal Hollywood turned on him. He became prickly and dwelt on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Watergate saw a modest revival, but his television appearances were few and the live gigs ever smaller, eventually once a week in his hometown.

He came to Australia twice, addressing the National Press Club in 1986 after shows in Sydney, and for the Melbourne Comedy Festival three years later. He was dismissive of the then new wave of US comics: “These young comics are all liberals and feminists.”