ONE-MAN SHOW A HIT : AT 60, MORT SAHL ENTERS THE CIRCLE OF CHAMPIONS

Nobody knew what to make of Mort Sahl as word began to build about his Broadway debut at the Neil Simon Theater on Sunday.

There’s a subtle totalitarianism in American cultural life that tends to make a non-person of anyone who doesn’t regularly appear on TV or in the tabloid media. Younger interviewers tended to view him as a fossil draped in an Eisenhower jacket. Even more mature reporters had trouble handling him as an ironist in an age of sensation. To the public in general, especially the New York public, he was someone who had crossed over from political concern to obsession, which was more than enough to ticket him to the oblivion of faded celebrity.

But Sahl at 60 has one of those rare, self-created sensibilities that somehow manages through the worst. It may have taken him 30 years to get to one of the championship divisions of American cultural life--a solo Broadway show--but by the time he made it, he was ready.

So was his audience. The American public has grown weary of the rondo of political hope and disenchantment, as well as the herd mentality of the attendant media. It took Sahl a few moments to warm his opening-night audience up, but he had done his homework, and by the time he came up with the line “Donald Trump is building prison high-rises to house the friends of the Mayor’s,” he was on a roll that lasted through most of his intermissionless 1 hour-and-40-minute performance.

Sahl made the very good choice of suppressing the material that would date him. What was once a Vicki Morgan reference vis-a-vis Alfred Bloomingdale now becomes a Donna Rice note as “a cynical device to humanize Gary Hart.”

Sahl told the audience that, just as it was taking its seats, four American ships had been fired on by Iranians in the Persian Gulf. “Or no,” he quipped, “that could have been Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s demonstration of weapons the U.S. was selling to Iran.”

Sahl had a great deal of fun with the elusive but fairly constant distinction between impotent liberals and hard-hearted conservatives (“The conservative is willing to bear arms to defend his goods, the fascist is willing to bear arms to take your goods, and the liberal wants everyone’s goods but feels guilty about it.”)

He has made extraordinary adjustments from the act we saw at the Henry Fonda Theater earlier this year. Though his central set piece remains--a White House dinner with the Reagans and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir--as well as his observations on the Earnest Frippery of the Hollywood celebrity liberal, he’s made numerous new additions, and he’s played down his references to Americana. Sahl is intuitive enough to know what plays this tight, little island, and how it feels itself subtly cut off from the continent by the Hudson River.

What the audience saw mostly was a virtuoso comedian at the height of his power. Sahl’s nervous, up-tempo cadence is perfect for the professional observer trying his utmost to report from the cyclotron of modern history.

His act is an intricate superstructure containing smaller structures, ironies, multiple meanings and pleasurable asides. And the force of his language is such that at one point the audience applauded a line about Waspish sexual repression and spiritual deprivation simply for its eloquence--there was no joke attached.

Everyone goes to the theater with a hope and an expectation. For the audience, the redemption of these qualities seemed to be in Sahl’s witty and energetic views on the bizarre and disquietingly unaccountable nexus between show business and politics. For Sahl, it had to rest in the discovery that, given the right conditions, there’s still room in modern entertainment for the expressions of individual complexity.

In a Mort Sahl performance, serious laughter is not a contradiction in terms.

OTHER VIEWS: Mel Gussow of the New York Times said of Sahl’s performance: “Though the comedian has shifted some of his animosity, age has not mollified his temperament or lessened his aptitude. He is still out there in the combat zone, flailing sacred cows (and sitting ducks) with his caustic wit. One may not agree with everything he says, but there is no denying the precision of his articulation . . . but he is one of our most acerbic commentators, and someone who refuses to talk down to his audience or be pigeon-holed.”

Howard Kissel, drama critic for the New York Daily News: “It’s tempting to quote Sahl at length because he’s so wildly funny. For an hour and a half he has our minds reeling with the loony improbability of our world. It’s not so much an evening of yocks as it is an evening of reality, and that’s almost as scary as it is hilarious.”

Clive Barnes of the New York Post: “The real joy of the man, and his show, is the quickness of his mind, and his wonderful sense of nonsense . . . forget that the man is clever. Merely think of him as the funniest guy in town. He is.”