Mort Sahl’s ‘Overtaxed’ Sense of Humor Is Back

To say Mort Sahl is funny is to point merely to the tip of this particular iceberg. He also has keen insight, facile memory, wit and book-learning.

“Mort is essentially a wise man, “ said John Hart, veteran NBC newsman now anchoring the daily “World Monitor” report on the Discovery Channel, and a longtime admirer of Sahl’s work.

“He is not a joke-teller so much as a truth-teller,” Hart said from his home in Boston. “The reason you laugh is that you recognize the truth. And you’re so relieved, and it’s so wonderful to see, as a poet sees, or a wise man sees, the connections in things. He has the most astonishing associative mind that I’ve ever run across. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and Mort proves it.”

Or still seeks to, as demonstrated by “Mort Sahl,” a series of four one-man performances next weekend at the Westwood Playhouse.

Sahl preceded Lenny Bruce and in fact paved the way for the whole school of comics as social critics. Enrico Banducci took a chance and booked him at the legendary “hungry i” nightclub in San Francisco one night in 1950. Wearing a cardigan sweater and with a newspaper under his arm, Sahl was the first act to bring the club any real attention. He took swipes at Eisenhower and joked that J. Edgar Hoover was writing a book called “How to Turn Your Friends in to the FBI for Fun and Profit.”

He was reportedly considered so shocking that the FBI leaned on Banducci to get rid of him. But by then, the story goes, the lines outside the hungry i stretched around the block, and Banducci opted to retain Sahl and the box office receipts.

And the comedian has been considered shocking many times since--for his jabs at the Kennedy and Nixon Administrations, and for hilariously criticizing the American left. He even dined with the Reagans at the White House. Liberals and conservatives alike have pondered over the years: Just whose side is he on?

“I hate hearing people claiming Mort Sahl went to the right. They simply have not been listening very carefully,” says Bob Wiede, producer and director of 1988’s “Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition,” part of the PBS “American Masters” series.

Whose side is he on? Hart says it’s the side of the Jeffersonian Democrats. Sahl himself limits it even further.

“I think the whole story of your life is finding out who the enemy is,” he said the other day. “When you’re young, you think it’s the people you work for. When you’re out of office, you think it’s the people who are in office. The enemy, I have found, is the group. Even if it’s your group--if you’re lucky enough to find a group. I rarely did, if ever. I think it’s the individual versus the group. The idea is to keep your state of mind independent, which is a war. Lonesome as hell. And you get deflected along the way. And distracted.”

He’s 63 now, and his graying temples complement his agate eyes. They are not angry eyes--and they’re not jaded eyes. (Newsman Hart remarked, “He will not yield to cynicism.”) Yet if any eyes have seen enough to lose their twinkle, Sahl’s surely have.

“Boy, I’ll tell you--you really need your sense of humor, but it’s sorely overtaxed,” he said with a tight-lipped smile, after pointing to what he called the “intellectualization” of movie and pop music reviews. “You notice when” critics “label a musical group ‘political’? Then they quote those couplets that they’re fond of? And it’ll be something like ‘save the environment; war is bad’--or some other great discovery,” he said, then guffawed.

Recently, he polished the dialogue for the film “Flashbacks.” He does sporadic commentary for the Christian Science Monitor’s “World Monitor” TV report. He is readying an hourlong weekly “Mort Sahl Show” for the Christian Science Monitor Channel, due in May (“sort of a hip C-SPAN,” he says).

He debuted his present theatrical show on Broadway two years ago, prompting Mel Gussow of the New York Times to write, “History has returned Mort Sahl to the spotlight when he is most needed.” He took the show on the road to Australia, a land he speaks about almost passionately, singing the praises of its wide open spaces, Melbourne’s seven daily newspapers, and people who have shelves at home “full of books instead of videotapes.”

“What do I cover in the show?” he asked, then pronounced the next word deliciously: “ America. My favorite subject. This unrequited love for America.” He guffaws. “Women. Movies. Social criticism. Some politics. I’ll use them as departure points. One thing leads to another. Remarkably unfree association” He chuckles.

The following is a smattering of contemporary Sahlisms that came up during a two-hour chat (punctuated by various kinds of laughter):

Politics: “People think they’re political. I’m not sure they are. I’m not sure people have politics anymore. They have trends. They’re trend-followers.”

The Bush Administration: “Reagan and Bush kept promising less government. How about none? Did anybody expect none?”

Movies: “Did I mention the new movie rating? IQ-80, with apologies to Jack Valenti. I went to the Director’s Guild Sunday night. They had a tribute to Richard Brooks there. They would show you a clip, and they would tell you what conclusion you should have to it. You know--they show you a Western, and they tell you why it’s socially significant! Sam Peckinpah used to say, ‘I can’t wait to read Pauline Kael so I can find out what my movie was about.’ ”

American women: “The new women, in their ruthless assertion of their rights--recognizing that they don’t want any emotional ties, no children, and economic superiority, and the right to be promiscuous--the new women are like the old men. If they want to be like us, that’s a dubious ambition. I’m not sure I want to help them. Also the fact that the women are supposed to be 55% of the population, and here they are classified as a minority.”

Television: “If they open up with a subject on ‘Good Morning, America,’ and then discuss it on all the talk shows, and then ‘MacNeil-Lehrer’ does it, the news does it at 6:30, and Koppel does it at 11:30, I think people are under the impression that they participated in a decision-making process. When all they’ve been doing is sitting in the gallery and watching. . . . Nobody has any memory.”

Dan Quayle: “One of his great quotes lately is that people are tired of the incumbents, and there’s a mood in the country to ‘limit the terms of the Congress--especially the House and Senate.’ That’s a direct quote! His ratings have not improved. I don’t think people think he’s up for the job--being an incumbent.”

Republicans and liberals: “I saw Chevy Chase showing up at the Feinstein dinner, giving her $50,000. But then you have to ask, Why isn’t that in any of his work? Why isn’t that kind of bite in any” comic’s work? “Even if he made a movie in which he created a straw right-winger and tore him to shreds, but that isn’t even in there. It’s like morality is a luxury for off hours.

But it’s interesting that Republicans don’t make it that way. They make it their craft, and it works for them. They keep getting elected. They’ve got the country to work with. The liberals lose all the time, and they have to go scratch their heads and say how can we make a movie that will make money? They can’t just follow their hearts.”

Marketing’s effect on media: “So you’ve read everything about 2 Live Crew. As if we’re all 14! And that’s the view the network took too. They’re now taking the position that ‘The Simpsons’ is better than ‘Cosby’ because the audience is 18 to 34, and Cosby’s is older.

What does this mean? That Cosby has to give the money back? What are we talking about? The 9-to-5 morality that anything is justified on the basis of marketing would lead us not just to write articles that the editor will endorse, but we could make more money from the standpoint of efficiency by each of us going to a grammar school now, waiting at the gate and selling them crack. We’d have had a more productive day, piece by piece.”

Left and right: “They’re not really liberals--I used to say the liberals--well, they’re really social democrats. The former left in America are all reasonable people, in the interests of economic survival. They do things that make themselves feel better about themselves. The minorities, the whales, “Big Green.” But the real question is why do they feel bad about themselves to begin with? The right doesn’t seem to have any guilt, no matter what it perpetrates. Sleeps fine. That’s because they’re the same monsters they were at the beginning of the journey.”

David Letterman: “Letterman is on that thing that television is ridiculous, and you’re part of it if you’re watching this. He makes that point. I saw him make it last night, very briefly, as I went by. He was grimacing, and it’s genuine. He can’t believe that they’re paying him and that we’re all in concert there. He’s got a point.”

Comics today: “The audience in clubs has become other comedians! That’s who stays there all evening. They look at each other! You know, in my intolerance, I thought rock was about the bottom; there was nothing really lower. But they still have to know a couple of chords and not violate the structure. And you can’t say that for the comedians. It’s like anything and everything. They dissipated profanity. You can’t use it for emphasis anymore. Nobody knows if you’re mad! Because everybody curses all day.”

Decline of America: “The political examples are easy, but the culture is what you really have to watch. When I was at a function, . . . all the movie people were lamenting the lack of leadership in Washington, and the lack of ethics on Wall Street, but the culture showed signs of breaking down well before they did. They don’t own up to that, because they’re part of it.”

Asked about the contemporary dearth of fellow social observers in modern America; the scarcity of informed and funny political satire in this country, Mort Sahl said, “Yeah, I’m a hard-head. I just kept on going.”

It was one of the few firm statements that he made that was not followed by a laugh.

Mort Sahl in “Mort Sahl,” a series of four one-man performances Friday, 8:30 p.m., Saturday, 7 and 9 p.m., and Nov. 18, 7:30 p.m., at the Westwood Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave. All tickets, $25. (213) 208-5454.