Morton Lyon Sahl (May 11, 1927 – October 26, 2021) was a Canadian-born American comedian, actor, and social satirist, considered the first modern comedian since Will Rogers. Sahl pioneered a style of social satire that pokes fun at political and current event topics using improvised monologues and only a newspaper as a prop.
Sahl spent his early years in Los
Angeles and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he made his professional
stage debut at the hungry i nightclub in 1953.
His popularity grew quickly, and after a year at the club he traveled
the country doing shows at established nightclubs, theaters, and college
campuses. In 1960 he became the first comedian to have a cover story written
about him by Time magazine. He appeared on various television shows,
played a number of film roles, and performed a one-man show on Broadway.
Television host Steve Allen said that
Sahl was "the only real political philosopher we have in modern
comedy". His social satire performances broke new ground in live
entertainment, as a stand-up comic talking about the real world of politics at
that time was considered "revolutionary". It inspired many later
comics to become stage comedians, including Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, George
Carlin, and Woody Allen, who credits Sahl's new style of humor with
"opening up vistas for people like me".
Television host Steve Allen, who
originated the Tonight Show, said he was "struck by how amateur he
seemed," but added that the observation was not meant as a criticism, but
as a "compliment". He noted that all the previous successful comics
dressed formally, were glib and well-rehearsed, and were always in control of
their audiences. Allen said that Sahl's
"very un-show business manner was one of the things I liked when I first
saw him work."
Sahl dressed casually, with no tie and
usually wearing his trademark V-neck campus-style sweater. His stage presence
was seen as being "candid and cool, the antithesis of the slick
comic," stated theater critic Gerald Nachman. And although Sahl acquired a reputation for
being an intellectual comedian, it was an image he disliked and disagreed with:
"It was absurd. I was barely a C student," he said. His naturalness on stage was partly due to
his preferring improvisation over carefully rehearsed monologues. Sahl
explained:
I never found you could write the act.
You can't rehearse the audience's responses. You adjust to them every night. I
come in with only an outline. You've got to have a spirit of adventure. I
follow my instincts and the audience is my jury.
His casual style of stand-up, where he
seemed to be one-on-one with his audience, influenced new comedians, including Lenny
Bruce and Dick Gregory. Sahl was the
least controversial, however, because he dressed and looked
"collegiate" and focused on politics, while Bruce confronted sexual
and language conventions and Gregory focused on the civil rights movement.
Numerous politicians became his fans,
with John F. Kennedy asking him to write his jokes for campaign speeches,
though Sahl later turned his barbs at the president. After Kennedy's assassination
in 1963, Sahl focused on what he said were the Warren Report's inaccuracies and
conclusions, and spoke about it often during his shows. This alienated much of
his audience and led to a decline in his popularity for the remainder of the
1960s. By the 1970s, his shows and popularity staged a partial comeback that
continued over the ensuing decades. A
biography of Sahl, Last Man Standing, by James Curtis, was released in
2017.
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