Scotsman Obituaries: Satirist who invented a new form of stand-up comedy

Mort Sahl cracks a joke at a press conference in London in 1961 (Picture: Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Mort Sahl was not only a stand-up comic. Arguably he was the man who invented stand-up comedy as we know it today – or at least yesterday. He dumped punchlines in favour of rambling stories, improvisation and often frank, biting observational humour, taking shots at all and sundry. He was an equal opportunities comic before equal opportunities was a thing.

“Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” he would ask as his act gathered momentum. Of course that was when causing offence might be considered to fall within the province of comedy rather than the law courts. Acknowledging changing social attitudes, Sahl once remarked: “In the Forties to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the Fifties to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the Sixties to get a girl you had to be black. In the Seventies to get a girl you’ve got to be a girl.”

His criticisms swept across both the social and political spectrum. “Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions,” he said. “Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen.”

President John F Kennedy was a target, a fan and ultimately a friend. JFK hired him to supply laughs in his speeches when he ran against Richard Nixon. Sahl was credited with the phrase “Would you buy a used car from this man?” It was funny, serious and ominously prophetic.

Sahl was huge in the US, where he co-hosted the Oscars with Bob Hope in 1959 and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1960, holding balloons illustrated with caricatures of Kennedy, Nixon and other politicians. But even in the US younger audiences may be unfamiliar with his work. There were few films or big TV specials. After his death Albert Brooks tweeted: “Most young people have no idea who he was but he was one of the few comedians who yanked comedy out of vaudeville-type humour into the modern age. One of the very first to just talk to the audience.”

To say he was influential would be like saying Frank Sinatra could carry a tune. Woody Allen said: “Comedians were very, very formula… Suddenly, in this small cabaret, this comedian comes along, Mort Sahl. He was absolutely like nothing anybody had ever seen before. And he was so natural that other comedians became jealous. They used to say, ‘Why do people like him? He just talks. He isn’t really performing.’ But his jokes came out as stream of consciousness, in a kind of jazz rhythm.” On another occasion Allen said: “He was the best thing I ever saw. He was like Charlie Parker in jazz.”

Morton Lyon Sahl was born to Jewish-American parents in Montreal, where his father ran a tobacco store and nurtured ambitions to become a professional playwright. Back in the States his father took an administrative job with the FBI – which would later compile a bulky file on Mort, though his own political allegiances remained frustratingly unclear. Ronald Reagan was another politician who was both a target and a friend. "Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter," Sahl said. "If he ran unopposed he would have lost."

After Pearl Harbor Sahl lied about his age in an attempt to join the Army and when he left school he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces. He subsequently studied traffic engineering and city management at the University of Southern California. He worked in various jobs, including selling second-hand cars, while trying to break into comedy and write plays. Friends discouraged him and NBC told him to give up, saying he would never make it. Ultimately he decided he would try to fuse the two ideas together, the comedy and the plays, in the form of comic monologues.

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It remained a hard slog during the early years of the 1950s. There were no comedy clubs as such. Eventually he was given a chance at the hip “hungry i” nightclub in San Francisco. His act attracted the attention of critics and comedians, not all of whom were jealous. All-round entertainer Eddie Cantor championed the new style of comedy and suddenly Sahl was playing to full houses. “I was born in San Francisco,” he later remarked.

Sahl came on stage with an outline of his routine (pinned to a newspaper, which became part of the image) and then he improvised around it, responding to his audience. His career and earnings took off and big nightclubs in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which had not hired comics previously, competed for him.

A recording of his act from 1955 was later acknowledged by the Library of Congress as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record”. Celebrity fans included Marilyn Monroe, who invited him to feel her breasts, and Frank Sinatra, who signed him to his Reprise record label. A whole new generation of comics acknowledged him as their inspiration, from Woody Allen to the ill-fated Lenny Bruce to Britain’s own John Cleese.

By the mid-Sixties, however, Sahl’s popularity had declined. He became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination and conspiracy theories and would use his act to read and dispute chunks of the Warren Commission report. He made something of a comeback in later years, but never enjoyed the status he had in the Fifties and Sixties. Disparaging of modern comics, profanity and woke culture, latterly he performed in a little theatre in Northern California, where he lived.

He connected with his audience because he seemed like a regular, ordinary guy... and he was funny and articulated their concerns and frustrations. But like many comics he struggled with personal demons and tragedies, though he did not drink or take drugs. Mort Sahl married and divorced four times. “My life needs editing,” he remarked. He had only one child, a son who died at the age of 19.

“People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn’t explain why I’m lonely,” he said.

Obituaries

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