Mort Sahl, who rocked the comedy world with a strikingly critical look at American life and politics in the 1950s and ’60s while strolling the stage with a newspaper, reports The New York Times and The Washington Post. died at the age of 94.
Sahl, widely regarded as the father of modern political satire, died at his home near San Francisco, newspapers quoted a friend as saying. He did not specify the cause of death. Reuters could not immediately confirm the death independently.
Sahl is credited with influencing comedians such as George Carlin, Woody Allen and Jonathan Winters. He was also a friend of another comedy mold-breaker, Lenny Bruce, although his work did not involve profanity like that of Bruce.
His “Mort Sahl at Sunset”, released in 1955, was his first stand-up comedy album and three years later, he had a Broadway show.
Morton Leon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11, 1927, and grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated from the University of Southern California, and moved to the San Francisco area in the early 1950s to try comedy. He lived in part of his car before building a following in San Francisco’s famously hungry nightclub and then hitting the street.
Sahl’s stage presence was different from the norm of the 1950s. He wore casual V-neck sweaters and was more irreverent, more intellectual, more hip, and less rehearsed than his coat-and-tie contemporaries who told mother-in-law jokes.
Sahal took the stage with a newspaper and outlined an act only by sitting on a stool and relying on improvisation and answering to his audience. He would read from the newspaper to launch his comic riffs on the day’s events with a quick-fire delivery that earned him the nickname “Rebel Without a Pause”.
“It wasn’t that he did political comedy—as everyone keeps insisting,” Allen was quoted as saying in the book “Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.”
“It was that he had real insight. He made the country receptive to a comedy it was not used to hearing. He told the country jokes that required him to think,” said filmmaker and comedian Alan he said.
As Sahal often told his audience: “I don’t tell jokes. I give a little lecture.”
‘a bother’
Sahl described himself in the New York Times in 2004 as a populist, a Puritan, a dreamer, and a “troublemaker”. And they spared neither Republicans nor Democrats.
“(John) Kennedy is trying to buy the country and (Richard) Nixon is trying to sell it,” he said.
He later mocked Republican President George H.W. Bush by saying: “God bless George Bush – he stagger long,” and later used the same line on Democrat Bill Clinton.
He maintained it through the rise of Donald Trump. “I was on stage last night and I gave a medical report about Donald Trump,” he said in an interview with the Library of Congress. “I said he was hospitalized for an attack of humility.”
Earlier, Sahl liked to blast Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee for their pursuit of communists.
“If you’re the only person left on the planet, I’ll have to attack you,” Sahl said. “this is my work.”
Sahl had a close relationship with President John F. Kennedy. At the request of Kennedy’s father, Sahl wrote jokes for his use during the 1960 election campaign, but later made sharp jokes about the Kennedy family. According to the book “Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satiere in Postwar America”, the club’s owners then refused to book Sahl because he was threatened with a tax audit.
Sahl became obsessed with the 1963 assassination of Kennedy. His attacks on the Warren Commission report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating the president, became a large part of his work, which included reading from the report, shutting down his audience and damaging his career. Was.
He joined New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison in investigating the murder conspiracy theories, saying he believes the same entity responsible for the murders of Kennedy, his brother Robert, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was responsible.
Sahl made a partial return in the 1970s as non-traditional comedians such as Carlin and Richard Pryor. In 1988, he did a one-man off-Broadway show titled “Mort Sahl’s America”.
Even in his 90s, Sahl performed weekly at a theater near his Mill Valley, California, home, with shows livestreamed over the Internet. Before the comic actor’s suicide in 2014, he was a close friend of Robin Williams, who lived nearby.
Disclaimer: This post has been self-published from the agency feed without modification and has not been reviewed by an editor
read all breaking news, breaking news And coronavirus news Here. follow us on Facebook, Twitter And Wire.