Mort Sahl, Whose Biting Commentary Redefined Stand-Up, Dies at 94 - The New York Times

Mort Sahl, who confronted Eisenhower-era cultural complacency with acid stage monologues, delivering biting social commentary in the guise of a stand-up comedian and thus changing the nature of both stand-up comedy and social commentary, died on Tuesday at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., near San Francisco.

Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in.

Sahl first took the stage at the hungry i — the hip nightclub in San Francisco that he helped make hip, where he would routinely be introduced as “the next president of the United States” — American comedy was largely defined by an unadventurous joke-book mentality.

“Nobody saw Mort Sahl coming,” Gerald Nachman wrote in “Seriously Funny,” his book-length 2003 study of comedy in the 1950s and ’60s.

(If a younger generation of comedians considered Mr. Sahl an inspiration, he did not return their love. He said in a 2010 interview that he found their comedy “kind of soft” and urged them to “take more chances.”).

He took the stage carrying a rolled-up newspaper, a prop that was also a prompt; in Mr.

Khrushchev and Adlai Stevenson: “Khrushchev said to Stevenson, ‘If you want to be president, I want to tell you how to seize power,’ and Stevenson admonished him and said to him, ‘You know, that’s not the way we do things in this country,’ but several members of the Democratic advisory council who were present admonished Stevenson to keep quiet and listen to this man!”.

Over the years he directed a venomous wit against Democrats and Republicans alike, famously supporting Kennedy in his presidential campaign against Richard Nixon and then lampooning him after his election: In choosing Kennedy, he said, the country was “searching for a son figure.”.

Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

“Are there any groups I haven’t offended?” he was wont to ask from the stage.

His father, Harry, ran a tobacco shop, though he had grown up in New York as an aspiring playwright, and by the time Mort was 7, Harry Sahl had moved the family to Los Angeles and found work as a clerk for the Department of Justice.

At 15, Mort joined the R.O.T.C.

He wrote barbed political one-liners for Kennedy the candidate, but when he turned his wit on the president-elect, tweaking him for his youth and for his family’s money and power, liberals who had loved his criticism of conservatism became notably cool.

Sahl was the victim of Kennedy family wrath or a blackball from liberal Hollywood, as he sometimes claimed, or whether his own thorniness was to blame — he bickered with producers and missed a number of engagements, and he was fired from a starring role in a 1964 Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” — gigs were fewer and farther between in the 1960s.

“My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,” he said from the stage at one preview.

Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination.

Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company.

I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company.

The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”.

Babior; then to China Lee, the first Asian American model to be a Playboy centerfold, from whom he was divorced for the second time in 1991; and finally to Kenslea Motter, from whom he was divorced in 2009.

Sahl and his second wife had a son, Mort Jr., who died in 1996 of a drug overdose.

In 1987, in the wake of Jackie Mason’s successful one-man show, “The World According to Me!” he reappeared on Broadway in one of his own, “Mort Sahl on Broadway,” and he continued to perform in clubs long after that

Sahl said in a Times interview after a 2004 performance, a reminder of lines from other decades and how little he had changed

“I’m the intellectual voice of the era,” he said to Time magazine, “which is a good measure of the era.”