Word: joking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Whenever there is a political bloat, Mort sticks a pin in it," says Hubert Humphrey. Among his constituents Sahl counts Adlai Stevenson, who sees him regularly when Sahl is in Chicago. Says Adlai: "I dote on him." Sahl contributed a joke bank that John Kennedy drew on for his witty performance at last November's Al Smith Dinner, once discouraged a Nixon worker who approached him for a similar purpose. As for President Eisenhower, he has never heard of Mort Sahl -possibly because the comedian refers to Press Secretary Jim Hagerty as "Ike's right foot." But Sahl...
...that quality for Sahl. But in his own way, Sahl has taken his place on the center line of the Ward-Dooley-Rogers tradition. The Depression and war years produced only minor political satire. Among comedians, Bob Hope -who still typifies the older, machine-tooled and essentially safe topical joke-might crack about Eleanor Roosevelt's never staying home; Fred Allen liked to say that Tom Dewey seemed to be eating a Hershey bar sideways. But satire on the whole was caught between social protest and safe, sponsor-tested lampoons. With Mort Sahl, political satire has come alive again...
Holding a rolled newspaper in his right hand, flashing baby-blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation-or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought; joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, till the whole structure spins but somehow balances. All the time he is building toward a final statement...
Some of Sahl's jokes are rather rarefied. Once he began talking about a fellow in a statistical analysis course who would never use sigma but preferred his own initials instead. When someone laughed, Sahl looked up in surprise and said: "If you understand that joke, you don't belong here. You had better call the Government at once; you are desperately needed...
...Berkeley hospital referred him elsewhere when neither he nor Sue had the $450 for an emergency operation, ran after him to demand $10 as an examination fee. The appendix ruptured, Sahl recovered in a veterans' hospital, and the American Medical Association joined his repertory (his mildest joke about the medical world is that "the A.M.A. opposes chiropractors and witch doctors and any other cure that is quick...