Word: mort
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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quot;Right!", echoes an almost fanatical following-dedicated fans who are sure that by Election Day Comedian Mort Sahl will have reduced the major candidates to little more than a 5 o'clock shadow and a few odd wisps of singed hair. Often introduced in nightclubs as "the next President of the United States," Sahl is unlikely this year to achieve his stated ambition to overthrow the Government. That will take time. His audience is still narrow and his appeal is anything but universal. But he is the freshest comedian around; he is a permanent and popular attraction...
Revolt Against Pomposity. In the view of his followers, Mort Sahl represents a new and growing feeling, described rather breathlessly by Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "a mounting restlessness and discontent, an impatience with clichés and platitudes, a resentment against the materialist notion that affluence is the answer to everything, a contempt for banality and corn-in short, a revolt against pomposity. Sahl's popularity is a sign of a yearning for youth, irreverence, trenchancy, satire, a clean break with the past...
...Mort Sahl is young, irreverent, and trenchant. With one eye on world news and the other on Variety, he is a volatile mixture of show business and politics, of exhibitionistic self-dedication and a seemingly sincere passion to change the world. The best of the New Comedians, he is also the first notable American political satirist since Will Rogers...
...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...
Eagerly sharpening knives for the Republican Convention in Chicago and for the campaign after that, Mort knows that he is under pressure. "I have only a few months to tell these jokes," he points out, "before they become treason...