Word: mort
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...this was the American the new used as its target. They made openly on his values, his sex his leaders. It was frightening. to Mort Sahl in the middle was like listening to Radio Europe in East Berlin or singing Civil War Songs at Fort Dix, New Jersey. We all felt like memories of the underground and our laughter was based very much on a sense of conspiracy. Laughing at McCarthy in those dear gone days was like laughing at God--or worse--J. Edgar Hoover...
...Mort Sahl who can still be quite funny has never been as hilarious to me since I began to feel free to laugh at him without fearing the F.B.I. was photographing me in the act. Any against authority was a dangerous joke in those days. This was losers' school of humor. Robert little man would have it instantly. So would . In one case it was Sahl being overcome by the Government, in the case it was Mike and Elaine being overcome by sexual mores; in another case it was Lennie Bruce being overcome by everything...
Comparing the white pages of Sick, Sick, Sick, his first cartoon collection, to the later strips darkened by heavy dialogue, one finds Feiffer edging toward literary satire. Why didn't he begin as a writer? The question applies equally well to Mort Sahl, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, all of whom started out in fields close to writing, and who now seem to be entering the field itself: Sahl is working on a book, Nichols just published a story in the New Yorker, and May's one act play opens off-Broadway this week...
That anonymous masterpiece typifies the current brand of topical and political humor as practiced in a growing number of U.S. nightclubs, a form opened wide by acerbic Mort Sahl and still growing in popularity from Manhattan's Greenwich Village to San Francisco's North Beach. Even in Washington, where political humor has heretofore been of the unconscious kind, four night spots are now flourishing with topical jokesters. Manhattan's The Premise has just opened a Washington outpost, where distinguished audiences (including, on occasion, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Senators Hubert Humphrey, Mike Mansfield, Kenneth Keating, "Scoop" Jackson) have...
...sense, Gleason's sudden achievements should not be as surprising as they seem. For unlike such masters of the oneline gag as Bob Hope and Mort Sahl, he bases his humor on the creation of comic characters-most of them acted by himself. And as the late James Thurber liked to remark, such comedy may be amusing, but it is also serious commentary on human life. "Gleason has gorgeous creative juices," says Requiem's Producer David Susskind with purple accuracy. "He is a thundering talent-the kind of raw, brilliant talent that has gone out of style, with...