Word: sahl
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Political satire, of course, has had its ups and downs in American comedy. The Eisenhower 1950s proved a fruitful time for outsider satirists like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, and the counterculture years of the late '60s and '70s gave rise to stand-up social commentators like George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Robert Klein. By the '80s, however, stand-up had mostly retreated to the home front (Roseanne Barr), the trivia of everyday life (Jerry Seinfeld) and the carefully nonpartisan "topical" jokes of Johnny Carson. In the George W. Bush years, political comedy came back in style, not just...
This is a relatively new phenomenon. The best political satirists of the 1950s and '60s were prickly outsiders, scornful of the high and mighty. When Mort Sahl sat on a nightclub stool and took out his newspaper to deconstruct the day's headlines, or Lenny Bruce lashed out, in X-rated language, at the political and moral hypocrisy he saw around him, they hardly expected, or wanted, the targets of their satire to show up onstage at the hungry i and join in the laughs...
Laugh, that is, with an uneasy edge. Comedy was about to break off from its '60s emphasis on topical humor (exemplified, in varying levels of toxicity, by Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce and Johnny Carson). Young comics of the '70s were as suspicious of Vietnam humor as they were of mother-in-law jokes. Their stuff was apolitical--but radical. It challenged the very notion of making people laugh. When Albert Brooks impersonated a mime so inept he must describe his movements, or Andy Kaufman turned on a plastic record player and lip-synched to the Mighty Mouse theme song...
Comedian Mort Sahl spoke for many now famous performers when he said he was "set free" by Enrico Banducci, the influential impresario of the seminal San Francisco nightclub the hungry i. After buying the cabaret in the early 1950s for $800, Banducci installed a brick-wall backdrop, now standard in comedy clubs, and urged artists to be themselves. In addition to nurturing Sahl, known for his edgy political satire, the flamboyant, beret-clad enthusiast helped launch such performers as Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby and the Kingston Trio. Banducci...
...label that stuck to him ? "sick dirty Lenny" ? had its drawbacks. Frequent arrests, for example. But the advantage of being outspoken was that he could speak about anything. Most comedians marched to a very conventional tune. A few, like Sahl and Dick Gregory, specialized in political satire; a few others, like Redd Foxx and Belle Barth, did "blue" material, at least by 50s standards. (Today it would barely be aqua.) Lenny's satire was more ferocious than Sahl's, his language saltier and more freewheeling than Foxx's. This combination of topic and tone, and the fact that nobody else...