Word: sahl
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More bizarre than Berman and more emotionally engaging than Sahl are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who brilliantly exaggerate sophistication until it bursts with humor. A dentist and his patient fall in love ("I knew it when I looked into your mouth and saw you were English clear through"). In a sequence called Bach to Bach they are two symphonic phonies comparing sensitivities in bed ("I can never believe that Bartok died on Central Park West"). Newest of the offbeat generation is Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind opens up some odd pockets of history-Khrushchev getting a head spray...
...Newhart, Nichols and May are warmer personalities than Sahl, other new comedians can be cold enough to freeze the marrow, and are the real source of the term "sick comedians." Chief among them is Lenny Bruce, who whines, uses four-letter words almost as often as conjunctions, talks about rape and amputees, and deserves distinction of a sort for delivering the sickest single line on record. Taking a minority view of the Leopold-Loeb case, he said: "Bobby Franks was snotty." In a class by himself is Jonathan Winters, who finds material in such experiences as being tested for inguinal...
Cool & Deep. Anxious not to be linked with that sort of thing, Mort Sahl insists that he will not say anything for a laugh: "I am not a sick comedian. I've never uttered a negative word in my life about the status of man, and I don't tell jokes about amputees." Mounting a platform of his own, Sahl adds: "Bad taste can't count as a form of insight." He also says he objects to "historical irreverence," and was disdainful when, in his Los Angeles acceptance speech, Jack Kennedy paraphrased Lincoln's second inaugural...
...Mort Sahl built his original audience of students who came in from the University of California and other regional campuses to hear him in San Francisco. No such common denominator applies any more; his following has increased to multitudes, mainly in the big cities, which he has, in his own word, "saturated" by long stands of up to six months. He calls his followers "my people." Some have peach fuzz on their cheeks, and others have it on the tops of their heads. The one thing they share is a fondness for articulate irony and a sense of feeling...
Working toward his goal as he sees it, Sahl has night by night over the past decade compiled a strong anthology of criticisms, a sort of Sahl's-eye view of the less-than-fabulous fifties (see box). "Nobody here is proud of our times, although you hear a lot about our way of life," Sahl points out. "I'm not saying what the Beat Generation says: 'Go away because I'm not involved.' I'm here and I'm involved...