Word: sahl
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Will Rogers, the country-boy conscience of the '20s and early '30s, who insisted that "there is no credit in being a comedian when you have the whole government working for you," could be biting, but most of the time he was jovially rustic where Sahl is urban and hip. Rogers was lovable, and even his fans do not claim 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...
Verbal Mobiles. Says Sahl mockingly: "I'm the intellectual voice of the era-which is a good measure of the era." It may well be. Bright and nervous, frenetic, full of quick smiles and dark moods, shouting "Onward, onward" between laughs, performing in a cashmere sweater, always tieless, he manages to suggest barbecue pits on the brink of doom...
...still smoldering in Sverdlovsk last spring when Mort Sahl began smoldering in Los Angeles. Building toward the big one, he waved the Examiner choppily, noted that Khrushchev had threatened war. "Then he modified it. He said, 'There will be no war for six to eight months. R.S.V.P.' " Still, K. always had the initiative, and Washington was just sitting around like a neglected girl, with Herter fretting: "Has he called today?" Returning to Pilot Francis Powers' possible fate ("They'll let him go to please the French"), Sahl again skirted off the subject to note that some...
Dozens of similar cracks, far and near to the downed plane, some made up on the spot, others refashioned from earlier monologues, clustered about the main stem before Sahl decided the time had come. Nathan Hale, he said, regretted that he had only one life to lose for his country. But Powers, ignoring that suicide needle, merely said: "This shatters all my plans...
Counterpoint to Laughter. When Little Rock entered the news, Sahl approached the theme from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at the President: a critic had said that if the President were really a man, he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. "That's easy to say if you are not involved," said Sahl, fingering the trigger. "But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping...