Let Us Now Praise Mort Sahl
Mort Sahl, who died yesterday at his Mill Valley, CA home at age 94, gets to go to comedy heaven, where the crowds are always standing room only. My colleague Karen Croft and I had the pleasure of getting to know Mort while we were researching our book Brothers. Mort, a famous news junkie, had often bumped into my Dad, actor Lyle Talbot (a fellow newsie), at a sprawling news stand in Studio City (remember those?) But I got to know Mort because he sacrificed his lucrative entertainment career to raise public awareness about the JFK assassination.
Mort was a lovely, warm, genuinely funny man. I remember the lunch that Karen and I enjoyed with him several years ago at San Francisco's legendary Zuni Cafe. Mort was bemoaning the City's slide into banality since his golden years at the hungry i nightclub in North Beach in the 1950s and early '60s, with the likes of Lenny Bruce and very young Woody Allen and Barbra Streisand. Just then a nude bicyclist went rolling merrily by right outside the Zuni's big picture window. Mort took notice of the spectacle, paused as only a great standup comic can, and said, "Then again..."
Here is a passage from Brothers about Mort. He was a hero, a bold truth-teller to the end -- and I salute his courage and talent.
Comedian Mort Sahl emerged as the most prominent critic of the Warren Report in the entertainment industry, putting his career on the line by turning his popular nightclub act into a running critique of the official investigation and charging that JFK was the victim of a government plot.
... Sahl had supplied JFK with gags during the 1960 presidential campaign but had fallen out with the Kennedy camp after the election, when he switched back to his role as political satirist and began tweaking the new president. Old Joe Kennedy thought you were either with the family or against it. He didn't laugh when Saul sent him a congratulatory telegram: "You haven't lost a son. You gained a country."
But Jack was different. He knew how to laugh at himself. Sahl admired his grace and humor. He thought his "Peace Speech" at American University should be taught in schools. He thought his murder was "the foulest event of our lives." That sort of thing was not supposed to happen in America. And where were the watchdogs of the American press? He was revolted by the sentimentalization of Kennedy's death, the way that Walter Cronkite led the nation in an orgy of "communal crying." He took a savage view of the news media's supine acceptance of the Warren Report. "Hitler said that he always knew you could buy the press. What he didn't know was you could get them cheap." When District Attorney Jim Garrison announced he was reopening the case, Sahl flew to New Orleans and volunteered to help him. Finally, someone was doing something to solve the crime of the century.
