E-mail a friendMort Sahl
airdate June 21, 2007
Mort Sahl blazed the trail for comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. He was the first to target U.S. presidents with his satire, an unheard of occurrence in the ‘50s. He was also one of the first comedians with a best-selling record. Sahl discovered his stand-up niche after attempts to forge a writing career and talked about things that his audiences felt actually mattered. He was even profiled in a Time cover story—a rarity in the ‘60s for a comedian. Sahl recently celebrated his 80th birthday.
Mort Sahl
Tavis: I am pleased to welcome Mort Sahl to this program. The iconic satirist and comedian celebrated his eightieth birthday last month - hard to believe, with that handsome sweater he's wearing there. (Laughter) But apparently, the celebration is not over because on June 28th, names like Jay Leno, Woody Allen, Larry King, and many more will gather for a special fundraising evening.
The event is being held at the Wadsworth Theater here in L.A., with proceeds going to the Heartland Comedy Foundation. Back in the fifties and sixties, when many entertainers shied away from speaking out on issues like civil rights and government hypocrisy, Mort Sahl tackled them head-on, landing him on the cover of "Time" magazine back in 1960. Mort Sahl, an honor to have you on this program.
Mort Sahl: Tavis, thank you very much.
Tavis: What do you have to do to get all those guys to show up to honor you?
Sahl: I don't know; it was kind of spontaneous. It's very generous of them. And I'm kind of overwhelmed a little bit.
Tavis: And the proceeds are going to support a foundation that does what?
Sahl: It keeps comedians from being abandoned. I don't know if the wives'll be in on that, but who knows? (Laughter) The war between men and women interests me more than the war between the parties, but don't tell anybody.
Tavis: Have you figured out what that war is all about yet, between men and women?
Sahl: Yeah, I think so. It has to do with women being convinced that they don't need us by people who want to forge them into a lobby, and they've been convinced. I think Shaw said the step up was a step down. So.
Tavis: Interesting. This is a long way - a comedy career, in fact, is a long way from studying traffic engineering at USC. How do you go from being a traffic engineer major at USC -
Sahl: Well, to keep my father happy.
Tavis: Oh, yeah, yeah. To being an iconic comedian?
Sahl: Well, I took America at word that you could - nobody was above humor. Now, people are above everything. They're above the law. But I thought everything was fair game.
Tavis: When you say - to your point now, when you say that you took America at her word that nobody was above humor, I hear your point but you're right about the fact that today, there are certain things that are sacred. There are certain things that are politically incorrect. Do you see that the same way?
Sahl: Yeah, well, it's a modern version of liberalism. Every Indian should have his own casino. It's that kind of (laughter) free thinking. But I don't know; the daring stuff doesn't really occur to anybody. If the speculation of if Lana Clarkson were Phil Specter's wife, I could get him off. Two books came out this week.
One is by David Talbot, about the Kennedy brothers. And the other one is by Vincent Bugliosi about the Kennedy assassination, the first one. And the audience will remember Vincent Bugliosi, because that's the last time the DA's office won a case in this town. (Laughter) So, nothing is above humor, I'm afraid.
Tavis: Nothing's above humor. What do you make of the fact, though, that while nobody is above humor, there are certain people these days who are getting themselves in trouble and getting themselves fired for pushing that notion too far - for example, Don Imus comes to mind, who went way too far by the estimation of just about everybody. How do you know where that line is, and balancing out this notion of nobody being above humor, but not using humor to degrade people?
Sahl: Well, it's all in how you put it. It's all in how you put it. He happens to be a really close friend of mine, but it's all in how you state the case. As unlikely a humorist as Alexander Hague may be, he offered me a Havana cigar once. And I said, "How can you smoke Castro's cigars?" And he said, "I prefer to think of it as burning his crops to the ground." (Laughter) See, there's a way of coming at it sideways. You can come at it sideways. You could say a man of the cloth - cashmere.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter)
Sahl: Or somebody said to me the other day, a politician who shall go unnamed is the moral successor to Dr. King - I have a scheme. (Laughter) It kind of goes like -
Tavis: To your point now, what do you make of the field of candidates that we have to choose from this time around?
Sahl: Well, when the Republicans stood up there and the moderator said, "How many of you believe in evolution," they proved - I don't believe in evolution, looking at those 10 guys. (Laughter) It's hard to believe. The country's really impoverished. There were only two human beings in both debates - Gravel, who was a cab driver in New York, and on the Republican side, Ron Paul, who is a Libertarian candidate.
Tavis: So if you say that they're the only two human beings in the race, what's your definition of a human being, where this race is concerned, at least?
Sahl: Being prepared to say what they think, to go for broke. First you have to know what you think, of course.
Tavis: That's a good point. (Laughter)
Sahl: Before you dare to say it.
Tavis: What do you think has brought that about? You're such a keen observer of our body politic. What has gotten us to the point - not that we haven't always had some formulation thereof where politicians are concerned. But what has gotten us to the point where these politicos who run for the White House are, in fact, afraid to say what they think?
Al Gore comes to mind. That guy got - I like Al Gore now. For some reason, the minute he got out of politics he started expressing himself, he became comfortable in the skin he was in - he says what he thinks. To your point, which I take, there are only a couple of folk in his race, on either side, who will say what they think. What's gotten us to that point where people are afraid to do that, and they're sticking to script?
Sahl: Well probably because of the smart money that says look what you've got to lose, rather than what you can - the orientation to what you can accomplish. Then they'll give you examples of people that told the truth and got in trouble for it.
Tavis: (Laughter) Let me take you back to your early days, the start of your career. You have been consistent all the way through. You always have spoken your mind; you've never shied away from controversial topics, from political issues, from civil rights. What made you decide that that was the way to distinguish yourself or that you were comfortable enough, or for that matter, good enough to make that your bailiwick?
Sahl: Because I believed in America. I went to all those movies, and I believed in that. I remember the first political joke I ever told in San Francisco. It was about the cold war and the black list, that every time the Russians would put an American in jail, we would put an American in jail to show them they can't get away with it. (Laughter) And I left it with the audience.
Is it the truth? Are these the facts? And go from there. But before you can tell the truth, though, you should know what it is. You have to arrive at it.
Tavis: You make a perfect point. How does Mort Sahl arrive at the truth? Because the truth is what -
Sahl: Just reading the papers, like Will Rogers, and listening to the guys that went before me - Sigmund Freud and (laughter) my father. Listening to those moral voices. This is America, and it usually came through a kind of a wounded humor, if the guy was an idealist. Whether it was Adelaide Stevenson, whom I was lucky enough to know, Justice Douglas, Eugene McCarthy.
I thought of McCarthy during the debate, because Romney's father was the governor of Michigan, and he was against the war and he was a Republican. He was against Vietnam. Then he went to Vietnam with General Westmoreland, he said, "It's revealed itself as a good war." Then he came home and he said, "I changed my mind again; it's a bad war, but I was brainwashed by the military."
And Senator McCarthy said, "A light rinse would have been sufficient." (Laughter) And by the way, you'll notice, Tavis, that there's no humor in any of the candidates now. They seem to be even intimidated by that. They don't even have a good time with their enemies.
Tavis: What do you make of that?
Sahl: The last guy with a sense of humor in the White House was probably Reagan. It's a sign of maturity, a sense of humor.
Tavis: Wow.
Sahl: The president smiles once in a while, but mostly it's when his enemies are suffering. (Laughter) But I haven't heard any jokes from him. And I know him. I have no vested interest in knocking him. But the last great sense of humor was Reagan's in the White House. It wasn't very intellectual, but it was a working sense of humor.
He used to say, "A Russian goes in to buy a car. The dealer says, ‘There's a 10-year wait.' He said, 'Well, will you deliver in the morning or the afternoon?' 'What's the difference?' The Russian says, 'The plumber is supposed to come in the morning.'" (Laughter) So he brought you down to the level that we're all the same - we're all people. Hopefully.
Tavis: Hopefully, yeah. You mentioned earlier reading the newspaper. For your long-time fans, they know that you almost never walk in a stage without a newspaper. Where did that part of the act come from?
Sahl: Yeah, I couldn't remember the material, so I wrote it down on the front of the paper.
Tavis: Are you serious?
Sahl: Yeah. And then I got out on the stage and I couldn't see it. (Laughter) So I just went for it. But I wasn't so foolhardy at the beginning. I just thought it was another way to come at things, to sneak up on people with the jokes. To come from another side, whether - and you could, by the way, Tavis, you can joke about anything if you've got a point of view.
Tavis: I'm glad you said that. I was just about to ask you - and I take that. You can joke about anything if you have a point of view, connected to your earlier point that you gotta start knowing what the truth is. I got that. You can make a joke about anything if you have a point of view. The question is, though, are there certain things that just aren't funny, though? You can talk about anything, but are there certain things that just there's no humor there?
Sahl: Freedom is one thing, but license is a whole other thing. I never found anything funny about Gary Hart's dilemma, or Marilyn Monroe's death, or the misfortune of others. I usually approached it through the hypocrisy of what was going on. In other words, if you were to say that if the Democrats ran unopposed they would be defeated, (laughter) you've already stated the case. For now.
Tavis: So I guess the point here is that as long as there's hypocrisy in the world, there's a role for Mort Sahl to play.
Sahl: Well, I hope so. I certainly hope so.
Tavis: Well, there's no shortage of hypocrisy, so you're going to be around a little longer. Nice to meet you.
Sahl: Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: Honored to have you here. What a great honor Mort Sahl deserves and has earned in these 80-young years, if I can just talk, of keeping us laughing and being empowered at the same time. So I'm glad to have you here. It's nice to meet you.
Sahl: Thanks, partner.
Tavis: That's our show for tonight.
Back to June 21, 2007