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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2021 20:56:56 GMT -5
Btw, when Jim lived near SF, he would take the subway to City Lights Bookstore and then go to the "Hungry i" to see Mort Sahl..... Dennis Jakob ("Summer With Morrison" - fine book) said Jim had more comedy records than music records and named Mort Sahl (as well as Tom Lehrer) and if you just watch the documentary, you'll see where Jim got some of his influence. Jim was a very impressionable guy who loved artists of all sorts, especially the most rebellious, anti-establishment types.
There’s No Dave Chappelle or Hannah Gadsby Without Mort Sahl
Before Sahl, who died at 94 on Tuesday, intellectual arguments and controversial stances were off-limits to stand-ups seeking mass acceptance.
The first time Mort Sahl appeared in this paper, the theater critic Brooks Atkinson referred to him as a “saloon talker,” because that’s more or less what comics were in the 1950s. They still are, of course. But now they are also philosophers, political sages, conspiracy-mongers, grumps, rebels and outcasts. And no one deserves more credit for the expansion of their portfolio than Mort Sahl.
When news broke Tuesday that he had died at the age of 94, a common reaction was, wait, Mort Sahl was still alive? Call it a cautionary tale for living long enough to be forgotten.
Before there even were comedy clubs, Mort Sahl gained acclaim for turning the news of the day into punch lines, pioneering the now expansive branch of political comedy. Lenny Bruce, his contemporary, died young, and while Bruce’s reputation ballooned in death, Sahl raced past his prime by the mid-1960s and was wildly out of fashion the following decade. When he tried a comeback on Broadway in 1987, the same year Jackie Mason resuscitated his career there, The Village Voice’s Laurie Stone delivered a bruising eulogy for Sahl: “He’s become irrelevant.”
Unlike Mel Brooks or Bob Newhart, other legends from his era, Sahl, often ungenerous to his colleagues, was too abrasive to ever be widely loved. Chris Rock once said that “Carrot Top is better than Mort Sahl.”
But Sahl has his champions, none more consistently effusive than Woody Allen. “He was an original genius who revolutionized the medium,” he has said. “He made the country listen to jokes that required them to think.”
To be sure, some of this talk is overblown (including occasionally by Sahl). Redd Foxx put out a comedy album years before he did. Sahl did not invent topical comedy about issues in the news (see Rogers, Will), and some of these arguments rest on a narrow definition of political. Sahl made a big deal out of how radical it was for him not to wear a tuxedo onstage, but for Timmie Rogers, a Black comic who started in the 1940s, it was just as meaningful to put one on.
The best case for the legacy of Sahl was his style and delivery. He represented a clean break from the borscht belt past, a rejection of shtick and canned punch lines. Sahl moved stand-up out of the era of joke books and into one in which material was not only original and specific to a performer but also a reflection of a distinct personality.
The only time I saw Mort Sahl perform in person, at the Café Carlyle in 2013, his delivery was herky-jerky and quick, with punch lines about President Barack Obama delivered in asides or interruptions. What stood out most was his attitude: perpetually bemused, cheerfully, without an ounce of anger in his cynical gibes. He gave audiences exactly what they wanted, right down to his outfit, his customary V-neck sweater, once a symbol of grad-school seriousness. He carried a rolled-up newspaper, as much a signature as the cigar was for Groucho Marx.
Watching him did make me wonder whether, if you do something long enough, it will inevitably become shtick. The first time Henny Youngman said “Take my wife — please,” was it personal? It’s hard to say, but part of what made Sahl so important is that he became famous doing comedy that anticipated our current scene. He might be the only comic who paved the way for both Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle, to take the rivalry of the moment. Let me explain.
Long before Gadsby integrated art history and feminist critique into formally tricky stand-up routines, comedians had to wear their intelligence lightly. To make smart points, you had to play dumb. Sahl adopted the opposite posture, a move that now seems banal after the work of Jon Stewart, Dennis Miller and John Oliver, among others. But a remarkable amount of Sahl’s early press attention focused on the curiosity of an intellectual telling jokes. Variety called him the “darling of the eggheads,” and Bob Hope once teased him as “the favorite comedian of nuclear physicists everywhere.”
Along with his digressive style, this made Sahl the patron saint of alt comedy, but he was no niche artist. By 1960, he was a major star, host of the Oscars and the first Grammy Awards, writing jokes for President John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, appearing on the cover of Time magazine. His ascent was fast and short, and his fall just as abrupt. It can be tracked roughly to the assassination of Kennedy.
Sahl became fixated on the Warren Commission’s report on the killing, dedicating years of his life, including much stage time, to picking it apart, crankily decrying groupthink and floating alternative theories. Decades before Joe Rogan struck gold by becoming a clearing house for conspiracies, Sahl mined this ground. He hosted a satirical TV show in 1966 that became fixated on Kennedy. As his biographer James Curtis put it, “The comedy had almost given way to outrage.” It sounds familiar.
One of Sahl’s stock lines was asking if there were any groups he hadn’t offended. His retrograde ideas about gender and his outright sexism earned backlash. After finding fame as the quintessentially liberal critic, Sahl became a Nixon voter who spoke of Ronald Reagan with affection. His image shifted from professorial sage to middle-American outlaw, putting a cowboy in a silhouette on the cover of his raucous, name-dropping memoir, “Heartland,” which announced with a straight face on the first page: “Here is the pain and the ecstasy of a conscience out of control.” Later he called Lenny Bruce “ignorant” before boasting about the time Marilyn Monroe placed his hand on her breast and said, “’Don’t be afraid, Mr. Sahl.” It’s a trip.
You can hear the echoes of the current Chappelle in this book: the self-mythologizing, the sensitivity, the bursts of grandeur. Sahl plays the victim brilliantly, saying he couldn’t sign a single record deal after he took a stand on the Warren Commission. If the term cancel culture was around then, he would have used it.
Like so many comics “canceled” today, Sahl kept working, and while he never regained his old stature, he also didn’t retire. I didn’t realize he was still active until a few years ago when someone told me not only was he performing every week at a theater in Mill Valley, Calif., but it was also livestreamed. And sure enough, I looked him up and there he was in his 90s, still bemused, flashing that wolfish grin. It was inspiring and not a little bizarre, like discovering that Fatty Arbuckle was still alive and acting.
In the popular narratives of the history of stand-up, Lenny Bruce is often positioned as the founding father, and his fight for free speech is a great romantic story to build on. A biopic called “Mort” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But look around the comedy scene today, the good, bad and ugly, and this saloon talker seems more relevant than ever.
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 10:43:07 GMT -5
Wow - you've hated him for 50 years - for a living. I can't compete with you there. I would hope you could come up with more quotes for those 50 years. I've seen ever video and audio out there. I have over a thousand newspaper clippings. I don't believe Oliver Stone at all... Check out the interview with Michael Jackson, and he'll explain both claims you make. It's very sad that you'll ignore 99% of what he did. And if you can't see his skill, humor, and humanity, then I feel sorry for you. I think if you see the following video, you might understand. I guess it depends on how open-minded you are, and how curious you are.
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 13:27:38 GMT -5
MORT SAHL - THE LOYAL OPPOSITION (notes)
Kent State ("Four Dead In Ohio") - one of the many triumphs of The National Guard. It's also why Dan Quayle considered it as combat service.
Moderate Iranians - Iranians who have run out of ammunition.
"I listen through the news"
"You define a place by what you say to the people. It's how you make your connection. You have to make people expect more of themselves. When they're thinking, they'll feel better about themselves. Approach people as if they have the same imperative as you are."
"The audience is intelligent" -- never condescend. You can lift them up, just like you bring them down.
"I'd like to celebrate 6 yrs on the (tonight) show by doing the same material"
The youth culture became a powerful economic base, so there was an appetite for Mort Sahl. (Lawrence Christon)
Moniker "Cal-Southern" -- being folksy, rural to the audience. Being from Southern California, he reversed it. "The problems weren't there. It was to conquer your own fear"
"I didn't dare to talk about what was on my mind at first. That took trust".
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 13:39:25 GMT -5
A great artist. A voice of defiance. Musicians detect sham. You either have chops or you don't have chops.
(Audience is like members of the band).. "If they don't laugh, you're singing a capella"
"I've never been in the Communist Party, because no one asked me"
(on being the "Rebel Without a Pause") - I had no one to talk to for 28 years, but I didn't want to pause and wait for them to laugh because I didn't want to put the burden on the audience.
"Am I crazy?" (when they laugh, I didn't feel lonely)
1st joke - "Every time the Russians put an American in jail, WE put an American in jail to show the Russians they couldn't get away with it"
The audience didn't know what to make of it. "I was a Strange face. In A strange language. A new dialect. With Strange ideas. "What was so strange about it?" I was expressing what I really cared about instead of an act"
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 13:46:07 GMT -5
"When they threw pennies at me, etc....." ... I thought (because of negativity) "I must be right.. Everything occured to me except for changing. You have to stick with what you think is right".... It only infuriated me.
Accusations of being a Communist (after being the only one attacking Senator Joe McCarthy)
Herb Caen (SF Chronicle) - thanks to Mort's mother sending him a letter. "You call yourself Mr. San Francisco. How come you haven't heard this kid, Mort Sahl?"
Steve Allen (first Tonight Show host) --- loved Mort's non-formal, anti-showbiz nightclub polish. No tuxedos. Unique. Newspaper rolled up. You couldn't tell if he was a member of the class, or teaching the class.
Mort never grew comfortable being called an intellectual. "I thought it was pretentious". (I was barely a C student)
"When an intellectual does something good in society I think it should be pointed out, aside from making rockets and other positive contributions" (laughter)
Men rob a bank (a reversal of social order)
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 13:53:42 GMT -5
NAACP approached me and asked why I didn't have any Negroes in my act (laughter)..
Powerful people (Democratic Presidential candidates) started hiring Mort... to savage the Republicans (since Eisenhower/Nixon were in power)
"Mr. Smith Goes To Washington" makes me cry seeing what they did to this country. First movie to criticize the cynicism of the press.
The cast were right-wingers, the writers were leftists, and Frank Capra held it all together.
Marlon Brando "One-Eyed Jacks" ... movie about social hypocrisy and the most romantic Western
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 14:00:09 GMT -5
Marlon Brando - original artist. like Stan Kenton and Paul Desmond
Nixon tells Mort "Keep a torch under my behind and Kennedy's"
Gary Cooper (on Kennedy and Rockefeller) thinking about running for President.. "Why doesn't that son of a bitch just go home, count his money, and leave decent people alone?".... "Which son of a bitch?" Mort asked.... ... "BOTH of them!"
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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2021 14:11:23 GMT -5
Excellent article
Mort Sahl Reflected on Activism, Politics and Social Change Within Hollywood
Editor’s Note: On Nov. 14, 2005, Variety published the following interview with Mort Sahl. The revolutionary comedian, who died on Oct. 26, provided an unfiltered view on the entertainment industry, from Depression-era cinema and the Hollywood blacklist to how current films tackle race, politics and culture.
For half of the last century and on into the next one, Mort Sahl, 78, has been the comedic conscience of America. Since 1968, when he debuted at San Francisco’s legendary Hungry i nightclub, he’s been walking onstage in his trademark V-neck sweater, a newspaper tucked under his arm, serving notice to every pundit and politician from Eisenhower through Bush that there was nowhere to hide.
He was the original truth-teller, pioneering a new kind of stand-up — barbed bipartisan political humor — paving the way for everyone from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Chris Rock.
In 1958, he co-hosted the Oscars. In 1960, Time magazine put him on the cover, calling him the most notable American political satirist since Will Rogers and “the patriarch of a new school of comedians.”
Woody Allen, speaking in Robert Weide’s PBS American Masters documentary, Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition, said his own training as a stand-up comic “came largely from watching Mort Sahl.”
In Allen’s view, Sahl “made the country listen to jokes that required them to think. He was the best thing I ever saw. He was like Charlie Parker in jazz. There was a need for a revolution, everybody was ready for a revolution, but some guy had to come along who could perform the revolution and be great. Mort was the one.”
What follows is Sahl’s stock-in-trade lacerating humor with a twist—instead of simply critiquing our society and our political leaders, Sahl has turned his attention to the entertainment business and Hollywood, the place he’s lived and worked and tried to believe in for most of his life.
The Depression — optimism vs. reality
The movies were all cotton candy. Shirley Temple and everything like that. Then, somehow, we went from the saccharine to the profane without crossing home plate. That’s what’s wrong now; now it’s hopeless. During the Depression, there was still hope. There was still optimism. Sure, we saw a lot of formulaic junk that wasn’t true. But we had a place to hang our hopes.
WWII— heroic dreams
World War II was the last time I was in the majority, and I’ll tell you what, I liked it, I really liked it. I volunteered for the service, I wanted to be a hero. I wanted girls to admire me for it. We were gonna make a great trade-off. We were gonna be brave because the brave win the fair, and the fair, their reward is to be loved. And I believed all that because I saw it in the movies. In other words, the movies dreamed well back then. I’ll tell you how well they dreamed — I was in the ABC movie Inside the Third Reich, the Albert Speer story, and I remember when we were doing research for it we found out that Hitler was watching Astaire and Rogers every night.
Holocaust and the movies
Well, Hollywood has never really stopped talking about the Holocaust. But that’s the easy way out. It’s easier to be a good Jew that way than it is to have what your grandfather told you was a real Jewish conscience. A conscience would mean standing up to the threat now, not 40 years ago.
Remember Mephisto? That picture shows you what happens to guys who cooperate with the devil. It lets you know that it’s tempting, but they get you in the end.
There’s another movie called Birgit Haas Must Be Killed, made by Laurent Heynemann. In that picture, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort not only show you what the Secret Service does to move world politics and public opinion, but they show what it costs — that a man who loves has a better life than a man who kills and doesn’t love.
I don’t know what happened here. Everybody keeps saying, “Well, everything changed when the conglomerates bought the studios,” but really I don’t remember them (the studios) being all that wonderful before.
McCarthy and the Blacklist
We went from making really honest and heroic movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and then four years later we got the blacklist, which was the defining moment in Hollywood. Suddenly, Goldwyn is making I Want You and Dorothy McGuire is telling Farley Granger he can’t eat at the table ’cause he doesn’t want to go to Korea.
And I believe that the guilt people felt about letting their friends be hung out to dry has haunted them ever since. They never got past it. The results are a Hollywood that wants to appear noble — so we’ve got people who adopt a Lithuanian child and go to see the Dalai Lama and wear a ribbon for AIDS. It’s all to take their minds off what they’ve really become.
Kennedy, Garrison, Stone and Arnold
I was an investigator in (New Orleans DA and Kennedy assassination investigator Jim) Garrison’s office for 10 years and afterwards tried to get a script going. I must have talked to 80 people and they all kept telling me about Lee Harvey Oswald or that it was too tough to touch. And then Oliver Stone was big enough to do it. But he didn’t mention anything I was witness to. I’m still waiting for that movie.
I’ll tell you how insane America is. The other night, I was at Cafe Roma and I saw (California Governor Arnold) Schwarzenegger in the cigar room. I was standing with Jim Garrison, talking about who killed Kennedy, and those are Schwarzenegger’s in-laws, and now he’s running for a second term as a Republican. The whole thing is maddening.
Madison Ave. to Vietnam
Well, the networks were doing the job of calling people to conscience. But the movies were a different story. We had a whole period of espionage films like Charade and Masquerade. A bunch of those, where the guy would say: “I’m a CIA agent. No, I’m not. I’m your uncle. No, I’m not.” They take another rubber mask off, and say “I’m your father.” They called it intrigue. But it wasn’t the truth of what was happening.
The right had decided to play hardball. They killed the kids at Kent State, they killed Bobby (Kennedy), they killed Martin Luther King, they killed Jack (Kennedy). And as far as I’m concerned, they executed him publicly as a lesson to anyone who was virtuous. The government was using Madison Avenue focus-group, demographic techniques to brainwash people. You could say the mind is a terrible thing to wash. So this was all going on in the country, and it wasn’t documented. If you go to see an Italian picture, the guy says “This is a fascist country” and he makes a movie about it.
We make a movie about Vietnam and the director says, “There’s no doubt we made a terrible mistake going there, but we’re not fascists. We just make mistakes.” Hollywood stopped believing in themselves, and they forgot how to tell the truth.
Nukes, Strangelove and Cheney
Hollywood certainly didn’t do too well when Sidney Lumet made Fail Safe, in which the president, to show the Russians that he’s sincere, orders a bomb dropped on New York while his wife is out shopping. Sincere? It showed that he was totally out of his head.
I don’t think we did too good with Dr. Strangelove either, because Strangelove minimizes the risk of fascists. It’s like, “these guys are pretty ridiculous, and they’ll fall apart of their own weight.” Well, Dick Cheney hasn’t. He shows no indications of doing so either, at least not in the near future.
Reagan and his progeny
You know, Gore Vidal wanted to be a senator from here. Gregory Peck did. Norman Lear did. Robert Vaughn did. Paul Newman wanted to run in Connecticut. So how come the dumbest guy, Ronald Reagan, got elected twice, and nobody in this town even thought he was a good actor?
Race and the Trump card
The movies have dissolved the Black man as a political force. The Black man has become a guy who just wants to get his necklaces and his tennis shoes and run a record company, so he can be as good as Donald Trump. You know what Preston Sturges would have done with Trump? He would have been Rudy Vallee, and he would have been a joke. But look where it is now. A guy who’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Atlantic City is telling people what it is to be a failure. And there’s nobody on the air to satirize it.
Give ’em hell, Harry
Look back at the first “Dirty Harry“; it was written by Harry Julian Fink, who was a real fascist, but he believed, in his heart, that it took that to clean up the streets. By the time they make the fifth one, sure Dirty Harry says, “Make my day,” but Harry’s as bad a hoodlum as the guy he’s chasing. They turned it around. By that time, they were in the money business.
At least, in the ’70s, they were trying. Is there anybody like Jerome Hellman or Hal Ashby today? Are there any guys that want to raise hell?
We don’t need another Hollywood hero
Critic Manohla Dargis in the New York Times the other day was talking about the movie Stealth. She says: “The heroes in Stealth continue the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.”
Well, my heroes aren’t the guys in the Stealth plane. My heroes are the guys who went to Canada so they won’t have to do that.
For instance, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was at the UN recently. Listen to him. He doesn’t sound like anybody in an American movie. I saw that movie about him, The Revolution Will Be Televised. It was made by some BBC students. Pretty good documentary, with great stuff. And, uh, they showed it at the Nuart, naturally. (Sahl laughs boisterously.)
What happened to Butch?
Gregory Peck and William Holden look fit on the bridge of a battleship. Bedford does not look believable on a bridge, and Eastwood doesn’t even look like an officer. He’s a sergeant, maybe — a buck sergeant. There’s something that happened here. The most masculine actor we have, Sean Connery, is not an American.
Peckinpah was great. Get him together with (Steve) McQueen, he could do no wrong. Sam’s films were violent because he thought that we were hypocrites and that we were presenting another face to people than what we saw in the mirror. And that’s the reason that in The Wild Bunch, Bill Holden gets up at the prostitute, sees the baby crying and it’s literally, “cut to suicide.” He’s had enough of himself. And you see it. Most Westerns, most movies, don’t present that kind of complex hero.
Sam was wild. He’d strike terror in people’s hearts. I brought him to Newman. I brought him to Eastwood. They were plenty scared. He was a great man. And he was nuts. And he had his own way of looking at things. He went to shoot a picture in Vegas once and a guy from Variety said to him, “Do you gamble?” And he said, “Yes, I get up every day.”
He was a real American. A real one, and with McQueen, it was the best combination you could find. They got it down to the bare-bones truth.
Musical chairs and the fountain of youth
I don’t know the studio chieftains now. You know, they’re gone before you get to know them. It’s been an amazing development. They don’t become institutions anymore, they become prisoners of an agent’s hysteria, too.
I think that started with CAA packaging everything. That probably started 30 years ago, with those guys that came out of the Morris office. And the Morris office didn’t want to do anything. If you were on The Andy Griffith Show, they wanted to let you die there.
Now it’s all about the youth, the whole idea of youth. Only youth will support the movies. Well, they won’t support anything very long. They’re good and they’re generous, but they’re fickle. You drop off the side of the mountain, the youth don’t come look for you. They don’t miss you.
Women in showbiz
You open up a magazine and it says, “The new women who arc the new story editors at the studios.” And they show a bunch of skinny chicks in black pantsuits whose fathers were agents. And they’re all sort of equine looking at a distance. There was a time when comedy would have been savage enough to take that on, you know, not only The Sun Also Rises, but the daughter also rises. Instead of that, they’re telling you it was an even competition. I mean, did it help women for Sigourney Weaver to be a spaceship commander in Alien?
Activism and Arnold redux
Politics in Hollywood has become about going to the Hollywood Bowl wearing those ribbons so that Norman Lear or somebody like him will see that and know they’re a good person who deserves a job. Take Schwarzenegger. Who’s going to run against him? Meathead? Rob Reiner is going to run against him? Warren? Who’s going to run against him? Those guys are good for about one dinner at the Beverly Hilton, but that’s it.
Nets, the King of Pop and Baretta
All three networks have gotten rid of any kind of foreign news coverage. You don’t even have real honchos like (CBS founder Bill) Paley anymore. I don’t think their shows are about anything. Now they’re gonna make E-Ring. You don’t really believe Dennis Hopper thinks the Pentagon is virtuous.
I just don’t know why more people don’t take a chance. Something that would touch your heart instead of all three networks having a guy that comes on at 11:30 and ridicules Michael Jackson and Robert Blake for a year and a half. That’s some kind of town.
“About” actors
There are some very talented actors in this town. There’s Kevin Kline and William Hurt and Laura Linney and some others, but look, if Jack Nicholson had made pictures like About Schmidt at the beginning of his career, he never would have been Jack Nicholson.
Wesley and Moore
Latin America has Che Guevara and we have Michael Moore. When Moore finally found a presidential candidate he approved and endorsed General Wesley Clark, a guy whose greatest political statement was to advocate the bombing of the bridges on the Danube, Moore’s political position became clean he’s on the left-side of the fascist wing,
Belting the “bible”
On my TV show years ago, Jack Riley walked on the set and saw me reading Variety. He said, “I’m surprised to see you reading that publication!” I asked him why and he said, “Because I thought you had more of a world perspective than that.” I said, “If there’s no world news in Variety this week, that just means the president didn’t buy an ad.”
Morality and action movies
All you have to do is look at the movies and you can feel the bankruptcy. Instead of trying to change the world for the better, Americans are saying life is a bowl of mud. We went from a time when we couldn’t address anything of substance to where we go to a movie now and treachery is a given. Everybody’s shooting everybody. It seems we’ve convinced the American public that truth is darkness. Once you buy into that, then the war’s over.
Hope against hope
Where have we come? Where the hell are we? I don’t expect young people should have any hope, based on what they’ve seen, but I’m cursed. I saw something better.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 9:42:49 GMT -5
(not from the doc)
Taking drugs is like putting cotton in your ears when you should just change the orchestra.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 11:56:36 GMT -5
(from the Chicago Tribune paywall)
Mort Sahl Begat Dave Chappelle
Will Leonard, an illustrious Tribune nightlife critic, hated Mort Sahl when he performed at Chicago’s famed Mister Kelly’s nightclub in 1973. “Mort Sahl almost always is a surprise. Not always a pleasant surprise,” the late Leonard wrote. “The man operates in an area all his own, zooming around just a little over your head, needling you with caustic remarks that make you nervous not only about your friends and enemies but about yourself as well.”
Leonard went on to call Sahl “sardonic and sarcastic and destructive,” as was Leonard’s right as a critic. He did not say that Sahl should be banned henceforth from the stage of Mister Kelly’s.
Leonard knew the importance of satiric speech in a free society. He wrote for a newspaper that long had celebrated Sahl’s right to offend everybody in the joint.
Sahl died Oct. 26 after a highly influential life.
Smart satirists, and Sahl was the model for many of them, understand that they operate as safety valves, stabbing at the bulbous balloons of the powerful and thus doing their part for democracy. Their job is to remind us that the world is complex, that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that everyone should be at least a little bit nervous about themselves.
It takes enormous courage to protect the rights of the Sahls of the world when you, your identity or what you believe, are the target. But it’s vital. History teaches us that the chilling of free speech is merely a way station on the road to the collapse of ever-fragile democracy. And satirical speech is often the first kind to be repressed.
We wish that the many critics of Dave Chappelle at Netflix had taken Leonard’s tack instead of trying to get the streaming platform to cancel his hugely popular show or remove it from Netflix’s offerings. The Chappelle comedy special that has caused so much uproar, “The Closer,” is often funny, but incendiary comments like “gender is a fact” also might bring about a response not unlike the one Leonard had for Sahl. And the expression of outrage is every viewer’s right.
Netflix is a commercial operation with shareholders but also, increasingly, an American town square. Its offerings should reflect multiple points of view, including contemporary manifestations of the Sahl brand of comedy, and its co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, is right to defend Chappelle’s right to ridicule. Sarandos did not “screw up” in Chappelle’s defense, as he later said to calm the firestorm. But we suspect he knows that.
In every American generation, it seems, at least one faction of the country struggles to understand that the target of the satirist is the powerful and that the powerful never actually think they have power, they merely exert their influence. And the moral rectitude of their religion or identity or ideology does not, and must not, deter the satirist. Sure it’s hard to swallow and the off switch is always available, but the price otherwise paid by a free society is far too great.
One of the arguments made against Chappelle is that his words might incite some to violence and/or make some Americans feel unsafe. This is the nub of the endlessly circuitous array of arguments over the controversial special: One person’s freedom of speech is someone else’s hate speech.
We recognize that hate speech both exists and has done damage and that there are limits to what a person should be allowed to say in the public square. And we know that there never will be a neutral arbiter on these matters.
But reasonable Americans must understand why there has to be a very high bar for banning (or de-platforming) speech and that the persons being attacked by the satirists are the least qualified to make that judgment. Comedians are not the same as politicians inciting their followers; they play a different role in society and most people can see what they say in that light. It’s wrong to blur the two, which is what has been happening in the Chappelle debate.
Banning satire rarely works; the banned and thus hardened speaker merely works to find or build another channel. It stifles relative thinking. It undermines tolerance and softens barriers against dangerously oppressive regimes. And it impedes the responsibility we all should feel to one another to check ourselves and to get out of the bubble of the like-minded. And, as counter-intuitive as this many seem to those who have been understandably wounded by Chappelle’s barbs, it hurts a nation’s awareness of complexity and its progression toward desirable change.
That is what Leonard meant when he wrote of his own discomfort at Sahl’s act. Or, to put it in Sahl’s own words: “If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you. That’s my job.”
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2021 13:41:53 GMT -5
(Stan Kenton Tribute)
FOREWORD
By Mort Sahl
We are all his children. He changed the lives of everyone he met. He was a rider to the stars, but he built a band bus and took us with him.
I write this through a veil of pain. The wound has been open since August, 1979, when he left us. Now I remove the poker from the crucible of memory — that's all we have now — and attempt to cauterize the wound.
Where were you when first you heard him? I was in a C-47 in the Aleutian Islands, but my radio was in the Hollywood Palladium. When I came home, I bought, first, "The Peanut Vendor" on a 78. A Capitol record, because Dave Dexter recognized talent. Peggy Lee, Johnny Mercer, Nat Cole, Stan Kenton. The elitist discovers talent, the populist passes it around. Like a jug, I guess!
Stan Kenton took America at her word: The only limit was your imagination. He expressed our defiance when we couldn't find the words. He had weapons in the war of sound. He even invented one: the mellophonium.
But it wasn't just his vision he unleashed. It was everyone else's, too. He played the works of Pete Rugolo, Bill Russo, Bob Graettinger, Gerry Mulligan, Franklyn Marks, Johnny Richards, Bill Mattheu, Dee Barton, Hank Levy, the last so fascinated with time changes that Stan would study the chart and ask, "What's the area code?" As for Bill Holman, his talent needed an entire album.
Stan believed you didn't try to knock the audiences out; you really blew to knock yourself out. He taught that to Art Pepper, Lee Konitz, Shelly Manne, Stan Levey, Maynard Ferguson, Kai Winding, Laurindo Almeida — well, the manifest is lengthy. It reads as an index and a calendar of where we went to school, when we went to war, with whom we fell in love, and every time we heard "Artistry in Rhythm" when we came home!
The critics never liked Stan. Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather tried to deny him. First, on intellectual grounds: the music was formal, written. It "didn't swing". (Ask Zoot Sims. Ask Stan Getz.) Critics used their impeccable liberal credentials to define the struggle with this man who threatened their status quo. They pointed out that his band was all white. Ask Curtis Counce. Ask Ernie Royal, ask Carlos Vidal. Ask Kevin Jordan. Ask Jean Turner. But you should never have asked Stan. He was an American who disliked coercion and never had time to rebut critics. He thought it a waste of time, like nostalgia. "Do you reject it?" I asked. "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," Stan replied.
Kenton's revolution in the use of brass, his Progressive Jazz period and the Innovations Orchestra excited the people and threatened, thus frightened, the press. When all else failed, they politicized the struggle once more and labeled him a rightist. The only political reference he ever made to me was one night on the bus, as we rolled across Kansas. "Maybe if all the farmers went to each coast and beat up all the intellectuals, the country would be better off."
Well, of course, they're not intellectuals. They're dilettantes. Oppenheimer was an intellectual. So is McCarthy. Hentoff hasn't fought for them. And they're not liberals. William O. Douglas was. Feather didn't mourn his passing. You say Douglas wasn't a musician. Well, Feather didn't mourn Stan's passing either.
It's not right versus left, or male versus female (ask Mary Fettig, who played tenor on Stan's band), it's the individual versus the group. Stan was first an individual. Right-wing? No, anti-collective. If the truth were known, the bourgeoisie in jazz objected not to what he had to say so much as his right to say it.
Stan's struggle with the band was not political, it was Freudian. The band looked upon him as a father; they called him "The Old Man" and they constantly felt his presence. Some found this inhibiting, but he looked upon them as children. The nest was structured, but only so they could fly beyond.
No one ever asked Stan to score a movie, but no contemporary composer is without his influence. Ask Hank Mancini. Ask Johnny Mandel.
Regrouping in 1970, Stan did what any independent does in a controlled society. He took his message to the people. He bought his own bus with an 800 mile range, and set out to establish music clinics at the universities — almost a baseball farm system. The worthiest students joined the band. "It's like making the Olympic team", one told me.
Stan never condemned those of this alumni who were vegetating as "successes" in studios. He was too busy developing places for the new composers and players to stand. And after all, if you have a place to stand, you can change the world.
I know it happened this way because I was there, right to the last night in August, 1978, when the entire trumpet section came down in front of the band to play a five-man screech-out chorus. By the way, it was "The Peanut Vendor".
As Don McLean says in "American Pie", it was "the day the music died."
When President Kennedy was killed, Senator Moynihan was asked, "Will we ever smile again?", and Moynihan said, "Yes, but we'll never be young again."
I have faith that in spite of the drug cutters, the corrupt press, the reactionary musicians who are still trying to imitate Bill Basie, somewhere some kid had the Kenton experience that will lead to his creating his own music. There will be a Kenton legacy if that kid fights for it.
I had that experience. Stan Kenton was my friend ... I loved him . . but, ultimately, Stan Kenton was a leader for 38 years. The orchestra played — and I heard it.
We are all his children.
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Post by mortsahlfan on Oct 30, 2021 10:07:32 GMT -5
www.chortle.co.uk/features/2014/05/21/20251/%E2%80%98i%E2%80%99m_not_so_much_interested_in_politics_as_i_am_in_overthrowing_the_government‘I’m not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government' Andre Vincent pays tribute to Mort Sahl ‘Is there any group here I haven’t offended?’ The political climate of the 1950s should have been ripe for comedy satire. President Eisenhower, the Cold War, the Korean War, the beginning of the atomic age, the Space Race: these were all perfect comedic targets. But then there was also McCarthyism, the anti-communist pursuit of political dissent which spread rapidly to include anything at all that could be construed as anti-American. So the comedy of the time established itself as ‘good clean wholesome fun’. It was the golden age of televised humour which included Jack Benny, Lucille Ball and The Colgate Comedy Hour. Live stand-ups were kooky, knockabout clowns like Lewis & Martin and Abbott & Costello, or nightclub comics with one-liners about their ‘dumb wives’, such as Henny Youngman, Buddy Hackett, Joey Bishop and Shecky Green. Nobody rocked the boat; it didn’t seem the thing to do. Then on Christmas Eve 1953, a young comedian gave a performance that was to break the mould forever. Standing on the folk music stage of the Hungry i in San Francisco was a young man dressed not in dinner jacket and black tie (the comedian’s ‘uniform’), but in a cardigan, preppy shirt, chinos and loafers. For this groundbreaker it was not what you wore that mattered, it was what you said. ‘Maybe the Russians will steal our secrets, then they’ll be three years behind.’ Nobody could have been further from the stock comic than Mort Sahl. His act contained no shtick, catchphrases or wacky personae. He simply ‘played’ himself, a performance characterised by a distinctive delivery that was hip, blunt and relaxed. Shelley Berman said at the time: ‘Comedians told jokes: good, one-line, strong jokes, with a set-up and a slam, good punchline. He wasn’t doing that, he was making commentary on our lives, on our social lives, and on our political thinking, making fun of us in some way, or showing us our silliness and the lies we were telling.’ Since Sahl’s standpoint has always been so consistently American (his parents being native New Yorkers), it is surprising to discover that he was actually born in Montreal, Canada. Even at an early age Sahl showed a theatrical bent and was encouraged by his mother while his father showed complete contempt for showbusiness. Harry Sahl was a failed playwright and attempted to share his bitterness with his son: ‘It’s all a fix. They don’t want anything good’ was regularly heard in the house. The Sahl family moved to southern California when Mort was seven and the west coast way suited the boy. He would hang around local radio stations and rescue discarded scripts from bins, re-enacting them at home. His mother claimed that by the age of ten Sahl ‘spoke like a man of thirty’. He was a patriotic teenager during the Second World War and became an amateur marksman with a rifle. His father, who was now working for the FBI, tried to get Sahl into West Point Military Academy, but instead he was drafted into the 93rd Air Depot in Anchorage, Alaska. It was this posting that caused the birth of the maverick we know. Service life did not suit Sahl at all: he grew a beard and long hair, refused to wear his uniform, and created a garrison newspaper called Poop From The Group. After an edition covering alleged military pay-offs, he won himself an eighty three-day ‘Kitchen Patrol’ sentence. Nearly three years later he was discharged from the army, still a private but an emphatic non-conformist. In 1950 Sahl graduated from the University of Southern California where he received a Bachelor of Science degree. He then joined a masters program in Traffic Engineering but did not complete the course. He felt that college life was ‘Conformity City’ and preferred to use the time in other ways, such as going to all-night jazz joints and writing one-act plays: these were performed with friends in a rented theatre space they called Theatre X. Sahl also tried breaking into the Los Angeles comedy club scene as an impressionist under the name ‘Cal Southern’, but he hated the act even more than the audience did. Sahl kept testing out his comedy legs wherever he could, from coffee shops on university campuses to performing for free between dancers at LA strip clubs. He was trying to find his voice and style but by his own admission was ‘ignored by managers, by the press, by everybody’. While in LA he met Sue Barbior, a leftist, atheist and jazz-lover, whose views pretty much ticked all the boxes for Sahl. He followed her to Berkeley, where she enrolled into the University of California while Sahl hung out with the students, debating politics, art, literature and music. It was Barbior who suggested Sahl tried a spot at the Hungry i. The owner, Enrico Banducci was known to enjoy taking a gamble on something different but had yet to hire a comic. Barbior commented to Sahl, ‘If they understand you, you’re home free, and if they don’t, they’ll pretend it’s whimsical humour.’ When Sahl went to meet the less-than-enthusiastic Banducci, he took along his friend Larry Tucker to act as his manager. Playing on the owner’s sympathy, Tucker told him that Sahl had just been discharged from the veterans’ hospital with malnutrition and a ruptured appendix. Banducci was won over and offered Sahl $75 to perform, unaware that he’d happily have worked for free. When he started performing at the Hungry i, Sahl was clearly uncomfortable in suit and tie and the conventionality it represented. One night he turned up in denim jeans, sweater and button-down shirt, more freshman then funny man. It worked - he was more relaxed, as was the audience. He started to find his stage style as well, influenced more by the jazz world and his favourite musician Stan Kenton, than by anyone in the comedy world. This showed in his delivery: riffing on ideas spontaneously, leaving stories and jokes unfinished while branching off onto new ones. Sahl then added a daily newspaper to his act. Much more than just a prop, it was borne out of necessity, being used to note down his set list and key lines. Eventually the newspaper became a useful authority that he would turn to several times during the performance, telling disbelieving audiences that every subject he joked about had to be true because here were the words right in front of him in print. This little bohemian stage with 85 chairs facing it was now set to change the face of comedy. ‘I’m not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.’ Within a few months Sahl was not just winning small local audiences. A whole new wave of comics were being captivated by his unique performance style with its free association, stream of consciousness, one-word punchlines and ad libs which could meander but never detracted from a structured routine. Woody Allen said of Sahl’s comedy at the time: ‘Everybody was ready for the revolution, but some guy had to come and be great. Mort was the one. He changed the rhythm of jokes, he had different content, but the revolution was in the way he laid down jokes…with such guile, he totally restructured comedy.’ Sahl didn’t just inspire Allen. A body of talent was waiting to be influenced by his comedy: Dick Gregory, Lily Tomlin, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, the Smothers Brothers and of course, Lenny Bruce. Without a doubt, Sahl originated many of the techniques that Bruce later used, but while Bruce was the patient exposing the audience to his problems, Sahl was the therapist telling the audience their own. The two comics once shared the Interlude Club - Sahl played the big room upstairs while Bruce worked a smaller crowd in the basement. One night Bruce exhorted his audience to shout ‘Lynch Mort Sahl’. Tthe chanting was loud enough to be heard by Sahl’s audience through the ventilator system, an event shocking for its time, but this was anarchy in the making. ‘I’m for capital punishment, you’ve got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?’ It wasn’t long before Sahl was in demand, opening for some of the biggest jazz musicians in the entertainment industry. For such a music fanatic, it couldn’t get any better, performing with the likes of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and his idol, Stan Kenton. Sahl was the first comedian to cross into the musical arena, and as a result was awarded Entertainer of the Year three years in a row by Metronome Magazine. He even compered the newly-established Monterey Jazz Festival. In 1955, Sahl recorded Mort Sahl at Sunset, a performance with Dave Brubeck: this is considered to be the first-ever comedy album, and is a very rare find for collectors. Broadway beckoned, and although it had a short run, The Next President firmly put Sahl on the map as an important, innovative voice. It was said that Richard Burton, who was performing in the theatre next door, would often miss his entrance cue as a result of listening too intently to the comic from the wings of the adjacent theatre. When the show closed, Sahl went straight to California for a four-week engagement at the Crescendo in Hollywood. He stayed for 88. Sahl remained edgy, never pulled his punches, and continually worried the management, but people flocked to see him. ‘I like to go out with actresses and all other female impersonators.’ During this period Sahl became a Californian playboy, dating many young starlets. He was close friends with Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and Hugh Hefner. He had made comedy cool and hip. He was branded ‘The rebel without a pause’ by his peers and became the first comedian ever to appear on the front of Time magazine. Soon he was under contract to both CBS and NBC television companies, but neither would actually risk putting him on any of their shows for fear of what he might say. During the height of his career, Sahl was courted by the Kennedy administration to write for JFK’s presidential campaign. He received a phone call that began: ‘Hello, this is Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, I want you to write something for Johnny…’ Sahl was happy to help, as long as there was no expectation of candidate endorsement. The senior Kennedy wasn’t worried – he just wanted Sahl to accept the job. Soon, he was writing lines not only for the future president but also for others members of the campaign entourage, including Frank Sinatra. However, once JFK took office, Sahl was quick to publicly lampoon the new President. The Democrats had assumed that the hippest comedy voice in America was one of theirs, but Sahl lived by his own code: ‘If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you - that’s my job.’ Despite the relative tameness of his presidential jibes, they were more than the party could take. After Kennedy Snr made a few calls, Sahl’s club bookings began to dry up. One morning, Banducci went to the Hungry I (seemingly the only place still booking Sahl) and found the doors chained and padlocked by the IRS in demand of back taxes. But everything changed on November 22, 1963. The Kennedy assassination would affect Sahl in a way that no one could have predicted. He became completely obsessed with the Warren Report, that controversial 889-page transcript of the murder. He quoted huge chunks of it on stage, mocked its lack of logic, and berated President Johnson and Chief Justice Earl Warren for their deceit. The whole subject consumed Sahl and he moved to New Orleans to work with District Attorney Jim Garrison, discrediting the report over a period of four years. This greatly damaged Sahl’s career progression: blacklisted by nearly every club, his annual income fell from $800,000 to about $20,000. One TV company completely banned his name from being mentioned in their offices. One good thing came out of Sahl’s relocation. While in New Orleans, he started to perform in the local college and university campuses, not simply for the money but also for the access to a student audience who were keen to hear his comedy for its political accusations and tirades. Consequently, he became one of the first comics to play the now-enormous US college circuit. Sahl’s diary in the 70s and 80s was filled with cancelled TV appearances, collapsed projects and few club bookings. His status took a nosedive but his spirit did not. Performing wherever he could, Sahl used his own obsession with the Warren report to make jokes about himself and the fixations that brought him down. This lightning wit combined with political insight can still be seen today when Saul performs. Most Thursday nights he is saving America at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California. ‘They used to say that no-one is above the law. I know a lot of people above the law – and almost everybody is above a lawyer. But I believe no one is above humour. In that sense my work is never done.’ There is an old adage that satirists are like dogs. As young pups they sink their teeth into everything and bark constantly. As they age, they get lazy and lose their bite. Mort Sahl has never stopped howling; once his fangs are in place he will not give up his prey.
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Post by mortsahlfan on Oct 30, 2021 10:33:38 GMT -5
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Post by mortsahlfan on Oct 30, 2021 10:55:30 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2021 8:03:48 GMT -5
THe documentary is now on vimeo.com
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 9:34:44 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 9:37:59 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 9:38:16 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 9:48:40 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 9:52:34 GMT -5
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Post by mortsahlfan on Nov 6, 2021 13:47:03 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2021 14:53:22 GMT -5
(Audiobook Notes)
Sahl has soul
Murrow didn't attack McCarthy until at least 3-4 months AFTER Mort did. Eisenhower was too scared.
"I already have a comedian - Will Jordan"
"People won't understand it" - I have a monopoly.
"Picking your brain?" - "No thanks, pick on someone else"
Chronicle Sunday magazine, march 1955 (bazar)... Harry Ackerman signed Mort, 13-weeks.. Bernie Gould.
"I'm a Harvard grad myself, I love it, but I don't know if the audience will"
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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2021 15:02:33 GMT -5
(try to type down articles, magazine specific issues, etc)
mort sahl "out in left field"
george goebell helped... "Dave O'malley"
julius tannen - monologist o'malley reminded Sahl of.
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Post by Admin on Nov 12, 2021 8:47:16 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 12, 2021 19:44:46 GMT -5
Some of the jokes he wrote for JFK were non-political. He always worked with and spoke about jazz, women/men, movies, cars. He's had multiple TV shows in Hollywood (all over, really) and even more radio shows (LA, DC, SF) and would substitute for ABC on radio, as well as filling in for Mayor Koch of NYC on C-Span. He's acted in about a dozen movies, dozens of shows. He was a Professor at Claremont (screenwriting and a course entitled, "The Revolutionary's Handbook"). He wrote 21 movies, with his first one being sold to Clint Eastwood. He also sold movies to Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford, Don Johnson, and did a ton of ghostwriting for Sam Peckinpah and Sydney Pollack. He wrote the line in "Tootsie", how "I was a better man as a woman". He was a deputized member of the District Attorney Jim Garrison's office, working as an investigator in the only trial of JFK's murder. He hosted the 1st Grammy Awards Show as well as the 1st Monterey Jazz Festival, The 1st Playboy Jazz Festival, etc.. He was a big fan of jazz, cars, women. Lots of social satire.. He did a lot of writing. TV Guide, Playboy, etc... Here's one I liked from TV Guide.  \    Mort Article On How Movies Changed The Depression — optimism vs. reality The movies were all cotton candy. Shirley Temple and everything like that. Then, somehow, we went from the saccharine to the profane without crossing home plate. That’s what’s wrong now; now it’s hopeless. During the Depression, there was still hope. There was still optimism. Sure, we saw a lot of formulaic junk that wasn’t true. But we had a place to hang our hopes. WWII— heroic dreams World War II was the last time I was in the majority, and I’ll tell you what, I liked it, I really liked it. I volunteered for the service, I wanted to be a hero. I wanted girls to admire me for it. We were gonna make a great trade-off. We were gonna be brave because the brave win the fair, and the fair, their reward is to be loved. And I believed all that because I saw it in the movies. In other words, the movies dreamed well back then. I’ll tell you how well they dreamed — I was in the ABC movie Inside the Third Reich, the Albert Speer story, and I remember when we were doing research for it we found out that Hitler was watching Astaire and Rogers every night. Holocaust and the movies Well, Hollywood has never really stopped talking about the Holocaust. But that’s the easy way out. It’s easier to be a good Jew that way than it is to have what your grandfather told you was a real Jewish conscience. A conscience would mean standing up to the threat now, not 40 years ago. Remember Mephisto? That picture shows you what happens to guys who cooperate with the devil. It lets you know that it’s tempting, but they get you in the end. There’s another movie called Birgit Haas Must Be Killed, made by Laurent Heynemann. In that picture, Philippe Noiret and Jean Rochefort not only show you what the Secret Service does to move world politics and public opinion, but they show what it costs — that a man who loves has a better life than a man who kills and doesn’t love. I don’t know what happened here. Everybody keeps saying, “Well, everything changed when the conglomerates bought the studios,” but really I don’t remember them (the studios) being all that wonderful before. McCarthy and the Blacklist We went from making really honest and heroic movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and then four years later we got the blacklist, which was the defining moment in Hollywood. Suddenly, Goldwyn is making I Want You and Dorothy McGuire is telling Farley Granger he can’t eat at the table ’cause he doesn’t want to go to Korea. And I believe that the guilt people felt about letting their friends be hung out to dry has haunted them ever since. They never got past it. The results are a Hollywood that wants to appear noble — so we’ve got people who adopt a Lithuanian child and go to see the Dalai Lama and wear a ribbon for AIDS. It’s all to take their minds off what they’ve really become. Kennedy, Garrison, Stone and Arnold I was an investigator in (New Orleans DA and Kennedy assassination investigator Jim) Garrison’s office for 10 years and afterwards tried to get a script going. I must have talked to 80 people and they all kept telling me about Lee Harvey Oswald or that it was too tough to touch. And then Oliver Stone was big enough to do it. But he didn’t mention anything I was witness to. I’m still waiting for that movie. I’ll tell you how insane America is. The other night, I was at Cafe Roma and I saw (California Governor Arnold) Schwarzenegger in the cigar room. I was standing with Jim Garrison, talking about who killed Kennedy, and those are Schwarzenegger’s in-laws, and now he’s running for a second term as a Republican. The whole thing is maddening. Madison Ave. to Vietnam Well, the networks were doing the job of calling people to conscience. But the movies were a different story. We had a whole period of espionage films like Charade and Masquerade. A bunch of those, where the guy would say: “I’m a CIA agent. No, I’m not. I’m your uncle. No, I’m not.” They take another rubber mask off, and say “I’m your father.” They called it intrigue. But it wasn’t the truth of what was happening. The right had decided to play hardball. They killed the kids at Kent State, they killed Bobby (Kennedy), they killed Martin Luther King, they killed Jack (Kennedy). And as far as I’m concerned, they executed him publicly as a lesson to anyone who was virtuous. The government was using Madison Avenue focus-group, demographic techniques to brainwash people. You could say the mind is a terrible thing to wash. So this was all going on in the country, and it wasn’t documented. If you go to see an Italian picture, the guy says “This is a fascist country” and he makes a movie about it. We make a movie about Vietnam and the director says, “There’s no doubt we made a terrible mistake going there, but we’re not fascists. We just make mistakes.” Hollywood stopped believing in themselves, and they forgot how to tell the truth. Nukes, Strangelove and Cheney Hollywood certainly didn’t do too well when Sidney Lumet made Fail Safe, in which the president, to show the Russians that he’s sincere, orders a bomb dropped on New York while his wife is out shopping. Sincere? It showed that he was totally out of his head. I don’t think we did too good with Dr. Strangelove either, because Strangelove minimizes the risk of fascists. It’s like, “these guys are pretty ridiculous, and they’ll fall apart of their own weight.” Well, Dick Cheney hasn’t. He shows no indications of doing so either, at least not in the near future. Reagan and his progeny You know, Gore Vidal wanted to be a senator from here. Gregory Peck did. Norman Lear did. Robert Vaughn did. Paul Newman wanted to run in Connecticut. So how come the dumbest guy, Ronald Reagan, got elected twice, and nobody in this town even thought he was a good actor? Race and the Trump card The movies have dissolved the Black man as a political force. The Black man has become a guy who just wants to get his necklaces and his tennis shoes and run a record company, so he can be as good as Donald Trump. You know what Preston Sturges would have done with Trump? He would have been Rudy Vallee, and he would have been a joke. But look where it is now. A guy who’s in Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Atlantic City is telling people what it is to be a failure. And there’s nobody on the air to satirize it. Give ’em hell, Harry Look back at the first “Dirty Harry“; it was written by Harry Julian Fink, who was a real fascist, but he believed, in his heart, that it took that to clean up the streets. By the time they make the fifth one, sure Dirty Harry says, “Make my day,” but Harry’s as bad a hoodlum as the guy he’s chasing. They turned it around. By that time, they were in the money business. At least, in the ’70s, they were trying. Is there anybody like Jerome Hellman or Hal Ashby today? Are there any guys that want to raise hell? We don’t need another Hollywood hero Critic Manohla Dargis in the New York Times the other day was talking about the movie Stealth. She says: “The heroes in Stealth continue the love affair Hollywood, that hotbed of liberalism, has long had with militarism.” Well, my heroes aren’t the guys in the Stealth plane. My heroes are the guys who went to Canada so they won’t have to do that. For instance, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was at the UN recently. Listen to him. He doesn’t sound like anybody in an American movie. I saw that movie about him, The Revolution Will Be Televised. It was made by some BBC students. Pretty good documentary, with great stuff. And, uh, they showed it at the Nuart, naturally. (Sahl laughs boisterously.) What happened to Butch? Gregory Peck and William Holden look fit on the bridge of a battleship. Bedford does not look believable on a bridge, and Eastwood doesn’t even look like an officer. He’s a sergeant, maybe — a buck sergeant. There’s something that happened here. The most masculine actor we have, Sean Connery, is not an American. Peckinpah was great. Get him together with (Steve) McQueen, he could do no wrong. Sam’s films were violent because he thought that we were hypocrites and that we were presenting another face to people than what we saw in the mirror. And that’s the reason that in The Wild Bunch, Bill Holden gets up at the prostitute, sees the baby crying and it’s literally, “cut to suicide.” He’s had enough of himself. And you see it. Most Westerns, most movies, don’t present that kind of complex hero. Sam was wild. He’d strike terror in people’s hearts. I brought him to Newman. I brought him to Eastwood. They were plenty scared. He was a great man. And he was nuts. And he had his own way of looking at things. He went to shoot a picture in Vegas once and a guy from Variety said to him, “Do you gamble?” And he said, “Yes, I get up every day.” He was a real American. A real one, and with McQueen, it was the best combination you could find. They got it down to the bare-bones truth. Musical chairs and the fountain of youth I don’t know the studio chieftains now. You know, they’re gone before you get to know them. It’s been an amazing development. They don’t become institutions anymore, they become prisoners of an agent’s hysteria, too. I think that started with CAA packaging everything. That probably started 30 years ago, with those guys that came out of the Morris office. And the Morris office didn’t want to do anything. If you were on The Andy Griffith Show, they wanted to let you die there. Now it’s all about the youth, the whole idea of youth. Only youth will support the movies. Well, they won’t support anything very long. They’re good and they’re generous, but they’re fickle. You drop off the side of the mountain, the youth don’t come look for you. They don’t miss you. Women in showbiz You open up a magazine and it says, “The new women who arc the new story editors at the studios.” And they show a bunch of skinny chicks in black pantsuits whose fathers were agents. And they’re all sort of equine looking at a distance. There was a time when comedy would have been savage enough to take that on, you know, not only The Sun Also Rises, but the daughter also rises. Instead of that, they’re telling you it was an even competition. I mean, did it help women for Sigourney Weaver to be a spaceship commander in Alien? Activism and Arnold redux Politics in Hollywood has become about going to the Hollywood Bowl wearing those ribbons so that Norman Lear or somebody like him will see that and know they’re a good person who deserves a job. Take Schwarzenegger. Who’s going to run against him? Meathead? Rob Reiner is going to run against him? Warren? Who’s going to run against him? Those guys are good for about one dinner at the Beverly Hilton, but that’s it. Nets, the King of Pop and Baretta All three networks have gotten rid of any kind of foreign news coverage. You don’t even have real honchos like (CBS founder Bill) Paley anymore. I don’t think their shows are about anything. Now they’re gonna make E-Ring. You don’t really believe Dennis Hopper thinks the Pentagon is virtuous. I just don’t know why more people don’t take a chance. Something that would touch your heart instead of all three networks having a guy that comes on at 11:30 and ridicules Michael Jackson and Robert Blake for a year and a half. That’s some kind of town. “About” actors There are some very talented actors in this town. There’s Kevin Kline and William Hurt and Laura Linney and some others, but look, if Jack Nicholson had made pictures like About Schmidt at the beginning of his career, he never would have been Jack Nicholson. Wesley and Moore Latin America has Che Guevara and we have Michael Moore. When Moore finally found a presidential candidate he approved and endorsed General Wesley Clark, a guy whose greatest political statement was to advocate the bombing of the bridges on the Danube, Moore’s political position became clean he’s on the left-side of the fascist wing, Belting the “bible” On my TV show years ago, Jack Riley walked on the set and saw me reading Variety. He said, “I’m surprised to see you reading that publication!” I asked him why and he said, “Because I thought you had more of a world perspective than that.” I said, “If there’s no world news in Variety this week, that just means the president didn’t buy an ad.” Morality and action movies All you have to do is look at the movies and you can feel the bankruptcy. Instead of trying to change the world for the better, Americans are saying life is a bowl of mud. We went from a time when we couldn’t address anything of substance to where we go to a movie now and treachery is a given. Everybody’s shooting everybody. It seems we’ve convinced the American public that truth is darkness. Once you buy into that, then the war’s over. Hope against hope Where have we come? Where the hell are we? I don’t expect young people should have any hope, based on what they’ve seen, but I’m cursed. I saw something better. I can't remember if you are a fan of Sam Peckinaph - but this is a great interview. “FOREWORD to Stan Kenton's "Artistry In Rhythm" By Mort Sahl We are all his children. He changed the lives of everyone he met. He was a rider to the stars, but he built a band bus and took us with him. I write this through a veil of pain. The wound has been open since August, 1979, when he left us. Now I remove the poker from the crucible of memory — that's all we have now — and attempt to cauterize the wound. Where were you when first you heard him? I was in a C-47 in the Aleutian Islands, but my radio was in the Hollywood Palladium. When I came home, I bought, first, "The Peanut Vendor" on a 78. A Capitol record, because Dave Dexter recognized talent. Peggy Lee, Johnny Mercer, Nat Cole, Stan Kenton. The elitist discovers talent, the populist passes it around. Like a jug, I guess! Stan Kenton took America at her word: The only limit was your imagination. He expressed our defiance when we couldn't find the words. He had weapons in the war of sound. He even invented one: the mellophonium. But it wasn't just his vision he unleashed. It was everyone else's, too. He played the works of Pete Rugolo, Bill Russo, Bob Graettinger, Gerry Mulligan, Franklyn Marks, Johnny Richards, Bill Mattheu, Dee Barton, Hank Levy, the last so fascinated with time changes that Stan would study the chart and ask, "What's the area code?" As for Bill Holman, his talent needed an entire album. Stan believed you didn't try to knock the audiences out; you really blew to knock yourself out. He taught that to Art Pepper, Lee Konitz, Shelly Manne, Stan Levey, Maynard Ferguson, Kai Winding, Laurindo Almeida — well, the manifest is lengthy. It reads as an index and a calendar of where we went to school, when we went to war, with whom we fell in love, and every time we heard "Artistry in Rhythm" when we came home! The critics never liked Stan. Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather tried to deny him. First, on intellectual grounds: the music was formal, written. It "didn't swing". (Ask Zoot Sims. Ask Stan Getz.) Critics used their impeccable liberal credentials to define the struggle with this man who threatened their status quo. They pointed out that his band was all white. Ask Curtis Counce. Ask Ernie Royal, ask Carlos Vidal. Ask Kevin Jordan. Ask Jean Turner. But you should never have asked Stan. He was an American who disliked coercion and never had time to rebut critics. He thought it a waste of time, like nostalgia. "Do you reject it?" I asked. "Nostalgia ain't what it used to be," Stan replied. Kenton's revolution in the use of brass, his Progressive Jazz period and the Innovations Orchestra excited the people and threatened, thus frightened, the press. When all else failed, they politicized the struggle once more and labeled him a rightist. The only political reference he ever made to me was one night on the bus, as we rolled across Kansas. "Maybe if all the farmers went to each coast and beat up all the intellectuals, the country would be better off." Well, of course, they're not intellectuals. They're dilettantes. Oppenheimer was an intellectual. So is McCarthy. Hentoff hasn't fought for them. And they're not liberals. William O. Douglas was. Feather didn't mourn his passing. You say Douglas wasn't a musician. Well, Feather didn't mourn Stan's passing either. It's not right versus left, or male versus female (ask Mary Fettig, who played tenor on Stan's band), it's the individual versus the group. Stan was first an individual. Right-wing? No, anti-collective. If the truth were known, the bourgeoisie in jazz objected not to what he had to say so much as his right to say it. |
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Post by mortsahlfan on Nov 13, 2021 13:13:35 GMT -5
jeannine@frankentertainment.com
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2021 18:41:55 GMT -5
knox.villagesoup.com/2021/11/04/mort-sahl/One way my mother rewarded good behavior was to let us stay up and watch late night television with her. We would cuddle up and share the jokes and music and weird views of Jack Parr, and later The Tonight Show hosted by Steve Allen, and eventually Johnny Carson. From an early age, The Tonight Show opened my experience to comedy, jazz, political commentary, and a general sense of the creative power and foolishness of humanity. Watching and listening to the guests — a variety that included authors and artists along with the actors plugging their latest movies and musicians promoting albums hot from the vinyl press – I fantasized about my own future, what work I might do that could be worthy of a five-minute visit to the stage. I fell in love with words early on, and hearing writers exchange witticisms with Johnny gave me encouragement. It was on those late nights, curled up with Mom, that I first witnessed stand-up comedy, and one of the first comedians to make an impression on me was Mort Sahl. When I say “make an impression” I want to be clear: Sahl was not one of those comics who made a name by imitating others. When he spoke it was always in his own voice. He was nobody’s mouthpiece, and he freely expresses his very strong opinions. Some of the first jokes I heard him make were about the 1960 presidential election. When asked to comment about John F. Kennedy — at that time the presumptive winner of an undecided race against Ricard Nixon — Sahl said, “I’ve decided myself, as a personal morality, to restrict my criticism of the president until we find out who he is.” A New York Jewish intellectual, his allegiances were not easy to pin down; Sahl would criticize Democrats and Republicans with equal fervor. That was the year I discovered politics, a seven-year-old child caught up in the first major political campaign to tailor itself to the audience of the emerging technology of television. In 1962, while NBC was checking out possibilities to replace Allen at the Tonight Show, Mort Sahl got a turn behind the big desk. He started his first monologue by saying he’d decided to “give politics a rest.” Instead, he said he’d had enough of divisiveness and was inviting a panel of women to talk about men. He and Hugh Downs — the show’s announcer and later co-anchor for a number of the network’s news and entertainment programs — would rebutt. Inviting Downs to join him at the host’s desk, Sahl said, “This isn’t going to be like (current affairs host) David Susskind, because I don’t have any facts.” During that trail run, Sahl hosted George Carlin’s first visit to The Tonight Show. As a guest, Mort Sahl shared the spotlight with rising comics like Carlin, Richard Pryor, and Lenny Bruce. At the time, he was more pointedly political than Carlin and less confrontational than the latter two. Sahl was never profane, unlike Bruce, who was once arrested in New York for obscenity in Yiddish. A veteran and critic of the United States’ increasing militarism, he provided in depth foreign policy education to my impressionable mind. Introducing Sahl, Steve Allen once said both he and Bruce were sometimes referred to as “sick comics … Of course that meant irreverent, outrageous, and in my personal opinion, extremely funny.” Saying Sahl was “not really sick at all, but always very funny and very insightful,” Allen called him “ … probably the only real political philosopher in modern comedy.” “I was in the Korean War, which we called at the time World War 2.4,” Sahl said. “The Korean War didn’t quite end or start. You just kind of went there.” “Everything I tell you is true,” he once said, differentiating his honest perspective from actual events. The peak of his career came early; after Kennedy was shot he turned his focus to investigating that event and the other assassinations that followed, returning to comedy in the 1970s, as the satirical style he had pioneered fell more in line with popular culture. In 1969, Sahl appeared on The Smother’s Brothers’ Comedy Hour, once more looking at the results of an election, and once more reminding us that popular judgement is just a point of view. “When a man is elected and you say you’ve got to like him, that’s the same as discovering you’re pregnant and then trying to fall in love as rapidly as you can,” he said of the newly elected Richard Nixon. As he moved about the show’s circular stage, Sahl observed that he seemed to be moving to his right. “Your left is my right,” he said. “And that’s what makes this country … what it’s rapidly becoming.” During a performing life that spanned more than 60 years, the outward stories changed, but Sahl’s description of events in the late 1960s show how much the essence has remained the same: “Liberals wanted bussing — to establish racial integration — and didn’t want prayer in the schools, and the conservatives wanted prayer in the schools and no bussing, and the moderates wanted a compromise whereby there would be prayer on the bus on the way to the school.” In the post-Sept. 11 world of perpetual war, Sahl said. “The idea of war is that you’re not supposed to win. You’re supposed to go there and stay there.” One of his last performances, sometime in the mid-2010s, was on the British show Set List. Saying he’d been asked, by a friend, why he was back in London, Sahl replied, “We’re all back, The experiment failed.” Mort Sahl inspired me as a writer and an activist, and for a brief time, as a stand up comedian. Like him, I avoided foul language and tried to use humor to reveal a truth. That I was less successful is all on me. Comedy doesn’t have to be offensive, but good comedy often offends someone. The difference between comedians like Mort Sahl and George Carlin — and most of the ones I shared a stage with during my brief courtship with stand-up — is not that the earlier comics were less offensive, but that they didn’t need to get all scatalogical and prurient. They used the attention they gathered to talk about important things. Mort Sahl was 94 when he died at his home in Mill Valley on Oct. 26, 2021.
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2021 18:43:17 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2021 18:45:05 GMT -5
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Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2021 18:48:07 GMT -5
www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/mort-sahl-made-people-laugh-at-things-he-wanted-them-to-be-angry-about/news-story/3652e5fd3684a8da6bfa952ed2ab21e5Conservative? No, anti-fascist. Trying to enlist in WWII is not conservative. Mort was criticizing our involvement in Vietnam (and every country) in 1962, ALWAYS before it became trendy. Two men changed American humour: Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. The fearless, furious-paced Bruce was confronting, challengingly profane and his 1964 obscenity trial, along with his First Amendment defence, changed American society (he was found guilty then, but in 2003 posthumously pardoned). Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Paul Kelly have written songs about him. He’s on the cover of Sgt Pepper. But it is still vigorously debated today: was he funny? Read Next Pies salivating over midfield of the future Jon Ralph and Glenn McFarlane There will be no such debate about Sahl. Until he emerged from a small club in the late 1950s, American stand-up comedians had routines about mothers-in-law and the funny things that happened on the way to the venue. Instead, Sahl, with a newspaper in his hands, spoke of current events, critical of what he saw as a smug, self-regard of many Americans, even as their government sent young men to fight and die in countries they knew little about. Talking of foreign affairs on the Ed Sullivan show in 1961, he told the audience the vice-president was in Laos. “Are you aware of Laos?” he asked. “Well, it would be a little easier if I told you who the leader was there, but we haven’t chosen him yet.” And he was routinely critical of American presidents: “Nixon’s the kind of guy that if you were drowning 50 feet offshore, he’d throw you a 30-foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the president had met you more than halfway.” And he was able to explain how Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 “because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.” Apparently, things didn’t improve. In the run-up to the 1996 US election, he pointed out that with just four million people America produced the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. “Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!” He was likened to the comedian, columnist and early film star Will Rogers who ran a fanciful campaign for the presidency in 1928, one of his few policies being to resign if he won. After Rogers’ death in an aeroplane crash in 1935, political comedy in America waned, and war would render much of it obsolete. Sahl believed that by the 1950s, the US needed a few sticks poked at it. He would say: “Will Rogers used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a yokel criticising the intellectuals who ran the government. I come out with a newspaper and pretend I’m an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government.” Sahl was born in Canada but moved to Los Angeles as a child as his father tried to make it as a scriptwriter. At school there, a classmate was Richard Crenna who would later star in the first Rambo movies. Sahl evolved as a sort of conservative rebel dropping out of school to enlist in the army after the attack on Pearl Harbour and staying there until his mother explained to them that he was just 15. He would join the air force, but rebelled against its discipline. He studied traffic engineering, but dropped out with plans to act and perhaps become the playwright his father had not. In 1955, he met 16-year-old Sue Babior whom he would marry. They hung about with a bohemian crowd that would read Trotsky and Nietzsche: “Things were simple then – all there was to worry about was the destiny of man.” He was doing small gigs unnoticed until Babior suggested he apply to the famed Hungry I nightclub at which he would revolutionise humour and where Bill Cosby, Bruce, Joan Rivers and Woody Allen would follow. It all happened quickly. Stars were seen in the modest venue and queues snaked down the street. Soon he was earning a fortune, starring on the Ed Sullivan and Tonight Show. he was on the cover of Time and even appeared as the punchline in a Peanuts cartoon strip. And just as quickly, it was over. Liberal Hollywood turned on him. He became prickly and dwelt on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. Watergate saw a modest revival, but his television appearances were few and the live gigs ever smaller, eventually once a week in his hometown. He came to Australia twice, addressing the National Press Club in 1986 after shows in Sydney, and for the Melbourne Comedy Festival three years later. He was dismissive of the then new wave of US comics: “These young comics are all liberals and feminists.”
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