Word: lining
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...government working for you," could be biting, but most of the time he was jovially rustic where Sahl is urban and hip. Rogers was lovable, and even his fans do not claim that quality for Sahl. But in his own way, Sahl has taken his place on the center line of the Ward-Dooley-Rogers tradition. The Depression and war years produced only minor political satire. Among comedians, Bob Hope -who still typifies the older, machine-tooled and essentially safe topical joke-might crack about Eleanor Roosevelt's never staying home; Fred Allen liked to say that Tom Dewey...
...then hooks thought onto thought; joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, till the whole structure spins but somehow balances. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much part of the whole to be called a punch line, but puts that particular theme away forever...
...Rock entered the news, Sahl approached the theme from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at the President: a critic had said that if the President were really a man, he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. "That's easy to say if you are not involved," said Sahl, fingering the trigger. "But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip." Wild laughter always greeted...
Crazing Crazes. Sahl works out every line himself, although he rarely writes anything down, and in collecting material buys newspapers and magazines by the long ton. Skimming, dipping, darting from headline to picture caption, he reacts like a pellet of pure sodium dropped in a glass of water, always has some fresh material for each new audience. There is usually some wild variation of the news, and a routine remark at a presidential press conference might come out as a caricature of the sort of bromide Sahl thinks the Administration is forever administering: ''The President says the Russians...
While politics is always the trunk line, his humor ranges everywhere. Crazes craze him. His masterpiece on hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. When he read that people were daubing themselves with instant skin tan, he moaned: "If you can't believe in the sun, what can you believe in?" Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, says Sahl, a bank robber slipped the teller a note saying: "Give me your money and act normal." The teller replied: "First you must define your terms. After all, what...