Word: mort
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Hold the Fort, Mort...
...some San Franciscans are so set in their ways that they still play dominoes, San Francisco claims to have nurtured more contemporary trends than any other U.S. city. The Bach-toned jazz of Dave Brubeck first took flight there about a decade ago. The mordant political satire of Comedian Mort Sahl found its first audience 6½ years ago at San Francisco's hungry i. And the beats were nowhere until they settled down in San Francisco pads...
Cool & Deep. Anxious not to be linked with that sort of thing, Mort Sahl insists that he will not say anything for a laugh: "I am not a sick comedian. I've never uttered a negative word in my life about the status of man, and I don't tell jokes about amputees." Mounting a platform of his own, Sahl adds: "Bad taste can't count as a form of insight." He also says he objects to "historical irreverence," and was disdainful when, in his Los Angeles acceptance speech, Jack Kennedy paraphrased Lincoln's second inaugural...
...Mort Sahl built his original audience of students who came in from the University of California and other regional campuses to hear him in San Francisco. No such common denominator applies any more; his following has increased to multitudes, mainly in the big cities, which he has, in his own word, "saturated" by long stands of up to six months. He calls his followers "my people." Some have peach fuzz on their cheeks, and others have it on the tops of their heads. The one thing they share is a fondness for articulate irony and a sense of feeling...
...involvement for the next few months will be with the 1960 presidential campaign, and, as always, he is facing the stump with a two-edged adz. "It's all over but the doubting," says Mort Sahl. "My considered opinion of Nixon versus Kennedy is that neither...