Word: mort
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...Whenever there is a political bloat, Mort sticks a pin in it," says Hubert Humphrey. Among his constituents Sahl counts Adlai Stevenson, who sees him regularly when Sahl is in Chicago. Says Adlai: "I dote on him." Sahl contributed a joke bank that John Kennedy drew on for his witty performance at last November's Al Smith Dinner, once discouraged a Nixon worker who approached him for a similar purpose. As for President Eisenhower, he has never heard of Mort Sahl -possibly because the comedian refers to Press Secretary Jim Hagerty as "Ike's right foot." But Sahl...
...machine-tooled and essentially safe topical joke-might crack about Eleanor Roosevelt's never staying home; Fred Allen liked to say that Tom Dewey seemed to be eating a Hershey bar sideways. But satire on the whole was caught between social protest and safe, sponsor-tested lampoons. With Mort Sahl, political satire has come alive again...
...still smoldering in Sverdlovsk last spring when Mort Sahl began smoldering in Los Angeles. Building toward the big one, he waved the Examiner choppily, noted that Khrushchev had threatened war. "Then he modified it. He said, 'There will be no war for six to eight months. R.S.V.P.' " Still, K. always had the initiative, and Washington was just sitting around like a neglected girl, with Herter fretting: "Has he called today?" Returning to Pilot Francis Powers' possible fate ("They'll let him go to please the French"), Sahl again skirted off the subject to note that some...
...Trampolin. Mort Sahl often points out that he more or less ignores the facts to get at the truth, and no set of facts could be more misleading than those surrounding his birth. It occurred on May 11, 1927 in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a hard fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. Harry Sahl, his father, had come out of an immigrant family on New York's Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway...
...Mort's mother, on the other hand, is an intractable optimist. On this trampolin Mort was raised, an only child, soaking up skepticism and idealism, respect for creativity and contempt for show business. His father's retreat to the tobacco shop in Montreal was soon followed by a new retreat to a government clerkship in Washington, and eventually by his return to Los Angeles, this time as a clerk for the FBI. From 2½ little Mort liked to stand behind the radio and shout through it his own version of the news. At eight he hung around...