Still a Stand-Up Kind of Guy

In August, comedian Mort Sahl performed two nights at the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, as the opening act for Woody Allen. The order was somewhat backward, given that Allen once said of Sahl: “Watching him made me want to be a stand-up comedian.” In the event, Allen was appearing not as a comic but as an abashed clarinetist, sitting in with the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band to promote his then-forthcoming film “Curse of the Jade Scorpion.”

Allen and Sahl go back more than 40 years, to the days of the last true renaissance in stand-up comedy, when Sahl owned audiences at the Hungry i in San Francisco and the Crescendo in Los Angeles and Allen was coming up as a shy, nebbishy comedy writer who spoke wittily of girls. Over the years they have, off and on, remained in touch, though they travel in different worlds, on different coasts. So when the 66-year-old Allen suggested the 74-year-old Sahl come do shows in New York, Sahl thought Allen was merely being friendly, the way people say, “We should have lunch.” He wasn’t.

On Sunday, Allen will introduce Sahl at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan, a four-night engagement put together by Allen and his longtime manager, Jack Rollins.

“Woody called me immediately [after the Jazz Bakery dates] and said, ‘Listen, this guy is hilarious. We gotta bring him to New York,”’ said Rollins, mostly retired and living in Connecticut himself. In addition to booking Joe’s Pub, Rollins got on the phone to another comic whose career he used to manage--David Letterman. Sahl will appear Monday on Letterman’s “Late Show” on CBS. He last did Letterman in 1988.

Over lunch at the Mulholland Grill, one of his haunts in a fashionable strip mall at the top of Beverly Glen, Sahl is clearly touched that Allen found him a place to work in New York--two shows a night, an hour each. He last worked there in 1994, during a run of “Mort Sahl’s America.” At Joe’s Pub, Sahl will come onstage holding a newspaper, his trademark. He figures he’ll talk about Michael Bloomberg, the newly elected billionaire mayor of New York City, and Sen. Hillary Clinton. And, of course, America’s latest war.

But it’s not like he writes down an act, exactly. Rather, he does what he always did--feel out an audience for what amuses them, relying on a store of anecdotes about friends such as Al Haig and Eugene McCarthy and a mind tuned to hypocrisy.

Post-Sept. 11, of course, there has been much hand-wringing in comedy about which of our leaders are safe to harpoon. But this presumes that there are voices out there up to the challenge in the best of times. Asked about comedy in a time of patriotism, Sahl--who ran afoul of the political and entertainment establishments in the 1960s for his onstage mocking of the Warren Commission’s findings on the JFK assassination--responds dryly: “Now I realize how hard it is to be a humorist.”

These days, Sahl does the occasional out-of-town date, but he concedes that he doesn’t work nearly as much as he’d like to, a fact that he variously attributes to disinterest among theater operators, agents and--perhaps most especially--television’s tremendous capacity to trivialize everything it touches. In September, after the terrorist attacks, he performed at the Jewish Theater of New England and was taken aback that his setups were playing like applause lines, in no less a liberal bastion than Newton, Mass.

“I said, ‘Isn’t the president a great leader?’ And they start cheering,” Sahl says, bemused. “And I said, ‘What about that speech he made on the state of the union?”’ More cheering. To Sahl, this disrupted what to him was one of his eventual punch lines: that the president was doing so well it made you embarrassed that he hadn’t actually been elected. Or: that Bush wants to be the education president. Yeah, and now he’s being home-schooled by Condoleezza Rice.

Today, Sahl is a godfather of stand-up, though not a relic. After Sept. 11, many of the contemporary successors to his stardom waited (some are still waiting) an “appropriate” amount of time to resume poking at America. It mattered greatly that they’re on television, while Sahl’s platform was the stage and the recording studio. Bill Maher, the mainstream figure perhaps best positioned and equipped to follow in Sahl’s footsteps, touched off a controversy on ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” calling the U.S. cowardly for lobbing missiles at far-away foreign targets. The comedian briefly became a hot topic of debate about the intersection of patriotism and polemics. Ari Fleischer, the While House press secretary, used the occasion to remind Americans to watch what they say these days.

But in the final analysis what plagues Maher most are his format--which demands that people speak quickly and semi-coherently--and his genre, television, the great seller of product and reducer of thought.

And so, at a time when newspapers have more immediacy, Sahl is a man with a country but not a stage. What about comedy clubs, you ask? Have you been to a comedy club lately?

“McCarthy used to say, ‘The jokes should draw blood,”’ Sahl says. “I think the comedians think you’re supposed to help the audience escape [rather] than go into it.”

Of the war on terrorism he asks: “How long can they keep the program going? It’s kind of expensive, isn’t it?” Of this heightened-state-of-alert business, he says: “They said if you hear anybody say anything that sounds disloyal you should report them to the Office of Homeland Security. What a great way to get even with your parents.”

There are those for whom Sahl will be forever frozen in the ‘50s and ‘60s, his name synonymous with such figures as Adlai Stevenson and Jim Garrison. Then, too, he has over the years befriended icons of the right, people whose politics don’t square with the die-hard liberal causes with which many mistakenly associate him. In March, for instance, Sahl spoke in Florida, at a fund-raiser at Haig’s house. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was there, and Al Hoffman, a Florida developer and major fund-raiser in Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. Sahl was there at Haig’s behest. They met in 1987, at the Beverly Wilshire, when the former secretary of state in the Reagan White House was running for president. They became fast friends, Sahl writing the tagline for the Haig candidacy: “He’s throwing his helmet into the ring.”

“He’s got a very willing sense of humor,” Sahl says of Haig. “He knows he’s foreboding.”

It is Sahl’s opinion, in fact, that real-life guys like Haig are better sources for humor than the comedians sanctioned to make fun of them. Sahl feels this way about another acquaintance, Alan Simpson, the conservative former Wyoming senator whom Sahl met two years ago, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where Simpson is a director at the Institute of Politics.

“Simpson told me a great joke, he gave it to [Vice President Dick] Cheney,” Sahl says. “Did I tell you about the two prisoners? They’re in a federal penitentiary. All they have to look forward to are the meals. The guard brings a tray, one prisoner digs in, and the other guy’s dispirited, and he says, ‘How’s the food?’ And the one guy says, ‘It was better when you were governor.”’

Earlier, he had brought up Warren Beatty, which reminded him of the Kennedy School, which reminded him of Simpson. Which reminded him of the prisoner joke.

“I ran into Warren Beatty up here,” he had said. “He says to me--how about this, I’ve known him 40 years, 41--he says, ‘You see any good movies lately?’ How about that for a deep question. You wanna say to him, ‘Have you made any good movies lately?’

“They have a hard time laughing at what they’re doing,” he had continued of Beatty and the like. “I saw him speak at Harvard. I was back there to be interviewed for a fellowship, and I went to hear him, he spoke at the Arco Forum.... And he says to the kids, ‘Basically, America’s story is the haves and the have-nots.’ Then he says, ‘I believe if you have more you should share it with those who don’t.’ Then he says--he rolls out [presidential candidate Ralph] Nader’s statistics--’A CEO today makes 424 times what an assembly-line worker makes.’ So a girl stands up and she says, ‘How many times do you make what a grip makes on a picture?’ And he had no answer. And Simpson said to me, ‘If he’s gonna run for president, he’s gonna have to have more answers than that.”’

Sahl’s day is such that he has time on his hands. His third wife, Kenslea, is a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines. In Los Angeles, he counts among his friends Fred Dryer, the former pro football player and star of the cop series “Hunter.” They met at the Playboy Mansion, on one of Hugh Hefner’s old movie nights. Asked what they talk about, Sahl says: “Nonconformity, mostly.”

His days begin with three newspapers--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. Midday he’ll come up to the Glen Center and have a cup of coffee or get a doughnut. He goes home in time to catch the East Coast feed of the network news at 3:30. His satellite dish beams in 561 channels, including six Discovery networks. After the news he’ll go surfing for an old movie.

“Yesterday I was looking at Audrey Hepburn, Steve McQueen, a good picture with Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, ‘Best Friends.’ You ever see that? They’re really good in it. Tells you a lot about men and women.”

And what tells you a lot about Mort Sahl? “You hear people say, ‘Mort, he’s got a lot of integrity, he doesn’t care whether they laugh or not.’ Oh, yes, I do. See, I’ll tell you what it comes down to in the town. I’m on a search for purity as perceived by them. Not to get a laugh. But they’re just hoping they don’t have to go with me.”