The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-27)

B6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021

obituaries

BY JOHN OTIS

Mort Sahl, the comic whose
caustic and fearlessly observant
routines about Cold War politics
in the button-down 1950s trans-
formed American comedy and
paved the way for generations of
acid-witted humorists, not least
Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, died
Oct. 26 at his home in Mill Valley,
Calif. He was 94.
His friend Lucy Mercer con-
firmed the death but did not cite
an immediate cause.
Before Mr. Sahl, wisecracks
about government and Washing-
ton were little more than glib
asides with no attempt at the
jugular. For the most part, co-
medians avoided topics that
might alienate escapist-minded
radio, TV and nightclub audienc-
es and stuck to safer material
about mothers-in-law or nagging
spouses.
By contrast, Mr. Sahl dove
headfirst into the divisive politics
and tumult of his time — from the
nuclear arms race to segregation
— with erudite outrage, a finely
tuned sense of the absurd and a
high tolerance for risk. Referring
to his more genial comic forebear,
Time magazine described him in
a 1960 cover story as “Will Rogers
with fangs.”
Mr. Sahl developed a trade-
mark look — a V-neck sweater
and loafers, befitting a graduate
student — and he carried onstage
the rolled-up newspapers whose
headlines he had plundered for
inspiration. Having honed his
style in seedy San Francisco bars
and coffeehouses, he riffed in
knowing argot about presidential
politics, Cold War paranoia, insti-
tutionalized religion and neurot-
ic relationships between the sex-
es.
During the height of Sen. Jo-
seph McCarthy’s anti-communist
witch hunts, which ensnared nu-
merous entertainment figures,
among ot her targets, Mr. Sahl
took the position that “McCarthy
doesn’t question what you say as
much as your right to say it.”
He painted President Dwight
D. Eisenhower as a blandly avun-
cular, distracted, golf-obsessed
leader. Amid the 1957 racial inte-
gration showdown in Little Rock,
Mr. Sahl joked that Eisenhower
considered walking a Black girl to
school but could not decide
“whether or not to use an overlap-
ping grip.”
He mocked talk of the “missile
gap” during the 1960 presidential
campaign, wryly jesting, “Maybe
the Russians will steal all our
secrets, then they’ll be three years
behind.” And he spoke facetiously
in favor of capital punishment,
observing, “You’ve got to execute
people. How else are they gonna
learn?”
With more sophistication than
a string of staccato one-liners, his
jokes formed a free-flowing nar-
rative punctuated by references
to political and diplomatic lead-

ers including Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, Cold War hot spots such as Malta and Pakistan, and legislation such as the Taft- Hartley Act. In one discursive story about Eisenhower’s travels abroad, Mr. Sahl said that White House press secretary James C. Hagerty grew testy when reporters asked when the president might visit Russia. “Hagerty was quoted as saying, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m not God,’ ” M r. Sahl said. “Somewhat out of pro- portion to the question.” In “Seriously Funny,” a book about rebel comics of the 1950s and 1960s, Gerald Nachman ex- plored the novelty of Mr. Sahl’s intellectual, explanatory style and his Ivy League wardrobe. “Pre-Sahl was a time in which comedians, clad like bandleaders in spats and tuxes, announced themselves by their brash, any- thing-for-a-laugh, charred-earth policy and by-the-jokebook gags,” Nachman wrote. “Sahl chal- lenged and changed all that sim- ply by the comic device of being himself and speaking his mind onstage.” At the end of his shows, Mr. Sahl would ask, “Is there anyone here I haven’t offended?” Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner became an admirer of Mr. Sahl’s humor and promot- ed him as an exemplar of cool sophistication. The comedian performed on Broadway and in

Playboy Clubs, acted in films, recorded popular comedy albums and appeared on a bevy of late- night and other comedy shows. He was regarded as a pathfind- er for the more topical, personal or of fbeat styles honed by Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Mike Nich- ols, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Joan Rivers and Mark Russell. In 1954, a 19-year-old Woody Allen saw Mr. Sahl perform at a New York nightclub and for years mimicked his delivery style. “He was the best thing I ever sa w,” Allen once said. “He was like Charlie Parker in jazz.... He totally restructured comedy.” Behind Mr. Sahl’s humor lay a deep concern for American de- mocracy, and his onstage probing was the antithesis of the cheap laugh. He sometimes warmed up crowds for his friend Dave Brubeck, but the jazz pianist com- plained that “he demands so much of an audience that it hasn’t the strength for anyone else.” His high-minded material it- self invited satire. In the early 1970s, Carlin portrayed a manic Mr. Sahl uncorking a ludicrous rant about the Arab League, student riots in Japan, Eisenhower watching a movie in Manila and the role of Asian religions in ecclesiastical history. By then, Mr. Sahl’s career had fallen into decline, a development owed almost wholly to his non- stop ribbing of President John F.

Kennedy and his obsession with his assassination in 1963. Mr. Sahl had admired Kennedy and even contributed one-liners to his 1960 campaign speeches. But, fiercely independent and vowing to make any White House occupant the butt of his humor, he let loose when Kennedy won. He joked about Kennedy’s wealthy father influencing the election outcome (“You’re not al- lowed one more cent than you need to buy a landslide”), the Kennedy preoccupation with communist Cuba and the new president’s rumored mafia con- nections. He incurred the wrath of Ken- nedy intimates and said his liveli- hood was threatened. Many nightclubs, fearing tax audits, stopped booking him. Some liber- als in his fan base, having grown accustomed to gibes about Eisen- hower and Richard Nixon, aban- doned him. Mr. Sahl plowed ahead and made an even more radical shift after the assassination. Deeply shaken by the killing, he became convinced that the Warren Commission, which in- vestigated the assassination, was a farce and that the CIA had participated in a plot to kill Ken- nedy. Onstage, Mr. Sahl read ex- cerpts from the commission re- port that he considered f ull of comically tortured logic, and he rambled on about various con-

spiracies. He journeyed to Louisiana, where the controversial New Or- leans district attorney Jim Garri- son deputized him to help investi- gate an alleged government coverup. Putting comedy aside, Mr. Sahl spent several years trav- eling the country interviewing witnesses and evaluating evi- dence. Invitations to appear on TV shows and in clubs dried up. In his 1976 memoir, “Heartland,” Mr. Sahl wrote that his earnings fell from $1 million a year to “about nothing.” But he made a come- back after Watergate, when his searing skepticism and dark view of American leadership better matched the national mood. “The harvest of what we found came out repeatedly afterward in Watergate, the Iran-contra affair, the whole idea of shadow government and of people who think they know better what’s good for Americans,” Mr. Sahl told the makers of a public television documentary about him in 1989. He returned to nightclubs and had a one-man Broadway show in

Mr. Sahl still impressed with
his steady supply of zingers.
One of them involved his
friend, former secretary of state
Alexander Haig, and the U.S. em-
bargo of Cuba. Mr. Sahl ex-
plained: “I was with him when he
lit up a Havana cigar, and I asked
him, ‘Isn’t that trading with the

enemy?’ He told me, ‘I prefer to think of it as burning their crops to the ground.’ ” Morton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal to American parents on May 11, 1927. His father, Harry, a failed left-wing playwright from New York, ran a tobacco shop to support his family. The Sahls later settled in Los Angeles, and the elder Sahl became an FBI clerk. According to Nachman, Harry Sahl cast a pall over his son’s view of the world. “It’s all fixed,” he would tell Mort, referring to show business. “They don’t want any- thing good.” In high school, Mr. Sahl joined the ROTC, and by his own ac- count became an expert marks- man and “something of a marti- net.” At 15, he enlisted in the Army by lying about his age. His mother found him two weeks later and ushered him home. Undaunted, he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces after high school graduation and was sent to an outpost in Anchorage, where his contrarian spirit made an un- timely emergence. He grew a beard and tried to turn a base newspaper, which he edited, into a muckraking journal. His efforts earned him ample KP duty before his discharge in 1947. He graduated in 1950 from the University of Southern Califor- nia. While doing odd jobs, he wrote a novel and a play that found no takers. He followed a girlfriend to San Francisco, where in 1953 he began trying out comic material at a basement bar called the hungry i, a rendezvous for beatniks that charged a 25-cent entrance fee. Mr. Sahl, who had been living in the back of a station wagon, said it took three months to get his first laugh. The winner was a Cold War joke about McCarthy’s anti-communist crusades: “Every time the Russians throw an American in jail, we put an Amer- ican in jail to show them they can’t get away with it.” His success at the hungry i led to more prominent engagements in Los Angeles, New York, Chica- go, Las Vegas and Miami Beach. A heavy coffee drinker largely averse to alcohol and cigarettes, he led a busy life that took a toll on his private affairs. All three of Mr. Sahl’s marriag- es — to Sue Babior, former Play- boy centerfold China Lee and Kenslea Ann Motter — ended in divorce. His son with Lee, Mort Sahl Jr., died of a drug overdose in

He had no immediate survi-
vors.
Mr. Sahl performed well into
his 80s, even after a mild stroke.
He often made light of death, but
with a sharp political eye. Refer-
ring to the Windy City’s reputa-
tion for electoral fraud, he once
quipped: “I’ve arranged with my
executor to be buried in Chicago.
When I die, I want to still remain
politically active.”
[email protected]

MORT SAHL, 94

His political comedy set the bar for future humorists

ROBERT W. KLEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS Comedian Mort Sahl, seen in 1967, was known for his finely tuned sense of the absurd in sk ewering conservatives such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he experienced harsh backlash when he joked about President John F. Kennedy.

BY HANNAH NATANSON

One of the last school board
meetings of an eventful calendar
year in Loudoun County saw
dozens of parents, residents and
students turn out for dueling
parking lot protests — while in-
side, more than 100 people gave
impassioned and angry speeches,
with many calling for the resigna-
tion of the board and Superinten-
dent Scott A. Ziegler.
Loudoun, a Northern Virginia
district of 81,000, has been roiled
with controversy for the better
part of a year, dominated by
ongoing conflicts over policies
for transgender students and the
district’s equity work. Most re-
cently, top school officials have
faced severe criticism from par-
ents on both sides of the political
aisle for the district’s decision
over the summer to transfer a
high school student accused of
sexual assault to another high
school within the system, where
the student allegedly committed
a second sexual assault. A juve-
nile court judge this week sus-
tained the charges against the
student in the first assault, the
equivalent of a guilty verdict, and
the youth is awaiting trial in the
second assault case.
On Tuesday, many parents
lambasted the school system’s
handling of the sexual assaults,
saying they feared for their chil-

dren’s safety. Board members did not respond because school policy does not allow for an inter- change. Instead, each speaker gets 60 seconds to share their views before ceding the floor to another speaker. “What is painfully obvious is your lack of concern for the children in this community,” said Loudoun resident Emily E mshwiller. “I respectfully ask that the board resign — you, too, Scott Ziegler,” said Cheryl Onderchain, who said her children are en- rolled at Broad Run High School, the campus where one of the assaults allegedly took place. The controversy over the school district’s handling of the sexual assault allegations has be- come a hot topic in the waning days of the Virginia governor’s race. Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin has demanded an in- vestigation of the Loudoun Coun- ty School Board. The political ties were evident Tuesday, with many attendees showing up to the board meeting in Youngkin apparel. The parking lot was filled with more signs than people, most of them reading “Youngkin” or “McAuliffe,” a reference to Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe. Separated by a sea of those posters, several dozen protesters and counterprotesters — some

there to advocate for LGBTQ students, others to protest transgender rights and the school district’s handling of the sexual assault allegations — faced off on a cold, windy afternoon before the meeting. The two camps had little inter- action. The closest they came to a clash was when one set of parents, members and supporters of pro-equity group “Loudoun 4 All ,” played loud music at the same time as the mostly conservative parents across the way invited a small child to step up to a microphone and sing the national anthem. Inside the building, speakers filed into the meeting room one by one to address masked board members seated behind a wood- en desk on a raised dais. B oard rules, adopted after an especially chaotic June meeting ended in an arrest, do not permit an audience during public comments. The guidelines also mandate that onl y one speaker at time can enter the room to address the board, and that only 10 speakers total can set foot in the building simultaneously, after undergoing a search by security personnel stationed outside the door. The scene Tuesday — upset parents, reporters’ flashing cam- eras, masked guards stationed at two corners of the mostly empty room — was bizarre but familiar

for the county, a f act some speakers recognized. “I come again in the name of the Lord,” said Loudoun resident Rene Camp, a repeat meeting attendee who held up a sign reading, “School Board Must Re- sign!” “So I’m back again for another week,” resident Tori Walden said. “ Welcome,” resident Michael Rivera said, “to Groundhog Day.” Loudoun’s nine-member school board has borne the brunt of parents’ discontent over the past year and a half. Five members are being targeted in a recall effort, purportedly over their vio- lations of open meetings laws, and one has since resigned. This fall, enraged parents and residents have lined up in the hundreds to deliver diatribes against the board at contentious biweekly meetings that f requent- ly have drawn attention from conservative pundits and Fox News. A handful of times, parents have chanted prayers at the board. A loud and vocal contingent of parents, many of them conservative and Christian, are upset for a variety of reasons — from mask mandates to required bias train- ing for teachers to sexually ex- plicit LGBTQ texts in Loudoun libraries that they find offensive. Some parents have seized on news of the assaults to condemn a

policy Loudoun adopted over the summer that allows transgender students to participate in extra- curricular activities and use facil- ities, including bathrooms, that match their gender identities. Loudoun changed its guidelines for transgender students in re- sponse to a 2020 state law that required every district in Virginia to update school rules to safe- guard transgender children from harassment. The 15-year-old victim in the first sexual assault case has said that her abuser was “gender flu- id,” prompting parental backlash against the transgender bathroom policy. That policy was adopted about three months after the May assault, meaning it was not in effect at the time. The second assault, which took place in October, allegedly happened in a classroom. On Tuesday morning, hundreds of students at several Lou- doun schools held 10-minute wal kouts to demand the county protect students from sexual assault. A few hours later, at the board meeting, others took up the call. “It’s morally wrong what he did, but a new school just means more new victims for him,” said Madelyn Jimenez, one of the only student speakers Tuesday night, who said she was in eighth grade. “Things need to change.”

Other speakers Tuesday t ied the assaults specifically to the bathroom policy and demanded the repeal of the transgender guidelines. Earlier this month, Ziegler promised major reforms to Lou- doun’s disciplinary procedures to prevent a similar occurrence. Go- ing forward, Ziegler said, Lou- doun will ensure that students involved in major disciplinary infractions “will have alternative placements” to keep them separate from the general student body. After about two hours of public comments Tuesday, the school board moved on with little fan- fare to its regular business, including considering a utility ease- ment at Cool Spring Elementary School and pondering proposed renovations at Douglass High School. The board also voted unani- mously to add Title IX reform to its list of legislative priorities for

Title IX is the federal law
that guides how schools address
sexual harassment and assault.
In the wake of the sexual assault
revelations, Ziegler had promised
the school board he would lobby
to change Title IX, partly to make
it easier for school districts to
separate students accused of sex-
ual assault or harassment from
the rest of the student body.
[email protected]

VIRGINIA

Passions, protests flare at Loudoun school board meeting

The Washington Post - USA (2021-10-27)

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