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Concert: Mort Sahl
The Magicopolis, Santa Monica, CA, USA; 14 Sept. 2004
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes
They couldn't have picked a better guy to start off "Entertaining Politics," a series of Tuesday night political satire and commentary sessions here in Santa Monica. Mort Sahl is credited as the first comedian to break through with a political awareness in his routines more than four decades ago. A true original, Mort Sahl is also credited with having the first LP of comic monologues and the first comedian to make the cover of Time magazine.
Mort's near 80 years old now and a beat slower in his delivery, but his wit's still plenty sharp. Arriving onstage armed with a newspaper, he quickly gave us his comments on the Presidential race, saying Kerry and Bush were "fighting out the last war." To the mainstream media the question has become "who was more valiant" in the Vietnam era, but for Sahl, all the guys he admired "went to Canada!" But even Mort, a man who knew those times well, seems to think a discussion of that war is irrelevant today, so he fantasized Jenna Bush asking her dad what he did in our current war, to which Bush said, "I started it!"
Throughout the show Sahl didn't rely on swearing like most modern comics, he never has, though he was there as Lenny Bruce was breaking down the barriers of language. He says that in recent times the crude has been confused with the revolutionary just because it's shocking. Having said that he proceeded to do one dick joke. He said a woman once told him that all men "only listen to their penis," so he told her "that's because my penis has never lied to me!"
For an old line liberal (we're talking all the way back to Adlai Stevenson here!) he sure seemed to have a lot of established right wing friends. A surprising revelation was that he knew former Secretary Of State Alexander Haig as an upper classman at West Point and confided that Haig actually has a "great sense of humor." Sahl also related how he had met Dubya at a Republican fundraiser in Florida that Haig hosted. Sahl called Bush "ignorant, not stupid."
Sahl also presented his pet theory that the left is basically a thing of the past and that most of the people in the country are actually "social democrats." To this end he used a poster board and proceeded to categorize figures from Karl Marx to Dubya in a left to right matrix with the social democrats in the middle. In his analysis Marx, Lenin and Castro all were on the extreme Left-Left while Bush as a "dysfunctional fascist" ended up on the extreme Right-Right with figures like Dick Cheney, Hitler, Bruce Willis and his dad. Surprisingly Osama Bin Laden and Michael Moore landed to the right of center too, "in the left wing of the right wing." Arnold Schwarzenegger landed in the left wing of the right along with them because of his stand for choice, but he's moving rightward since he claimed an affinity for Richard Nixon. Schwarzenegger said at the convention that Nixon was like a breath of fresh air, but Sahl thinks he was more like "carbon monoxide."
Ralph Nader was one of a very few who landed to the left of the middle in the social democrats. The very mention of his name drew hisses from some in the partisan crowd, but Sahl seemed to appreciate him. According to Mort, liberal and social democrat rhetoric is often "hogwash" designed to make us feel better about ourselves because we have "Eskimos on the evening news." Don't do that because "it's futile," he admonished.
Sahl spoke for about an hour and then took questions from the two hundred people in attendance, mostly older folks who obviously remember him from his early days. One questioner said he had first seen Mort in 1958 at a long-defunct club called the Crescendo, one of the venues that brought him to national attention. After all these years, it's great to see that he's still deserving of that attention.
© 2004 - Rusty Pipes