The satirist often ended his routines by inquiring: “Is there any group I haven’t offended yet?”
NEW YORK — Satirist Mort Sahl, who helped revolutionize stand-up comedy during the Cold War with his running commentary on politicians and current events and became a favorite of a new, restive generation of Americans, died Tuesday. He was 94.
Sahl became famous in 1953 at San Francisco’s hungry i , the perfect place for a comedian of his type. The city was a meeting ground for beatniks and college activists, and they crowded into the tiny club to hear someone who spoke to their disdain for the status quo. Word spread quickly about the young comedian with the distinctive style. Soon Sahl was earning $7,500 a week at nightclubs across the nation and appearing on television with Steve Allen and Jack Paar.
In the 1980s he frequently ridiculed his friend Reagan, but he said the president was never offended.“If you’re his friend, it doesn’t matter if you’re an escaped con,” Sahl once said of Reagan. But when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Sahl was devastated and the tragedy foreshadowed a decline in the comedian’s fortunes that lasted for years. He quickly became convinced that Kennedy had been killed as part of a CIA plot and he accused the government of staging a massive cover-up. He devoted much of his monologues to reading long passages from the report by the government’s Warren Commission, which had been appointed to investigate the assassination.
At age 80 he also began teaching a class in critical thinking at Southern California’s prestigious Claremont McKenna College. They eventually settled in Los Angeles, where young Morton joined his high school ROTC program and excelled at speech. His mother said he had started to talk at 7 months and by age 10 already spoke like a man of 30.
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