Woody Allen and Don Rickles sent their good wishes via video. The program announced, “Comedians scheduled to appear are subject to personal availability.” Thus, David Steinberg and David Brenner were no-shows, and Larry King was replaced as host by Jack Riley, one of the patients in Bob Newhart’s TV group-therapy ensemble.
Paula Poundstone, the only female comic there, resorted to her forte, asking an audience member, “What do you do for a living?” He was an attorney—giving her the opportunity to talk about her own problems with the law—and he turned out to have started the first Mort Sahl fan club in 1956. Poundstone asked if all the members of his fan club wore those cute cashmere pullover sweaters like Mort did.
Although all the performers topped off their regular schtick with praise for Sahl’s comedic breakthrough, Albert Brooks was the most original and unique in the context of this occasion.
“I’m embarrassed tonight,” he began. “And angry. And I’m confused. I don’t know the people that produced this show at all. But I would strongly suggest that when they do an event like this again, they spend a little extra money and hire a real publicity firm to disseminate the information correctly. I was told that Mort Sahl passed away. So you can imagine my shock, my dismay and quite frankly my disappointment, when I arrived here this evening and saw him standing there.
“I worked very, very hard on this eulogy—and unlike other comedians tonight, I don’t have a current act, I just can’t pull ten minutes off the top of my head—so I do this, or I have nothing. I asked myself, ‘What would the late Mort Sahl say?’ I think he would have said, ‘You do it.’ Nobody appreciated a turn of a phrase, a beautifully written sentence, as much as he did. But then again I say, to the people that produced the show, ‘If you don’t wanna spring for full-blown publicity, please get someone who will talk to the talent.’ ”
And he started to read aloud: “Mort Sahl—1927 to 2007. Mort? We hardly knew you. I remember the last time I saw Mort alive. It was at a Starbucks near where I live. And now I wish I’d said the things that I really felt. I wish I’d said how much he influenced all of us here. How brave he was. I wish I’d have told him how much of an innovator he was. I wish I’d have told him how much I loved listening to his records. While he was here. But I didn’t. All that I think I said that day was, ‘Are you gonna finish that latte?’
“This should be a lesson to all of us. If you see someone that you love, don’t ask for their food. Tell them how much they mean to you. Do you know what? On a night like this, I think we need to look on the positive side. From what was told to me, Mort didn’t suffer. He died as he lived. In his sleep. It’s at times like these that I think of what the great Alexander the Great said to his brother in the middle of a fierce fight. He said, ‘I’m going home. I don’t wanna fight anymore. You can take over. And try not to die.’
“If only I’d said that to Mort Sahl! That day in Starbucks. But I didn’t. Actually I think, along with the latte comment, I also asked him if he were going to eat the scone. But you know what? I’m sure he knew what I meant. I’m sure he read into that freeloading comment the fact that I loved him. . . .”
Finally, Sahl himself took the stage—wearing, of course, his signature red pullover sweater.
“I’ve been very moved by everybody tonight,” he said. “And I had a good time laughing. I want you to know it really did knock me out. And I also want you to know that I’ll do it as long as they let me. I didn’t want this to be a retirement party, you know. I’m still in business. And to reference that business—talking about the Bush administration—you know, I know the president, and he told me that he doesn’t drink. He said, ‘I don’t need it, because I’ve been born again.’ And what occurred to me in the moment was: If you had the rare opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush? . . . Cheney went to the hospital. Got an aneurysm in the right knee. You know, the one that replaced the left knee. Also, he’s had four heart attacks and also a pacemaker. They’re reconstructing Cheney, a Halliburton corporation. And they’re overcharging him.”
At one point, someone shouted, “Hey, Mort! You avoid 9/11 in your act. You always talked about the Warren Commission. You were all over it!”
“You hear that?” Sahl asked the audience, not realizing the critique came from a 9/11 Truth Movement member. “It was something to do with the Warren Commission. Well, you know that’s how I went out of business for about twelve years. But I stuck to my guns, because I remember something [Bobby] Kennedy said: ‘To all you with the guns out there. You may be able to slay the dreamer, but you haven’t slain the dream.’ I came to this because I really thought I was an American and really had the capacity to dream. You all know that if you watch Turner Classic Movies. That’s what the movies were about—it was a dark place where people could fall in love and moral issues could be resolved. My grandfather came from Lithuania, although Lou Dobbs tried to stop him. . . . I dreamed that dream.
“When I started this act,” he concluded, “although I was just lonesome and looking for a family, in a larger sense I saw it as a rescue mission for America . . . but I believe it more than ever, in spite of the odds. That the good guys’ll win. . . . I tried to get to your funny bone and get into your head, but apparently I also got into your heart.”
◆ ◆ ◆
In November 2007, I was supposed to open for Sahl at the Warner Grand Theater in San Pedro, California. The evening was a tribute to Jimmy Carter, who was in town building houses as part of his Habitat for Humanity campaign. The show began with a mini-musical, Habitat—featuring original lyrics for melodies from Camelot. Sahl had been there since 5:00 p.m., listening to the song rehearsals over and over, and his opening line would be “I hate Camelot.” He had gotten so antsy while the singers were performing that he asked to be introduced immediately after them, and I would follow him.
So now I can honestly say that Mort Sahl once opened for me.
Currently, Sahl is a visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College, where he’s been teaching courses such as “Critical Thinking” and “The Revolutionary’s Handbook” (including his experience with Jim Garrison investigating the assassination of JFK) as well as a class in screenwriting. And he continues to perform regularly. At McCabes, for example, he observed that during the Republican debates, when the candidates were asked who didn’t believe in evolution, a few raised their hands, and Sahl pointed out, “If you watched the debate, you wouldn’t believe in evolution either.” His targets have always included liberals and conservatives alike. As a news junkie, his material still has a sharp point of view, as opposed to easy-reference jokes about celebrities.
Recently, however, he adroitly poked fun at the public perception of a celebrity. A friend of mine was having his caffeine fix at a Starbucks in Los Angeles. He happened to be seated right near Sahl and recounts the following incident. A young woman who had just finished her coffee stopped to chat with Sahl. It was apparent that they knew each other. Then, as she started to leave, Robert Blake walked in. Sahl, loyal to his buddies, had been among those show-biz folks (including Quincy Jones, Sally Kirkland, Anthony Hopkins, Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters) who visited Blake when he was in jail. Now, Sahl said to the young woman, “Do you know my good friend, Bob Blake?” Blake looked at her and said to Sahl, “She looks like a very nice person. She looks like she sleeps well at night.”
Sahl paused, then said to Blake, “Well, she’s got a clear conscience.”
BARBARIAN AT THE GATE
When I first started doing stand-up comedy in the 1950s, I called myself Paul Maul and played the violin between jokes. Then I launched a satirical magazine, The Realist, in 1958, and stopped performing. But Lenny Bruce encouraged me to start again, only without that corny stage name and without using my violin as a crutch.
I began memorizing a long list of things that I could talk about on stage, and the order they were in. Lenny advised me to just go out on stage with a completely blank mind, but I wasn’t read
y for that yet.
In 1961, I opened at the Village Gate. Lenny couldn’t come to my show because he was too busy getting arrested. Art D’Lugoff proved to be a most gracious host, taking care of details from placing an ad in the Village Voice to providing a sound engineer, namely Chip Monck, who would later become the disembodied voice at the Woodstock Festival. Most of all, D’Lugoff was supportive of my freedom to be irreverent and controversial. Here’s an excerpt from that show:
“India has allocated $105 million dollars for birth control, but can you imagine the uproar there would be in this country? So don’t tell me we’re free from religious interference. I won’t be satisfied until you can find an abortionist in the Yellow Pages. Until it’s as socially acceptable as a nose job. Until people can start sending studio cards saying, ‘Good luck on your abortion.’ And don’t say, ‘Well that’s different from birth control, that’s murder.’ Because, when you talk about abortion being murder and birth control not being murder, what’s your focal point? The moment of conception. Before—sí. After—no. But this gets into all kinds of equivocal ramifications. Shouldn’t a douche be ruled out? That’s foul. It’s a very tenuous thing. You’re gonna have these rabble-rousers going around scrawling on signs in the subway: ‘Zonite is a murderer!’ ”
D’Lugoff and I became friends. He was principled and generous. Like so many other performers, I developed a tremendous sense of loyalty to him. He always made me feel welcome at the Gate, and occasionally I would stop by to have a little chat. One afternoon, Ed Sanders—poet, peace activist and leader of the Fugs, a funky band that was the missing link between folk and punk—was there. We sat listening to an early rock group, the Byrds, rehearse for their performance that evening.
“Wow,” I said, “they’re pretty loud, huh?”
“You’ve gotta get inside the music,” Ed explained.
The Gate continued to serve as a venue not only for an eclectic array of music, but also for benefits, forums and theatrical events.
It was purely a slip of Barbara Garson’s tongue when, at an antiwar rally on the Berkeley campus in 1964, she referred to Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, as “Lady MacBird.” Then, in the wake of a demonstration to block the trains carrying troops that would end up fighting in Vietnam, she wrote a fifteen-minute takeoff on MacBeth, titled MacBird. She developed it into a full-length play, which she submitted to The Realist, but I rejected it because her targets had already been attacked so much in our pages.
However, when producers eventually began holding backers’ auditions, I invested $3,000, since so many people who didn’t read The Realist could now be exposed to this stage production. The play opened at the Gate. MacBird (LBJ) was played by Stacy Keach; Lady MacBird was played by Rue McClanahan; Robert Ken O’Dunc (Robert Kennedy) was played by William Devane.
The line that got the biggest reaction was when Robert Ken O’Dunc said, “I basically agree with both positions.” In real life, Senator Kennedy had both come out against the bombing in Vietnam and voted for Johnson’s supplementary budget to subsidize the war. Voice reporter and Robert Kennedy biographer Jack Newfield sent him a note: “To thine own self be true.” I suggested that Kennedy would reply, “Out, damned spot.”
◆ ◆ ◆
In 1965, Art D’Lugoff became upset when he read in the New York Times a quote by black poet LeRoi Jones, referring to slain white civil rights workers: “Those boys were just artifacts. They weren’t real. If they went to Mississippi to assuage their leaking consciences, that’s their business. I won’t mourn for them. I have my own dead to mourn for.” Jones then extended that lack of sympathy to the six million Jews who were slaughtered in Nazi Germany.
And so D’Lugoff invited LeRoi Jones to participate in a debate at the Gate, and he asked me to moderate the discussion. Jones agreed only because D’Lugoff promised him the free use of the Gate for a benefit for the Black Arts Repertory Theater. D’Lugoff and Voice columnist Nat Hentoff were also panelists. Jones was the star attraction, but he arrived an hour late.
“About the six million Jews,” Hentoff said at one point, “you know, this is a tragedy within a tragedy, and I don’t like it being used for rhetoric. The tragedy of those deaths—and there were many millions more Poles and Gypsies and Lord knows who, including Russians—is that nobody, including the Jews and the Poles and the Gypsies, what few of them are left, learned anything from it. I will agree that there is no real cohesive organization, but there are a number of Jewish organizations within the endemic tendency to disagree among Jews. But the fact is there was no outcry about the A-bomb in Hiroshima, there’s no organized Jewish outcry about South Vietnam, there’s no organized Jewish outcry about the whole skein of violence that is part of this country’s foreign policy.
“Now the other part of this is—it seems to me so simple, and yet it also indicates the lack of role-reversal ability—what the hell difference does it make to a guy in central Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant or the South Side of Chicago that six million Jews were killed? I mean you can’t expect a guy on the Bowery—and this is true of a cracker as well, or a guy in Appalachia, or an Indian, or a Mexican—you can’t expect him to be [theologian] Paul Tillich. He is hurting and he is hungry. And the only Jews he happens to see, probably, are the storekeepers who, for other economic and determinist reasons, are part of the ghetto. But you really can’t bring in the six million Jews there, because it is not relevant.”
D’LUGOFF: “I think you’re dead wrong, Nat, and I think it’s a disgrace—”
HENTOFF: “Are you going to take my mezuzah away?”
D’LUGOFF: “—because anybody who has the audacity to talk about any human beings that were killed or massacred or lynched the way you have . . . I think that you are saying something that, believe me, you may not like it, but I think it’s anti-Semitic.”
KRASSNER: “Not only is your mezuzah being taken away, but your foreskin is being given back.”
Later, we got into a discussion about the white power structure.
JONES: “I do strongly believe that white America represents the most repressive force on the earth today.”
D’LUGOFF: “Just what is it that you want me to do?”
JONES: “I want you to give this club to my father.”
D’LUGOFF: “But I built this place with my own hands. Besides, this is a marginal operation.”
JONES: “You’re a drag.”
D’LUGOFF: “Oh, yeah? You’re a bigger drag.”
The New York Post reported this as: “You’re a bigot drag.”
In 1971, five years after Lenny’s death, Groucho Marx wrote to my publisher—“I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce”—and I took that note as my personal marching orders. I had moved to San Francisco, but the Gate was my stage away from home, and I would perform there every time I returned to New York. Here’s an excerpt from a show I did at the Gate in 1981:
“There’s definite sexism in the movie E.T. I mean, how do we know E.T. is a male? Because the little boy says, ‘I’m keeping him.’ This is a blatant male chauvinist assumption. I’ve seen E.T. and there’s no penis. And even if there were, it would be human chauvinism to assume it was a penis. How do we know it’s not just a spare battery holder for E.T.’s finger with the red light?”
Anyway, Art D’Lugoff never did give the Village Gate to Leroi Jones’s father. And, although the building that once housed that venerable club may have changed, the spirit of the Gate remains a national treasure.
FEAR AND LAUGHING IN LAS VEGAS
“I’m covering this for The Nation,” I told Jerry Seinfeld.
Chris Rock interjected, “The Nation of Islam?”
We were in Las Vegas (where Mayor Oscar Goodman had recently suggested that those who deface freeways with graffiti should have their thumbs cut off on TV) at the first annual Comedy Festival, a three-day laugh quest featuring some thirty-five shows. A ticket for all events cost $1,500.
There
was a panel about comedy with Seinfeld, Rock, Robert Klein and Garry Shandling, moderated by CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper. Shandling asked Cooper, “What do you do one night when you’re just not feeling funny?” Seinfeld later received the first annual The Comedian award, given to a performer “who has most influenced and furthered the art of comedy.” He said, “I’m honored, but awards are stupid. Every insurance company, hotel, car dealer—they get these jack-off trophies.”
Seinfeld is best known for his observational humor, so after the presentation I asked if he’d ever done a political joke. He recalled one: “Anybody who wants to be president shows evidence of a brain that’s not working too well.”
The festival kickoff was a two-hour taping of a TV special, Earth to America, a comedic approach to raising consciousness about the environmental crisis. Executive producer Laurie David called it “a little bit of prime-time history.” The show began with a film clip of her husband, Larry, star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dressed as a modern Paul Revere, riding into Vegas on a horse and shouting, “Global warming is coming!”
“Coming to you from Las Vegas, the conscience of America,” said emcee Tom Hanks.
RAY ROMANO: “I think it’s very appropriate, we’re trying to conserve energy in a town that uses more energy than any other town in the world.”
BILL MAHER: “We have a president who thinks Kyoto is that guy his father threw up on in Japan.”
WANDA SYKES: “I don’t wanna go home and see my aunt out on the corner, trickin’ for her medicine—‘Tickle your balls for an anti-inflammatory?’ ”
At the after-party, two bodyguards were assigned to Laurie David; none to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He had thanked the performers at Earth to America for volunteering their time. Actually, they got union scale. For the other shows, performers were highly paid.
Who's to Say What's Obscene? Page 3