Last Man Standing: Mort Sahl and the Birth of Modern Comedy

by James Curtis

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (b. 1927) took the stage at San Francisco s hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Through the extraordinary details of Sahl s life, author James Curtis deftly illustrates why Sahl was dubbed by Steve Allen as the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy.

Sahl came on the scene the same year Eisenhower and Nixon entered the White House, the year Playboy first hit the nation s newsstands. Clad in an open collar and pullover sweater, he adopted the persona of a graduate student ruminating on current events. It was like nothing I d ever seen, said Woody Allen, and I ve never seen anything like it after. Sahl was billed, variously, as the Nation s Conscience, America s Only Working Philosopher, and, most tellingly, the Next President of the United States. Yet he was also a satirist so savage the editors of Time once dubbed him Will Rogers with fangs.

Here, for the first time, is the whole story of Mort Sahl, America s iconoclastic father of modern standup comedy. Written with Sahl s full cooperation and the participation of many of his friends and contemporaries, it delves deeply into the influences that shaped him, the heady times in which he soared, and the depths to which he fell during the turbulent sixties when he took on the Warren Commission and nearly paid for it with his livelihood.

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Genres: Comedy, Humor, Biography

400 pages, Hardcover

Published May 2, 2017

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

About 75% of the biography that Sahl deserves. Would have liked to have had more verbatim examples of his act through the years and more interviews with some of his peers as well as those comedians who were influenced by him.

[Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those who don't know or never heard of Mort Sahl, you're missing out on a true American original. Every comic working today owes a debt to Sahl's brilliance, courage, perseverance, and innovation; even more so than the great Lenny Bruce who voiced words that people didn't want to hear, Sahl voiced ideas that people didn't want to hear. He made you listen and think and laugh and wonder. His performances were a kind of spoken jazz. Sahl is the First Amendment fully locked and loaded.
This biography of a man not yet finished riffing is by James Curtis and is very, very good.

[Wally Cwik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although this book was an interesting read, primarily having lived through the time frame, it was a difficult read. Had a hard time determining who was speaking.