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 Sahl, who was widely considered
the father of modern political satire, died at
his home near San Francisco, the newspapers
cited a friend as saying. She did not give a
cause of death. Reuters could not immediately
independently confirm the death.
Sahl was credited with influencing comedians
such as George Carlin, Woody Allen and Jonathan
Winters. He was also a friend of another comedy
mold-breaker, Lenny Bruce, although his act did
not include profanity as Bruce's did.
His "Mort Sahl at Sunset," released in 1955, was
the first stand-up comedy album and three years
later, he had a Broadway show.
Morton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal on May 11,
1927, and grew up in Los Angeles. He graduated
from the University of Southern California, and
moved to the San Francisco area in the early
1950s to try comedy. He lived in his car part of
the time before building a following at San
Francisco's legendary hungry i nightclub and
then going on the road.
By 1960, Sahl had become so popular that Time
magazine, which called him "Will Rogers with
fangs," put him on its cover - the first time a
comedian had ever been so honored.
Sahl's stage presence was different from the
standard of the 1950s. He dressed informally in
V-neck sweaters and was more irreverent, more
intellectual, more hip and less rehearsed than
his coat-and-tie contemporaries spouting
mother-in-law jokes.
Sahl took the stage with a newspaper and only an
outline of an act while perching on a stool and
relying on improvisation and responding to his
audience. He would read from the newspaper to
launch his comic riffs on the day's events with
a quick-fire delivery that earned him the
nickname "Rebel Without a Pause." He simply
declared: "Onward" when he was ready to change
topics.
"It wasn't that he did political comedy - as
everyone keeps insisting," Allen was quoted as
saying in the book "Seriously Funny: The Rebel
Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s."
"It was that he had genuine insights. He made
the country receptive to a kind of comedy it
wasn't used to hearing. He made the country
listen to jokes that required them to think,"
said Allen, the filmmaker and comedian.
As Sahl often told his audience: "I don't tell
jokes. I give little lectures."
'A DISTURBER'
Sahl described himself to the New York Times in
2004 as a populist, a Puritan, a dreamer and a
"disturber." He would ask his audiences: "Is
there any group I haven't offended yet?" and he
spared neither Republican nor Democrat.
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 "(John) Kennedy is trying to
buy the country and (Richard) Nixon is trying to
sell it," he said.
He would later mock Republican President George
H.W. Bush as wishy-washy by saying: "God bless
George Bush - long may he waver," and later used
the same line on Democrat Bill Clinton.
He kept it up through the rise of Donald Trump.
"I was on stage last night and I gave a medical
report about Donald Trump," he said in an
interview with the Library of Congress. "I said
he was hospitalized for an attack of modesty."
Before that, Sahl liked to blast Senator Joe
McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities
Committee for their pursuit of communists.
"If you were the only person left on the planet,
I would have to attack you," Sahl said. "That's
my job." Sahl was closely linked
with President John F. Kennedy. At the request
of Kennedy's father, Sahl had written jokes for
him to use while campaigning in 1960, but he
later made acerbic jokes about the Kennedy
family. Club owners then refused to book Sahl
because they had been threatened with tax
audits, according to the book "Revel With a
Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America."
Sahl became obsessed with Kennedy's 1963
assassination. His attacks on the Warren
Commission Report, which concluded that Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the
president, became a big part of his act,
including readings from the report, turning off
his audiences and damaging his career.
He joined New Orleans District Attorney Jim
Garrison in investigating assassination
conspiracy theories and said he believed the
same entity was responsible for the
assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert
and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr..
Sahl partially rebounded in the 1970s as
non-traditional comedians such as Carlin and
Richard Pryor broke through. In 1988, he had a
one-man off-Broadway show titled "Mort Sahl's
America."
Even in his 90s, Sahl performed weekly at a
theater near his Mill Valley, California, home,
with the shows being livestreamed on the
internet. He had been a close friend of Robin
Williams, who lived nearby, before the comic
actor's suicide in 2014.
(Reporting by Bill Trott; Additional reporting
by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Peter Cooney)
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