Reply #22: Mort Sahl

[MinM]

Mort Sahl was the original celebrity/comedian who risked it all by speaking truth to power:

Weekend Edition
August 25 / 26, 2007
"My Grandfather Came from Lithuania--Though Lou Dobbs Tried to Stop Him"
Mort Sahl's Punchline
By PAUL KRASSNER

On May 11, 2007, Mort Sahl turned eighty. He was a pioneer in stand-up comedy. He broke through the tradition of jokes about airplane food, Asian drivers, booze and frigid wives, instead sharing his wit and insights about political hypocrisy, racism, marijuana laws and monogamy. I first met Sahl in 1953 when he was a guest speaker in a course I was taking at the New School for Social Research. I was inspired by his satirical approach to serious issues.

"Every word I do is improvised," he once told me. "I don't rehearse anything. I start it on stage."
In the beginning, though, he would write key words on a rolled-up newspaper, which became his trademark prop. In 1960 he wrote jokes for presidential candidate John Kennedy, and Sahl's picture graced the cover of Time magazine in August during the conventions. When Kennedy was killed in 1963, Sahl endangered his career and was blacklisted as a result of becoming an associate of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in his investigation of the JFK assassination..
http://www.counterpunch.org/krassner08252007.html

"Heeeere's Justice!" 37 years ago this month, Johnny Carson spent 50 minutes with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison

Sahl is one of my favourite undersung heroes of the Sixties, for having spent the capital of a successful career in the Quixotic pursuit of justice for the murderers of America.

From the cover of Time

to "conspiracy monger"

That strikes me as the trajectory of an honourable man.

There's an interview with Sahl a couple of months later in 1968, before the epochal one-two of Dr King and Robert Kennedy, that is as prophetic as anything I've read from that time:

ARGO: Why is the truth behind the assassination of President Kennedy the last chance of America for its survival?

SAHL: Because the evidence developed by District Attorney Garrison indicates that certain people had to take President Kennedy's life in order to control ours..
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/01/heeeeres-justice.html