Welcome to our collection of quotes by Mort Sahl. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Mort Sahl
Morton Lyon Sahl (May 11, 1927 – October 26, 2021) was a Canadian-born American comedian, actor, and social satirist, considered the first modern comedian since Will Rogers. Sahl pioneered a style of social satire that pokes fun at political and current event topics using improvised monologues and only a newspaper as a prop.
Sahl spent his early years in Los Angeles and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he made his professional stage debut at the hungry i nightclub in 1953. His popularity grew quickly, and after a year at the club he traveled the country doing shows at established nightclubs, theaters, and college campuses. In 1960 he became the first comedian to have a cover story written about him by Time magazine. He appeared on various television shows, played a number of film roles, and performed a one-man show on Broadway.
Television host Steve Allen said that Sahl was "the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy". His social satire performances broke new ground in live entertainment, as a stand-up comic talking about the real world of politics at that time was considered "revolutionary". It inspired many later comics to become stage comedians, including Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, George Carlin, and Woody Allen. Allen credits Sahl's new style of humor with "opening up vistas for people like me".: 545 Numerous politicians became his fans, with John F. Kennedy asking him to write his jokes for campaign speeches, though Sahl later turned his barbs at the president. After Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Sahl focused on what he said were the Warren Report's inaccuracies and conclusions, and spoke about it often during his shows. This alienated much of his audience and led to a decline in his popularity for the remainder of the 1960s. By the 1970s, his shows and popularity staged a partial comeback that continued over the ensuing decades. A biography of Sahl, Last Man Standing, by James Curtis, was released in 2017.
My humor was Victorian -- and still is.
Too much comedy today is vulgar, not clever. I say that as a comedian and as a consumer.
You haven't lived until you've died in California.
There's a danger our fiscal bankruptcy might overtake our moral bankruptcy.
There's so much Botox around now that you can't tell when a Jewish girl is angry!
I went to computer class with my Dell and I was bullied by a guy with a Mac.
I was always biting the hand that fed me. It was compulsive. Kennedy was very good to me, and I attacked him as soon as he was elected. I attacked him before he was elected.
The New York Times is the official leak of the State Department.
Now that Obama is at war in a 3rd country, does that mean he has to give back his Nobel Peace Prize?
There are Russian spies here now. And if we're lucky, they'll steal some of our secrets and they'll be two years behind.
If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you'll eventually be accused of treason.
My whole life is a movie. It's just that there are no dissolves. I have to live every agonizing moment of it. My life needs editing.
I was a writer. I couldn't sell anything, and the comedians were among the dumbest people I had ever met. They'd all say to me, 'The average man won't understand it.' You know, they're superior to the average man.
We claim we believe in compassion, which is an abstract, and when it's personified we discredit the man.
I'm for capital punishment. You've got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?
There were four million people in the American Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong.
I don't think crucifixion is the answer. I believe in the resurrection. I like that part of the story.
Everything I tell you is true, but this is factual.
The fact is that you can't have a good relationship with a girl who hasn't settled things with her father.
The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on.
We would have broken up except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.
Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.
Remember when movies were just good or bad, before auteurs, film festivals, and guys from USC who were the first to shoot underwater?
I've arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago. Because when I die, I want to still remain active politically.
The bravest thing that men do is love women.
I made the mistake early in my career, when I moved to Hollywood, of being attracted to actresses. I used to go out exclusively with actresses and other female impersonators.
I used to go out with actresses and other female impersonators.
In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.
You know me, I love lost causes.
If anybody comes up to you and says, My kid is a conservative -- why is that? you say, Remember in the 60′s when we told you if you kept using drugs your kids would be mutants?
I watched Ken Burns' Civil War series on PBS. My favorite segment is when Bob Hope entertains the troops at Gettysburg.
This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.
Remember that no matter how selfish, how cruel, how unfeeling you have been today, every time you take a breath, you make a flower happy.
Women want their men to be cops. They want you to punish them and tell them what the limits are. The only thing that women hate worse from a man than being slapped is when you get on your knees and say you're sorry.
A Yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.
Comedians have to challenge the power. Comedians should be dangerous and devastating -- and funny. That's the hardest part.
I was on stage last night, and I gave a medical report about Donald Trump. I said he was hospitalized for an attack of modesty.
Nixon's the kind of guy that if you were drowning fifty feet off shore, he'd throw you a thirty foot rope. Then Kissinger would go on TV the next night and say that the President had met you more than half-way.
I was afraid no one would laugh, and I wanted to pretend I wasn't noticing the audience. I didn't want the audience to get the idea I was telling a joke and waiting for a laugh.
One thing about being narrow-minded: you'll never be lonely.
New book on Malcolm X says we don't know how he was killed. Want to bring in the FBI. Maybe they were in already.
There's a great feeling of powerlessness in America. When I express ideas to people, they say, 'That's terrific, but do you think it really counts?'
A political satirist's job is to draw blood. I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government.
I took benzedrine -- I got clairvoyance. With benzedrine you can have a very wide view of the world, like you can decide the destiny of man and other pressing problems, such as which is the left sock?
There are talented people along the way, although very few come to mind. They're not very daring. Part of the problem is that comedians don't want to overthrow anything. They want to join it.
I dare say that if most comedians today, the gifted ones, were to sit down and write, they'd learn more about their craft. But what happens is they get out there before they learn what their viewpoint is, if any.
If someone were to ask me for a short cut to sensuality, I would suggest he go shopping for a used 427 Shelby-Cobra. But it is only fair to warn you that of the 300 guys who switched to them in 1966, only two went back to women.
Obama said he went to Libya because of his conscience. Did anyone ever wrestle with his conscience and lose?
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas -- except the drone.
The distance between taking social action and having the knowledge is as wide as the mouth of the Mississippi.
My life needs editing.
When people write comedy from neutrality, it just gets kind of silly.
I used to go to two movies every week for the Saturday matinee when I was a kid.
People tell me there are a lot of guys like me, which doesn't explain why I'm lonely.
A conservative is someone who believes in reform. But not now.
I'm a radical, and I always have been.
I never met a man I didn't like until I met Will Rogers.
If you were the only person left on the planet, I would have to attack you. That's my job.
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
I didn't think that anything is beyond humor -- not profane humor, but a good, honest approach to humor.
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
Washington couldn't tell a lie, Nixon couldn't tell the truth, and Reagan couldn't tell the difference.
Professional comedians, surprisingly, have a lack of humor. They're insensitive to the insanity of our times.