Mort Sahl on JFK

[Paul Brancato]

14 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

 

You agree with whom? Mort Sahl or McGovern? (The former, I hope.)

 

Yes - Liberals failed us.

[Rob Couteau]

On 10/25/2017 at 8:48 AM, Joe Bauer said:

Jack Paar

This doesn't answer your question, but it's a great video nonetheless. Paar explains that RFK chose to come out of his seclusion after his brother's death by appearing on the Paar show.

Edited April 2, 2018 by Rob Couteau

[James DiEugenio]

Does everyone know the transformation that the Tonight Show took when Paar left and Carson replaced him?

My father, for one, was very disappointed.  He loved Jack Paar.  Never liked Carson.

I do not at all think that if Paar had stayed the debacle on The Tonight Show with Jim Garrison would have happened.

[Robert Harper]

Reading this thread prompted my looking Sahl up, and I found that he is still with us at age 90. It would be a compliment to him and his integrity if he could know that--at least the EF people-- continue to hold him in high regard. 

[Rob Couteau]

Well said, Robert. I had no idea he was still alive.

[Robert Harper]

On 10/22/2017 at 2:56 AM, Paul Brancato said:

I walked by the small theater in Mill Valley CA where he still speaks on Thursday evenings. A friend of mine says he's kind of losing from old age. I'm thinking I should go meet him.

Paul-I missed this by you...GO! even if he's lost it, he'll have a glimmer. Tell him he has lots of fans here.

[Paul Brancato]

1 hour ago, Robert Harper said:

Paul-I missed this by you...GO! even if he's lost it, he'll have a glimmer. Tell him he has lots of fans here.

I keep thinking about it but usually work Thursday nights. I have a Thursday off in two weeks - I’ll try. Thanks for the encouragement 

[Robert Harper]

5 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

. I have a Thursday off in two weeks

One of my favorite Mort Sahl:  In the 50's you had to be a Jew to get a girl; in the 60's you had to be Black to get a girl; in the 70's you had to be a girl to get a girl.

[Michaleen Kilroy]

Mort Sahl does a live Periscope from The Throckmorton Theater in Mill Valley, Calif. every Thursday night:

https://twitter.com/mortsahlsays

[Rob Couteau]

20 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

I keep thinking about it

Wow, definitely drop by and let us know what happens!

[Paul Brancato]

Made plans for Thursday week after next. I’ll post after

[Kirk Gallaway]

On 10/23/2017 at 3:07 PM, Kirk Gallaway said:

I remember Mort Sahl as largely political comedian from a very early age before I cold understand the meaning of his jokes. As any political humorist of his day, he was never really a huge commercially successful comedian. His heyday was when he was a frequent on the Smothers Brothers show, during the Viet Nam War period. I remember, he would use the exclusive "we" a lot, pertaining to be of the liberal movement of that day, which I related to. Though I thought it spanked of a "we are the other people" sort of snobbishness.

I have heard his 70's foray into the Kennedy assassination on FM radio at the time and there's no doubt, he held to his beliefs. In the early 80's he became an avid follower of Ronald Reagan and alluded to being a close personal friend of Nancy Reagan. My friends and I at the time thought that was a real 180.  I  saw a TV interview where the interviewer remarked that came as a surprise to him as he had always thought Sahl as a Liberal, which sort of embarrassed Sahl, and he denied any real political affiliation.

To reiterate, I think Mort Sahl was a uniquely talented comedian. His performances have some elements of brilliance to them, but come off as somewhat uneven just because the nature of the material.(political satire)

I think he ingeniously shlepped out a career, but because of changing political dynamics had a career of ups and downs where he was forced to reinvent himself. He embraced the liberal anti war movement rather exclusively as I pointed out in the post above. Unlike a lot of our political elders at the time, who were egging the youth movement to appeal more to moderating the anti war message to make it more assimilable, Sahl sort of embraced a "we are the other people" which the youth was already guilty of taking, and some of us thought was a little unbecoming of his age, and "trying to hard." 

But in reality, Sahl is a loner, very intelligent, somewhat arrogant, and would piss off people and burn his bridges along the way. He reinvented himself in the 80's as he embraced Ronald Reagan and called himself a big friend of all people, Nancy Reagan. 

And now he talks that his reinvention was because he was disappointed at the "liberals" for not embracing his support of Garrison. Oh come on, that's BS!! IMO It was largely liberals who spearheaded the JFKA movement.  You have to have lived in that time period to realize there was so much else going on following the JFKA.  There was a war going on. What is everybody just supposed to abandon everything that's happening and become JFKA researchers? I would expect many of the people on this forum who were living at that time were very curious  and suspicious but were not avid JFK researchers from the git go, and those were born after the 60's, had they lived at that time, wouldn't have been either. And you have to give credit that Mort was. Mort would have you believe that his association with Garrison cost him his lucrative career, more BS, with the youth he gained more acceptance, but finally in the 70's, people knew the Viet Nam war was winding down and  the public had had their fill of the anti war movement and youthful Liberalism, and Mort was out.

Besides it's called a political philosophy, either in your core, you believe or you don't. Not to say, people didn't legitimately  change their philosophies. But in the final analysis, where did he end up? Where did he choose to live out the rest of his life, in Marin, In Mill Valley, which is about as liberal an area as you can get.  He knows where his base is.

This is typical of what I remember of Mort Sahl's act in 1967. It's  pretty funny. He hasn't quite really embraced an anti war movement yet. But it's easy to read his political philosophy here.  He's not talking about the JFKA or Garrison. He's not kind at all to Bobby Kennedy, here. He's keying in on the very public recognition of Bobby's work with Mc Carthy, but doesn't give him credit for his taking on the mob. But maybe personally underlying this was a criticism  of Bobby and his family's handling and his sort of ambivalence of using his power to go after the murderers of his brother, I was  with Mort on that at the time. I never understood it. If it was that Bobby may have decided in the long run it was better to forego that for his eventual Presidential aspirations, he ended up being right, except for of course, one fatal flaw, that he never would live to realize that.

https://youtu.be/h5yd3Nqp19s

Edited April 8, 2018 by Kirk Gallaway

[Robert Harper]

On 4/8/2018 at 10:58 AM, Kirk Gallaway said:

Mort would have you believe that his association with Garrison cost him his lucrative career,

I think he would say that and I think he would be right. No question.

I agree that those of us alive and aware were not active "JFK researchers" at the time. But VERY FEW people spoke out in public, and often, like Mark Lane and Mort Sahl. You see where someone wants to go when they are 20-35 years old, say. Sahl was onto a creative, intellectual, course--wherever it might bring hmi. Stand-up is one of the few professions that you can crack early and successfully without a lot of strings and associations. I don't take seriously any "recantation"  of one who has nothing to recant for; I don't find anything nasty in having a friendship with Nancy Reagan. People like Salandria  Meagher, Buchanan and Sauvage,  knew in their hearts that something was wrong and used their research and writing skills to tell us. Sahl used his performance skills to do the same; unfortunately performers need audiences and after Garrison, the wagons got in a circle to keep people like Sahl, ineffective and distant.

 

[James DiEugenio]

What happened to Mort should not have happened to anyone.

 

https://kennedysandking.com/videos-and-interviews/mort-sahl-interview-with-elliot-mintz