Floating among West Coast cabaret tables is a new line about a fellow who is writing a play. The scene is the United Nations and the title is U Thant, Take It With You.

That anonymous masterpiece typifies the current brand of topical and political humor as practiced in a growing number of U.S. nightclubs, a form opened wide by acerbic Mort Sahl and still growing in popularity from Manhattan's Greenwich Village to San Francisco's North Beach. Even in Washington, where political humor has heretofore been of the unconscious kind, four night spots...