(8 of 9)
Far removed from the old standup, joke-book comedians, they mostly do set pieces that are almost playlets. Using the telephone as a trademark prop, Shelley Berman prefers to find his material in the living room rather than the newspaper. Now a father talking to his daughter before her first date, he tells her that a car is a motel room on wheels; now Dr. Sprocket, child psychologist, he tells a patient's mother: "I know your little boy. His name is Oedipus." (While Sahl's four published recordings have sold only 125,000 copies, the closer-to-the-fingertips comedy of Shelley Berman has sold nearly 1,000,000 copies in three releases, a surprising figure for a "talking" record.)
More bizarre than Berman and more emotionally engaging than Sahl are Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who brilliantly exaggerate sophistication until it bursts with humor. A dentist and his patient fall in love ("I knew it when I looked into your mouth and saw you were English clear through"). In a sequence called Bach to Bach they are two symphonic phonies comparing sensitivities in bed ("I can never believe that Bartok died on Central Park West"). Newest of the offbeat generation is Bob Newhart, whose button-down mind opens up some odd pockets of history—Khrushchev getting a head spray to cut down the glare for television—all related in a tone so quiet and dry that the wildest caricature has the ring of truth.
If Newhart, Nichols and May are warmer personalities than Sahl, other new comedians can be cold enough to freeze the marrow, and are the real source of the term "sick comedians." Chief among them is Lenny Bruce, who whines, uses four-letter words almost as often as conjunctions, talks about rape and amputees, and deserves distinction of a sort for delivering the sickest single line on record. Taking a minority view of the Leopold-Loeb case, he said: "Bobby Franks was snotty." In a class by himself is Jonathan Winters, who finds material in such experiences as being tested for inguinal hernia, enjoys discussing what it is like to be naked in front of a dog.
Cool & Deep. Anxious not to be linked with that sort of thing, Mort Sahl insists that he will not say anything for a laugh: "I am not a sick comedian. I've never uttered a negative word in my life about the status of man, and I don't tell jokes about amputees." Mounting a platform of his own, Sahl adds: "Bad taste can't count as a form of insight." He also says he objects to "historical irreverence," and was disdainful when, in his Los Angeles acceptance speech, Jack Kennedy paraphrased Lincoln's second inaugural address with a crack about Nixon's "malice toward all."