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The citizen has certain misgivings. "Politics aside," he wonders, "is Richard Nixon worth $100,000 a year? I admit his chances look pretty good, but what about ours?" Waging a sort of personal third campaign, he has a captious eye on Hyannisport as well: "The choice is between the lesser of two evils, anyway," he says. "Some people claim Nixon is trying to sell the country, and Kennedy is trying to buy it. At the Los Angeles convention I had a hunch about how things were going right from the start, when the minister delivered the invocation and said, 'A little child shall lead them.' You know, Kennedy had to have Lyndon Johnson on the ticket with him because he can't get into Washington without an adult. And Nixon picked Lodge because conservative Republicans approve of anyone getting out of the United Nations. Right? Right."
quot;Right!", echoes an almost fanatical following—dedicated fans who are sure that by Election Day Comedian Mort Sahl will have reduced the major candidates to little more than a 5 o'clock shadow and a few odd wisps of singed hair. Often introduced in nightclubs as "the next President of the United States," Sahl is unlikely this year to achieve his stated ambition to overthrow the Government. That will take time. His audience is still narrow and his appeal is anything but universal. But he is the freshest comedian around; he is a permanent and popular attraction in a nightclub circuit that includes San Francisco's hungry i, Chicago's Mister Kelly's, Manhattan's Basin Street East; he is carefully monitored by fellow comedians and politicians; and his Los Angeles TV shows during the Democratic Convention made him the most entertaining voice within reach of a microphone. This fall, new territory will be opened up by Sahl when he launches a national tour, with the Lime-liters providing a folk-song counterpoint to his humor.
Revolt Against Pomposity. In the view of his followers, Mort Sahl represents a new and growing feeling, described rather breathlessly by Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as "a mounting restlessness and discontent, an impatience with clichés and platitudes, a resentment against the materialist notion that affluence is the answer to everything, a contempt for banality and corn—in short, a revolt against pomposity. Sahl's popularity is a sign of a yearning for youth, irreverence, trenchancy, satire, a clean break with the past."
At 33, Mort Sahl is young, irreverent, and trenchant. With one eye on world news and the other on Variety, he is a volatile mixture of show business and politics, of exhibitionistic self-dedication and a seemingly sincere passion to change the world. The best of the New Comedians, he is also the first notable American political satirist since Will Rogers.