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Will Rogers, the country-boy conscience of the '20s and early '30s, who insisted that "there is no credit in being a comedian when you have the whole government working for you," could be biting, but most of the time he was jovially rustic where Sahl is urban and hip. Rogers was lovable, and even his fans do not claim that quality for Sahl. But in his own way, Sahl has taken his place on the center line of the Ward-Dooley-Rogers tradition. The Depression and war years produced only minor political satire. Among comedians, Bob Hope —who still typifies the older, machine-tooled and essentially safe topical joke—might crack about Eleanor Roosevelt's never staying home; Fred Allen liked to say that Tom Dewey seemed to be eating a Hershey bar sideways. But satire on the whole was caught between social protest and safe, sponsor-tested lampoons. With Mort Sahl, political satire has come alive again.
Verbal Mobiles. Says Sahl mockingly: "I'm the intellectual voice of the era—which is a good measure of the era." It may well be. Bright and nervous, frenetic, full of quick smiles and dark moods, shouting "Onward, onward" between laughs, performing in a cashmere sweater, always tieless, he manages to suggest barbecue pits on the brink of doom.
Holding a rolled newspaper in his right hand, flashing baby-blue eyes and a wolfish grin, he states his theme and takes off like a jazz musician on a flight of improvisation—or seeming improvisation. He does not tell jokes one by one, but carefully builds deceptively miscellaneous structures of jokes that are like verbal mobiles. He begins with the spine of a subject, then hooks thought onto thought; joke onto dangling joke, many of them totally unrelated to the main theme, till the whole structure spins but somehow balances. All the time he is building toward a final statement, which is too much part of the whole to be called a punch line, but puts that particular theme away forever.
The U-2 was still smoldering in Sverdlovsk last spring when Mort Sahl began smoldering in Los Angeles. Building toward the big one, he waved the Examiner choppily, noted that Khrushchev had threatened war. "Then he modified it. He said, 'There will be no war for six to eight months. R.S.V.P.' " Still, K. always had the initiative, and Washington was just sitting around like a neglected girl, with Herter fretting: "Has he called today?" Returning to Pilot Francis Powers' possible fate ("They'll let him go to please the French"), Sahl again skirted off the subject to note that some religious groups believe in capital punishment—"even though they made a very large Mistake once."
Dozens of similar cracks, far and near to the downed plane, some made up on the spot, others refashioned from earlier monologues, clustered about the main stem before Sahl decided the time had come. Nathan Hale, he said, regretted that he had only one life to lose for his country. But Powers, ignoring that suicide needle, merely said: "This shatters all my plans."