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Counterpoint to Laughter. When Little Rock entered the news, Sahl approached the theme from various byways, one of which was his fondness for sniping at the President: a critic had said that if the President were really a man, he would take a little colored girl by the hand and lead her through that line of bigots into the high school. "That's easy to say if you are not involved," said Sahl, fingering the trigger. "But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip." Wild laughter always greeted that one, but with a nod and a nervous chuckle, and a characteristic "It s true, it's true," he would slide off into a skein of digressions, usually with an aside for interested conservatives, telling them that they could get the Chicago Tribune anywhere in the U.S., "flown in, packed in ice." Following Stevenson in Africa, he reported that the natives were suspicious of Adlai's quick smile and thought he lacked warmth. Then, circling back toward Arkansas, he would press on to the famous line that put Little Rock into permanent and absolute focus: "I like Orval Faubus." he admitted, "but I wouldn't want him to marry my sister."
Talking jumpily and a little like a phonograph record running too fast, he sprays his monologues with far-out terms such as chick, drag, gasser, cool it, bug, dig, weirdo and all that jazz. He also mixes in a never-ending supply of phrases parodying academic jargon ("We must learn to differentiate between generic and relative terms"). Between jokes, he draws on a fat little glossary of verbal rialtos that counterpoint the laughter, indicate his attitude to the material. "Wild, huh?" he will say, standing in the ruins of his most recent target, or "You can't go too far, fellas," or "Is there any group I haven't offended yet?"
Crazing Crazes. Sahl works out every line himself, although he rarely writes anything down, and in collecting material buys newspapers and magazines by the long ton. Skimming, dipping, darting from headline to picture caption, he reacts like a pellet of pure sodium dropped in a glass of water, always has some fresh material for each new audience. There is usually some wild variation of the news, and a routine remark at a presidential press conference might come out as a caricature of the sort of bromide Sahl thinks the Administration is forever administering: ''The President says the Russians are terrified of the Turkish cavalry."
While politics is always the trunk line, his humor ranges everywhere. Crazes craze him. His masterpiece on hi-fi ends with a family living in their garage and using the house as a speaker. When he read that people were daubing themselves with instant skin tan, he moaned: "If you can't believe in the sun, what can you believe in?" Psychoanalytic clichés are seldom spared. Once, says Sahl, a bank robber slipped the teller a note saying: "Give me your money and act normal." The teller replied: "First you must define your terms. After all, what is normal?"