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Some of Sahl's jokes are rather rarefied. Once he began talking about a fellow in a statistical analysis course who would never use sigma but preferred his own initials instead. When someone laughed, Sahl looked up in surprise and said: "If you understand that joke, you don't belong here. You had better call the Government at once; you are desperately needed."
On the Trampolin. Mort Sahl often points out that he more or less ignores the facts to get at the truth, and no set of facts could be more misleading than those surrounding his birth. It occurred on May 11, 1927 in Montreal, where his father kept a tobacco shop. Although that might suggest a solid burgher background, Canadian citizenship, and perhaps a hard fall on the ice, Mort had none of these. Harry Sahl, his father, had come out of an immigrant family on New York's Lower East Side with a strong will to be a playwright. Broadway and Hollywood gave him just enough encouragement to make him sure that he had the art, but his failure to make a living in his field turned him into a black cynic whose philosophy is "It's all fixed," and "They don't want anything good."
Mort's mother, on the other hand, is an intractable optimist. On this trampolin Mort was raised, an only child, soaking up skepticism and idealism, respect for creativity and contempt for show business. His father's retreat to the tobacco shop in Montreal was soon followed by a new retreat to a government clerkship in Washington, and eventually by his return to Los Angeles, this time as a clerk for the FBI. From 2½ little Mort liked to stand behind the radio and shout through it his own version of the news. At eight he hung around radio stations, picked up discarded scripts from the floor or out of garbage cans, read them into a dummy microphone he had made for himself at home.
In high school, younger and thinner than most of his classmates, and usually alone, he found a haven inside an ROTC uniform, wore it every day everywhere—always with field jacket, so that no one could see from the shoulder patch that he was not a real soldier. He won a marksmanship trophy and the American Legion's Americanism Award, and he became so gung-ho that he tried to get into World War II at 16, lied about his age and spent two weeks in uniform before his mother took him home. Noting all this, Harry Sahl began pondering a military career for Mort—a secure field one or two light-years from show business—and initiated what might have been one of the cooler footnotes to military history when he got a Congressman to agree to give Mort an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy. Mort Sahl at West Point seems roughly twice as hard to imagine as Dwight D. Eisenhower (West Point, '15) rapping out bi-nightly monologues in a cave on Sunset Strip.
Poop from the Group. Long before Sahl could take the West Point exams, he could no longer take the U.S. Army. Drafted after graduation from high school, and assigned to the 93rd Air Depot Group in Alaska, Private Mort Sahl grew a beard and refused to wear a cap. He edited the post newspaper Poop from the Group, won 83 straight days of K.P. for his editorials discussing various types of military payola.