Mort Sahl will perform at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway Theater on Thursday night. For more information, go to Jimmy Tingle's website. All shows are at 7:30 pm.
Without Mort Sahl, there would be no Daily Show or Colbert Report. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair went so far as to suggest that Sahl was more important to American comedy than Lenny Bruce. Whether or not that's true, Sahl laid the foundation for today's political satire. He also wrote for JFK and later become embroiled - perhaps too embroiled - in searching for the truth behind the JFK assassination.
Sahl will receive a Comedy Lifetime Achievement Award from the Boston Comedy Festival and Emerson College in October, but you can see him now at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway starting this Thursday, August 23, through Sunday, August 26.
He's 80, and he's earned his PBS special, but he's still going. He certainly has plenty to talk about these days. In an interview with Tavis Smiley, when Smiley asked Sahl what his take is on the current crop of candidates, Sahl responded:
Well, when the Republicans stood up there and the moderator said, "How many of you believe in evolution," they proved - I don't believe in evolution, looking at those 10 guys. (Laughter) It's hard to believe. The country's really impoverished. There were only two human beings in both debates - Gravel, who was a cab driver in New York, and on the Republican side, Ron Paul, who is a Libertarian candidate.
Image of Mort Sahl at his peak on the cover of TIME.
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