Abstract and brief chronicles

 I wanted to write about Mort Sahl, who died last week, and about comedy in general.  As Jason Zinoman observed in the New York Times, Sahl was not the first to offer political commentary -- Will Rogers, sure, but "licensed fools" since the Middle Ages spoke truth to power when others could not, Lear's Fool being the best-known literary example.  As for addressing the audience without lariat or violin, the long-forgotten Frank Fay was doing that in the 1920s.  But Sahl was preeminent among the topical comedians of the 1960s.  While Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby remained resolutely apolitical and enjoyed long careers in comedy, films and television, those who chose to be "relevant" often paid a price, personally and professionally.

Lenny Bruce is probably more written about than seen now.  For the crime of talking on stage the way his audience talked everywhere he was arrested, harassed and finally driven to die of a heroin overdose, the perfect hipster saint.  But he was funny, too -- "Religions, Inc." is as sharp as ever and "Comic at the Palladium" is not to be heard with a full bladder.  George Carlin picked up the linguistic torch, digging into why words "hang us up so much" when deeds don't.  His "Seven Words You Can't Say On Television" had real-world consequences when a WBAI producer played it at midday and brought the wrath of the FCC down on the Pacifica station.  This led Carlin to become ever more political; as evidence mounted of FBI wiretapping he claimed to answer his phone "Fuck Hoover!  Hello!"  His drug of choice was cocaine, possibly contributing to a couple of heart attacks he discussed in his act.

As an African American Dick Gregory had little choice but to be political.  When talking about civil rights and the Vietnam War was no longer enough, when hunger strikes were no longer enough, he quit comedy to become a full-time advocate of vegetarianism and spirituality, which is a long, strange trip from the Tonight Show.  Richard Pryor, who Roy Blount, Jr., called "the funniest living American," started where Gregory left off.  For Pryor, the personal was political.  He had an astonishing gift for making comedy out of his own horrific experiences -- crack addiction, heart attack, run-ins with police, months of intensive care after setting himself on fire.  Racism was just the curtain raiser, multiple sclerosis the final tragedy in which he tried to find defiant laughter.

Mort Sahl's friend Robin Williams didn't need to be overtly political, only to orient the audience to his views by referencing the rest.  Uniquely free-associative, he had his own demons ("Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money") and struggled with depression for years before a misdiagnosis of Parkinson's led him to suicide.  Bill Hicks was raised Southern Baptist and rejected it with a vengeance but his abrasive views were too much for even late-night television; he died at 33 without impressing the mass audience.  And when he derided the official version of the Kennedy assassination it was hard not to be reminded of Sahl.

Sahl was riding high in 1964 when the Warren Report was published and it became an obsession, if not exactly a career ender.  People who went to comedy clubs did not want to be harangued about the absurdities of the single-bullet theory and he seemed unwilling to talk about anything else.  Understandably, perhaps, because he had written speeches for John F. Kennedy (politicians had discovered that wit could be a valuable weapon, even someone else's).  As he aged he moved perceptibly to the right; many do.  And he remained the most quotable of aphorists:  "I never met a man I didn't like until I met Will Rogers."  (Not literally, Rogers died in 1935, but Sahl hated folksiness.)  "I'm for capital punishment.  You've got to execute people, how else are they going to learn?"  "Joe McCarthy doesn't question what you say so much as your right to say it."   "If you were the only person left on the planet I would have to attack you.  That's my job."  A lonely one, I imagine.  If Dave Chappelle is pissing people off on Netflix, he's doing his job.  

What Hamlet said about the players is true of the best comedians:  They are "the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.  After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."  Let them be well used, for we need the light they give off in their frequently unhappy lives.