Satirist’s caustic barbs shook America and heavily influenced modern standup

Mort Sahl once said that, if there was only one other human being left alive on the planet, it would be his job to offend them. In a career that began in the Baby Boomer era of American postwar prosperity and lasted into the age of MeToo and Black Lives Matter, nobody was safe from Sahl’s sardonic asides and blistering put-downs. ‘‘Are there any groups I haven’t offended?’’ he liked to challenge his audiences from the stage.

As the godfather of modern American standup, he described himself not so much as a comic but as a ‘‘disturber’’. His mission was to disturb hypocrisy, cant and sanctimony wherever he found them – and he found them everywhere.

Long before the term ‘‘woke’’ gained currency he summed up both sides in the 21st-century ‘‘culture wars’’ with a forensic acuity. ‘‘Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes. A conservative is someone who believes in reform, but not now.’’

Sahl, who has died aged 94, called himself a sceptic rather than a cynic, and every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump felt the lash of his scornful wit. Whether they were Republicans or Democrats mattered not.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, Sahl suggested he ‘‘won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost’’. He then said: ‘‘Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth. And Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.’’

On the grounds that it was better to have Sahl on side, John F Kennedy employed him to write jokes and one-liners for his 1960 presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. Typically, once Kennedy had been elected, Sahl turned his comic rapier on the new president. Having been lionised by the liberal establishment for his acidic assaults on conservatism, he found work dried up after he lampooned Kennedy. ‘‘My so-called liberal supporters have all moved in with the establishment,’’ he said.

It did not help that, after Kennedy’s assassination, he became obsessed with conspiracy theories and claimed that the CIA and the Pentagon had murdered the president. Those who turned up to his shows to hear side-splitting jokes were instead treated to long diatribes about the alleged whitewash of the Warren Commission report.

His career suffered a further setback when his coffee was spiked with LSD at a gig. As he drove home hallucinating heavily, he crashed and ended up at the bottom of a canyon with a broken back. In hospital he mistook a bag of clothes for his wife and spent three days talking to it. When the drugs wore off, he learnt he would be in a brace for a year.

It took Nixon and the Watergate scandal for his popularity to revive in the mid-1970s,

‘‘We would have broken up earlier except for the children. Who were the children? Well, she and I were.’’ Mort Sahl on the first of his four marriages

when he recorded an album, Sing a Song of Watergate, and became a TV regular again. He also found a new college audience but complained that the students who flocked to his shows were insufficiently militant. ‘‘I’m not 18 any more but I’m the angriest man on any campus I visit,’’ he wrote in Heartland ,a 1976 memoir that was partly a settling of old scores. The New York Times reported that one acquaintance had described Sahl as ‘‘a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily’’. The same was true of his wives: he was married and divorced four times.

He met Sue Babior in 1950, when she was 16 and he was 22. They divorced in 1958. ‘‘We would have broken up earlier except for the children,’’ he said. ‘‘Who were the children? Well, she and I were.’’ In 1967 he married China Lee, a Playboy model. They divorced, married again and divorced for a second time in 1991. He married for a fourth time in 1999 to Kenslea Ann Motter, an air stewardess. They divorced a decade later. A son, Mort Jr, with Lee, died in 1996 of a drug overdose.

His influence on modern comedy can hardly be overestimated. Without him, we might never have had alternative comedians such as Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory. He was also a huge influence on Woody Allen, who likened him to Mark Twain.

Morton Lyon Sahl was born in Montreal, the son of Dorothy and Harry Sahl, who ran a tobacco shop. When he was 7 the family moved to Los Angeles.

He left school at 15, lying about his age to join the US Army. There followed two weeks of boot camp before his mother got him out. He joined up again when he had attained the required age and served in the Army Air Forces in Alaska and the Pacific. Under the GI Bill he enrolled at the University of Southern California, where he studied city management and traffic engineering. The chaos that might have ensued if he had made a career of these subjects can only be imagined.

Fortunately, he was not really interested and jazz was his main preoccupation. He threw in his studies and took a job at an LA car showroom, where he made extra cash from a deal with a television shop that promised anybody who bought a set a free car. Needless to say, the cars were wrecks. ‘‘That may have been the moment I became aware of the needs of the American people and how they were not being met,’’ he deadpanned.

In 1953, he audition as a comedian at a hip nightclub in San Francisco. Not trusting to memory, he stapled his material inside a newspaper, which he read on stage and which became his stock-in-trade prop.

He was soon counting among his friends the likes of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. After Sahl recorded an album in 1955, which the Library of Congress has cited as ‘‘the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record’’, Sinatra signed him to his record label, Reprise, for whom he made several further albums. He also hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and was cast in movies such as All the Young Men (1960) and Johnny Cool (1963).

Despite ill health, he continued giving a weekly streamed performance from a theatre north of San Francisco, until the pandemic finally halted the endless flow of acerbic gags.

Having changed the face of comedy, Sahl was not overly impressed with those who followed him. ‘‘Comedians should be dangerous and devastating,’’ he said. ‘‘And funny. That’s the hardest part.’’