COMEDIANS: The Third Campaign

• Share

(6 of 9)

Discharged in 1947, Sahl went to Compton College and the University of Southern California, got his bachelor of science degree and started a master's thesis on city traffic flow in his new field, public administration (Harry was sure it would be safe). But his collision with the social sciences was even more disillusioning than his romance with the military. "I couldn't get with it," he says. "It was Conformity City. All the organization men were swinging." With a friend, he rented an old theater, called it Theater X, wrote and staged plays (one title: Nobody Trusted the Truth]. But mostly he kept hanging around Los Angeles nightclubs, looking for a chance to try out the comic-ironic monologues that were developing from his growing catalogue of hostilities. From 1950 to 1953 he tried to get into 30 nightclubs, earned an average of $46 a year in his new profession, learned officially from NBC that he would never become a comedian.

Falling in love with a teen-ager named Sue Babior (he married her June 25, 1955), Sahl finally fled Los Angeles, followed her to the University of California at Berkeley, and became the academic equivalent of a ski bum. Auditing classes off and on, he drank a tun of coffee a month in all-night campus snack bars, argued art, social science and politics into the abstract hours. He slept mainly in the back seat of his moldering Chevy, and ate cold hamburgers provided by a Nietzsche-soaked friend who worked in a short-order bin. Sometimes he slept on the window seat in the apartment Sue shared with two other girls, now says he scrupulously disappeared at mealtimes to preserve his dignity. It is more likely that he was avoiding the filets of horsemeat that one of the girls regularly fingered from her job in a pet shop.

The Lower Depths. While all this seemed to be leading to the Steinbeck orchards in the Salinas valley, it was actually leading to $300,000 a year. From the wooden microphone of his childhood to the hamburgers with Nietzsche relish, Mort Sahl had accumulated experience, intelligence and enmity until just one more shattering blow was needed to complete his training. He got it when he disgustedly walked out of a beat-liberal campus party, picked up a tangerine on the way, and swallowed a seed that—according to Sahl—lodged in his appendix. A doctor at a Berkeley hospital referred him elsewhere when neither he nor Sue had the $450 for an emergency operation, ran after him to demand $10 as an examination fee. The appendix ruptured, Sahl recovered in a veterans' hospital, and the American Medical Association joined his repertory (his mildest joke about the medical world is that "the A.M.A. opposes chiropractors and witch doctors and any other cure that is quick").