Post by mortsahlfan on Jun 4, 2020 22:19:33 GMT
Has anyone read it? I'm reading it now and glad to see many mentions of my username 
I'll paste one excerpt:
To say that I was blown away by Mort Sahl—it would be like when I first tasted spare ribs. Now when it comes to Mort I could go on and make this book longer than War and Peace. I can’t do justice to his work as a comedian. I can only say what a sports writer said to me as he extolled Babe Ruth, “You had to be there.” In a short time Mort would electrify America, get booked at every college campus in the country, draw huge audiences, conquer every smart nightclub, get put on the cover of Time magazine, get profiled in the New Yorker, and those of us who were around when it was happening know we shared a comic experience like no other.
It’s hard to go into what made him great because the answer is everything and no amount of prose can nail it. Suffice it to say, he ruined my life in the way that Charlie Parker ruined every saxophone player who came after him for years. As one critic who liked me a lot wrote, “If Woody Allen can lose those Mort Sahl mannerisms, he could be a very funny comedian.” I wanted to do what he did, I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be him. And that’s the problem. You have to be him to get that effect. It wasn’t the brilliant jokes, which were the best I ever heard, it was the man. It took me a long time to understand that and to grasp that no matter how hard I tried or how clever I could make my act, I wasn’t him. (It’s the same problem 99 percent of the actors had after Brando hit the scene. They walked like him, paused like him, posed like him, postured and pivoted like him, but in the end, they were them.) In the end, I was always me. As Marshall Brickman so incisively put it in a discussion about art and artists—“You’re fucked by who you are.” I did extremely well as a stand-up comedian, but what I did when compared to Mort was second-rate
I'll paste one excerpt:
To say that I was blown away by Mort Sahl—it would be like when I first tasted spare ribs. Now when it comes to Mort I could go on and make this book longer than War and Peace. I can’t do justice to his work as a comedian. I can only say what a sports writer said to me as he extolled Babe Ruth, “You had to be there.” In a short time Mort would electrify America, get booked at every college campus in the country, draw huge audiences, conquer every smart nightclub, get put on the cover of Time magazine, get profiled in the New Yorker, and those of us who were around when it was happening know we shared a comic experience like no other.
It’s hard to go into what made him great because the answer is everything and no amount of prose can nail it. Suffice it to say, he ruined my life in the way that Charlie Parker ruined every saxophone player who came after him for years. As one critic who liked me a lot wrote, “If Woody Allen can lose those Mort Sahl mannerisms, he could be a very funny comedian.” I wanted to do what he did, I wanted to be like him, I wanted to be him. And that’s the problem. You have to be him to get that effect. It wasn’t the brilliant jokes, which were the best I ever heard, it was the man. It took me a long time to understand that and to grasp that no matter how hard I tried or how clever I could make my act, I wasn’t him. (It’s the same problem 99 percent of the actors had after Brando hit the scene. They walked like him, paused like him, posed like him, postured and pivoted like him, but in the end, they were them.) In the end, I was always me. As Marshall Brickman so incisively put it in a discussion about art and artists—“You’re fucked by who you are.” I did extremely well as a stand-up comedian, but what I did when compared to Mort was second-rate