Mort Sahl, father of political comedy, still has the stage

A jazz pianist keeps playing, the slow journey continuing, until the comic stops and turns to the crowd. When Sahl took the stage at the hungry i nightclub in 1953 with a newspaper in his hand, he launched both modern political satire and a thriving San Francisco comedy scene. [...] there was a long dark period beginning in the 1960s, when the media and many friends turned against him because of his political views. Decades before W. Kamau Bell and Trevor Noah, before Jon Stewart, Lewis Black and George Carlin, and even before Bruce, it was Mort Sahl at Enrico Banducci’s hungry i — defying the set-up/punch line comics of the era by abandoning a suit and tie for an open-collared shirt and...