Vampire’s Hours: Mort Sahl, JFK, and the Garrison Investigation
When Mort Sahl died in October of 2021, obituaries praised him as a trailblazing political comedian who “instinctively followed the tradition of inner mission and conviction of the ‘voice of one crying in the wilderness’ cited in the Book of Isaiah” in Forward ’s assessment [1] and served as a one-man “shock to the comedy system,” as The New York Times words his legacy: Other groundbreaking comedians – Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Richard Pryor among them – would pour into his wake, seizing on the awareness that audiences were hungry for challenge rather than palliation. And for social commentators who took to the airwaves in the half-century after he began to speak his mind – from Dick Cavett to Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart – Mr. Sahl was their flag bearer as well. [2] Sahl’s career is unusual and especially noteworthy, however, for his special interest in the JFK assassination. “America has just