We kick off our series of printed highlights from the radio show with the father of modern standup comedy Mort Sahl. On the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination Mort Sahl talked to us from his home in Northern California.
David: Mort Sahl, thank you so much for joining us.
Mort: Well, it’s a pleasure, David.
David: All right so November 22nd, 1963. When you first heard that President Kennedy was shot, what was your first suspicion?
Mort: I wanted to know the detail. I didn’t like the communal crying.
David: What do you mean you didn’t like the “communal crying?”
Mort: There was a lot of sobbing, and it’s a terrible thing that happened and they all can’t stop crying. But there were a lot of questions. For example where was the presidential security detail? They were at Fort Hood, they were told to “stand down.” Oswald shot from the window, but why didn’t the Secret Service nail down those windows and the manhole covers? Where’s the detail? They say, “Well, we’ll know more when we get Oswald.”
Then they questioned Oswald for 10 hours, there’s no record of the interrogation. Then Jack Ruby comes in there and they say, “This patriot shot Oswald.” But the patriot turns out to be a bagman for the mob in Chicago. It started to fall apart right away.
After Mort Sahl stopped touring in order to join Jim Garrison’s investigation into JFK’s murder his income plummeted from $400,000 a year to $19,000.
David: You couldn’t stand the communal sobbing?
Mort: Yeah.
David: That’s a distraction, the tears and the patriotism.
Mort: It’s an indulgence. The Hungry i closed when that happened. The second time when Bobby got it and Enrico (Owner of The Hungry i) said, “We’re going to close” I said, “No we’re not. We’re not going to be lead in communal mourning by Walter Cronkite. We are going to ask, ‘Who did it?’”
David: So by making something sacred, it enables the cover-up, doesn’t it?
Mort: Oh, yeah, sure! That’s the whole thing. Then you can’t say, “The movie was lousy.” “What are you talking about? Oprah Winfrey made this movie. Are you a bigot?” It’s that thing again. The liberals. They are all on the side of the angels. So how come I ain’t happy?
David: Conservatives do it with the American flag, and patriotism, they hide behind our soldiers, they hid behind 9/11. I mean, both sides do it.
Mort: That’s one of the reasons the liberals should have unmasked 9/11 if they were really liberals.
David: They should unmask 9/11? What do you mean by that?
Mort: In other words, why is the 9/11 Report incomprehensible? And I saw the hearings. They still don’t know if they used thermite in that building and there are no answers. Incidentally, the only book that really took 911 on was a book by a Republican professor from Claremont College.
Mort Sahl on the cover of Time magazine.
David: Okay, so when did you go to work for Jim Garrison in New Orleans?
Mort: About 1965.
David: You were at the height of your popularity as a comedian and you gave it all up to pursue the prosecution of Clay Shaw?
Mort: Well, I didn’t think there was going to be any America; I thought it was going to be a fascist country. If they can do that and not give an explanation, you have got to oppose them, you can’t go along with that madness. Look who they got to go along, Earl Warren. They targeted everybody. They’re still lying. PBS by the way contributed Wednesday night, they said Oswald turned out to be a “lonely looser, a degenerate Marxist.” That’s an awful lot for one guy to accomplish at that age. There’s no evidence of any of that. What happened was that Garrison followed everybody in the case, and he found out that they all worked for the federal government, that’s how he got started. Then we began to get a lot of resistance. Why aren’t the archives open? Why was Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission? Where is the president’s brain?
David: Obama’s brain or JFK’s brain?
Mort: JFK’s brain is missing. They can’t find it in the archives.
David: Didn’t Bobby Kennedy take it?
Mort: No, that’s a contrived story. We had that whole thing for several years too, that the Kennedy family believes these investigations are gruesome and so forth. Until they killed Bobby. Nobody believes Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby. The fatal wound is behind his right mastoid. There were 22 bullets in that board behind him and Sirhan had a 6 shooter. And the LA police took the board down. And then you get the coroner in the case Thomas Noguchi. I don’t believe them. The guy who wrote the book that the conspiracy is all hokum is Vincent Bugliosi. Who of course with the LAPD and Noguchi solved the Manson case. Notice how they solved it, they scare you more. But that’s the last time the D.A.’s office won a case in LA by the way. You know, Garrison never lost a capital case in eight years.
Mort Sahl invented modern standup comedy.
David: Do you believe it was the CIA working with the Cosa Nostra?
Mort: No. As Jim used to say, “The guys at the CIA make the Cosa Nostra look like Shirley Temple.” They’ll do anything as you can see from Snowden’s revelation. And they did. And it was out of the Western hemisphere of the CIA, with David Atlee Phillips.
And of course our witnesses kept getting killed remember? George de Mohrenschildt.
Terrible casualty list of potential witnesses, people are being beaten and threatened, but the fact wouldn’t go away. The president was gone and this country went to perpetual war, perpetual.
David: Thank you Mort Sahl.
Mort Sahl is the father of modern standup comedy. You can follow him on Twitter.