Mort Sahl

Mort Sahl walked on in a sweater, carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and talked about the actual news. When he started at San Francisco's hungry i in December 1953, nightclub comics mostly traded set-up-and-punchline gags; Sahl riffed on Eisenhower-era politics like a sharp graduate student, and in August 1960 Time put him on its cover as the patriarch of a new school of comedians. Every political comic since works in a room he opened. Recommended recording: The Future Lies Ahead (Verve, 1958), often called the first modern comedy album, which streams on Apple Music. Completists can also look for At Sunset, taped at a jazz club in 1955 without his knowledge and released later.