After high school, he joined the Air Force but soon grew disenchanted with the conformity of service, rebelling by growing a beard and writing articles critical of the military for a local newspaper. When America entered World War II in 1941, the 14-year-old Sahl joined his school’s ROTC program, earning awards for marksmanship and “Americanism,” and dropped out the next year to enlist in the Army, lying about his age to get in-a ruse that fell apart two weeks later when his mother found out and revealed his true age. He was born Morton Lyon Sahl in Montreal on May 11, 1927, and later relocated with his family to Los Angeles, where his father tried to break into show business as a writer before taking a job as a court reporter for the FBI. There is perhaps not a single notable comedian to emerge in his wake who has not been influenced by his efforts in one way or another. The man was Mort Sahl, who passed away yesterday at the age of 94, and what he did would single-handedly revolutionize American comedy forever. After December of 1953, all of that would change forever, almost entirely due to the efforts of a seemingly unassuming man who hit the stage armed with nothing more than a proto-preppy wardrobe, a rolled-up newspaper, and a willingness to challenge the social conventions of the time and the joke-joke-joke nature of comedy.
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