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• 139 • 5 AllLiesandJest H E F I R S T D A Y S and months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination were as unkind to political standup comedy as they were to the grieving nation as a whole. The First Family was removed from store shelves, as was a sequel, which had been released in the spring of 1963. The horrors in Dallas prompted the albums’ producers to call Cadence Records and ask that all unsold copies be returned to warehouses to be destroyed out of respect for the murdered president and his family. They were. Nightclubs were mostly empty the entire weekend of the assassination. On Broadway, where Mort Sahl had assailed the political establishment in The Next President more than five years before, theaters and restaurants went dark for days. Even the film industry was shaken. The official preview screening of Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s dark satirical film about thermonuclear Armageddon, was postponed, and worried film editors hastily dubbed over a coincidental off-color reference to Dallas made by Major T. J. “King” Kong, a B-52 pilot played by actor Slim Pickens, and replaced it with an allusion to Las Vegas instead. American show business deferred almost completely to the tragic spectacle in Texas and Washington, D.C., where the president’s state funeral captivated the country. In death as in life, Kennedy drew a crowd and got top billing. Variety, the entertainment trade weekly, estimated the cost of the television coverage of the murder and the funeral during the five days following the assassination to be $40 million.1 In New York, the only comedian to take the stage on November 22 was Lenny Bruce, who appeared before a muted audience at the Fox Theatre in lower Manhattan. Bob Booker, one of the creators of The First Family, caught his act a few days later as Bruce made his entrance, looked at the audience, and said, “Boy, did Vaughn Meader get fucked.”2 T • 140 • c h a p t e r f i v e Bruce’s remark was prophetic in several ways. Meader was devastated personally and professionally and never imitated Kennedy for profit again. He did attempt a comeback in January 1964 at the same club where he had launched his famous impersonation, but he foundered through an assortment of non-Kennedy material groping for laughs, without much success. “In the end,” said the critic from Time, “he . . . scored on about 35% of his shots.” Similar reviews from Newsweek and Variety ensured the early close of his act. Alcohol, cocaine, and heroin addictions followed, and although he made sporadic attempts to revive his career with a pair of comedy albums later in the decade and subsequent appearances as a country singer, nothing worked. Meader eventually returned to his home state of Maine, where he died in October 2004, largely forgotten.3 Bruce might have said the same thing about Mort Sahl. Sahl’s barbs at Dwight Eisenhower helped elect Jack Kennedy, but when he entered the White House, the new president became fair game. Sahl pursued the New Frontier in ways true to his iconoclastic tradition, criticizing policy, attacking the Bay of Pigs invasion, and ridiculing the Kennedys as America’s “royal family.” In what proved to be a haunting reference, Sahl claimed in 1961 that he could put to rest the rumor that Cubans were out to assassinate the entire Kennedy family: “Castro denied it, claiming they had insufficient ammunition.”4 As Kennedy’s popularity grew, Sahl’s began to decline, in large part owing to pressure from the administration, which further demonstrated the president ’s ambivalent response to being the object of the joke. Although Kennedy had once praised Sahl’s “relentless pursuit of everybody,” the comic’s refusal “to become court jester” to Kennedy ostracized him from the White House and the Democratic Party, which considered him a traitor to the president. After Kennedy’s victory, Sahl responded onstage to those who assumed that Kennedy’s election was what he wanted, saying, “You didn’t have to do it for me!” Old Joe Kennedy was incensed. Two years after encouraging Sahl to write material for his son, he issued an ultimatum through third parties that he stop performing material about him, promising to teach Sahl “the meaning of the word ‘loyalty.’” Even Sahl’s agent told him he resented the comments about the president, and while Vaughn...

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