2276...Happy Birthday To You

If you are Mort Sahl.

Mr. Sahl, who was born in Montreal, is 83 this day.

If you haven't heard of him, don't worry. His career peaked around 1960. He was a precursor to people like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Richard Pryor, the holy trinity of comedy.

Mort is listed #40 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest standup comedians of all time.

Woody Allen has said, "I adored Mort Sahl," and added he would not have become a comedian himself if not for Sahl's example, which proved a comedian could succeed with off-hand intellectual material. He compared Sahl's influence on comedy to the effect Charlie Parker had on jazz. "I still find Mort Sahl funny," Allen said in 2008. "I was with him the other day, in California, and he’s 81 and he’s teaching at Claremont [McKenna] College. And he said they have a course out there that they offered him to teach, on the Holocaust, and he didn’t take it. He said, 'I wanted to see first how history judges the event.'"

WFDS