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Long before there was Bill Maher and Dennis Miller, there was a stand-up comic named Mort Sahl.

To call him a stand-up comic, of course, is a gross injustice, since when he first appeared on the nightclub scene in the early 1950s, performing at the hungry i in San Francisco, Sahl - Montreal-born but California-raised - revolutionized the comedic form.

He wasn't interested in cute observations about airline meals, mothers-in-law or family pets. What he was interested in - passionately - was the world at large, political events, the currents of state. Dressed in casual slacks and a V-neck sweater, he'd take a newspaper up on stage and use various stories to riff off the absurdities and criminal incompetence of our elites. A satirist in the Lenny Bruce mould, but without his sad excesses, or the cocaine and alcohol binges.

Sahl didn't tell jokes so much as he offered a form of lacerative comic analysis. Amazingly, he is still offering it. Eighty years old, sharp as a laser beam, he's now teaching a course in critical thinking in contemporary politics twice a week at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and appearing in clubs and theatres from time to time. Canadians will have a rare opportunity to see him this weekend, tonight in Montreal at Club Soda and tomorrow night in Toronto at the Leah Posluns Centre.

"Performing, that's the lifeblood," Sahl said in a recent interview. "I don't know how to keep alive without that."

This past June, Sahl's showbiz friends threw him a gala 80th birthday party. They all came out, in person or by video, including Maher, Richard Lewis, George Carlin, Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Jonathan Winters, Paula Poundstone, Harry Shearer, Bob Newhart, Albert Brooks, Woody Allen and Don Rickles. In August, he appeared at the Edinburgh Festival.

Sahl's humour has lost nothing of its bite. He ridicules the Democrats as the kind of people who "form a firing squad by standing in a circle, dismisses the Republicans by asking, "If you look at them, would you believe in evolution?"

George W. Bush? "I met George Bush once and he told me he had been reborn. 'Reborn?' I said. 'You were reborn and you came back as George Bush?' "

But he isn't always joking. About Bill Clinton, he said: "I thought he was an opportunist, a guy who'd do anything. He bombed civilians in Belgrade and sent cruise missiles into the Sudan. He never reined in the intelligence agencies."

During a career that has spanned six decades, Sahl appeared in five Broadway shows, wrote jokes for former presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, hosted the Academy Awards ceremony, wrote 18 screenplays and an autobiography, Heartland, and was the first humorist to make the cover of Time magazine (1960).

He was also the first performer to record a comedy album and, as a non-musician, win a Grammy; and the first to perform live comedy on college campuses.

But Sahl's career went into freefall when, disillusioned by the Kennedy administration, he began to take satirical shots at them. Nightclub owners cancelled his gigs, fearful that if they gave him a platform, they'd be subject to harassment by the IRS. Sahl's income plunged from the stratosphere to the low teens.

It grew worse. After Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Sahl became convinced that the president had been the victim not of Lee Harvey Oswald, but of a de facto coup d'état.

He dived into the case, then met and became deputized by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who was leading the investigation.

At the time, only a small minority of Americans doubted the truth of the Warren Commission, which, convened by Congress, had declared Oswald the lone gunman in Dallas's Dealey Plaza.

But Sahl took to reading sections from the commission's final report during his nightclub acts. He thought the material was funny. Audiences weren't so sure. He became a pariah. His regular spot on Ed Sullivan's variety show, where he had appeared 20 times, was suddenly cancelled. (Sahl was said to be the inspiration for Paddy Chayefsky's Howard Beale character in the 1976 movie Network.)

Kennedy, Sahl notes, was really the "last president to oppose war. After him, all the generals are green berets, the counterinsurgency guys. Garrison used to say to me the government liked to create hysteria. If you keep the people destabilized, you can get away with anything."

Of course, he notes, very few Americans today believe the Warren Commission's version of events.

"Now, no one in America believes anything the government says - even if it's accurate."

For information on this weekend's appearances contact Ticketpro (Montreal) or Ticketmaster (Toronto).

The sayings of Mort Sahl

Most people past college age are not atheists. It's too hard to be in society, for one thing. Because you don't get any days off. And if you're an agnostic you don't know whether you get them off or not.

A yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been

reviewed yet.

I met this girl ... very aggressively ... I just walked up to her and I said "Who are you? I have to know who you are." It's a good opener, but you can't sustain that level of excitement. Later on chicks start complaining the relationship doesn't have that much drive any more. You have to remind them, "I'm the guy who ran up and said 'Who are you?' " And they always say "Well, you never do that any more." And you have to say "Yes, and I still don't know who you are."

I took a course once called Statistical Analysis. And there was a guy in the course who used to make up all his computations and he never used sigma. He used his own initials. 'Cause he was the standard deviation.

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.

I took Benzedrine - I got clairvoyance. With Benzedrine you can have a very wide view of the world, like you can decide the destiny of man and other pressing problems, such as which is the left sock?

He was wearing a velvet shirt open to the navel. And he didn't have one. Which is either a show-business gimmick, or the ultimate rejection

of mother.

There were four million people in the Colonies and we had Jefferson and Franklin. Now we have over 200 million and the two top guys are Clinton and Dole. What can you draw from this? Darwin was wrong!

On Mel Gibson:

A perfect example of how you can go wrong if you love your parents.

On cosmetics:

There's so much Botox around now that you can't tell when a Jewish girl is angry.

On Michael Eisner:

Say what you will, he made the monorail run on time.

On Diane Sawyer:

If you're really having a run of bad luck, she walks with you in a field.

On Liberals:

God is watching us. If we support someone we don't believe in and say he's electable, then God will make sure he's not elected and hope we do better the next time.

About his ideology:

I'm not a liberal, I'm a radical!

About Richard M. Nixon:

Would you buy a used car from this man?

About Wernher von Braun:

He aimed for the stars and often hit London.

To Otto Preminger about his film Exodus:

"Otto - let my people go"

(reputed - referring to its 220-minute length)

Asked his motto:

If you can't join them, beat them.

If you maintain a consistent political position long enough, you will eventually be accused of

treason.

M.P.