LOS ANGELES — Mort Sahl tosses his head back in delight upon being reminded that the elderly man calmly sipping his latte and commenting on the state of the world was once comedy’s angry young man.“Angry?” asks the 80-year-old Sahl, amusement registering in his deeply set but still-piercing blue eyes as he sits outside a sun-splashed Starbucks tucked deep into the Hollywood hills.

Disappointed in America maybe. Definitely heartbroken almost 44 years after John F. Kennedy, the young president he mocked publicly but admired privately, was cut down by an assassin’s bullets. But angry?

“Since I talked about social and political hypocrisy I guess that was considered angry,” he says now.

Then he adds with a wry smile, “I had a pretty good time along the way.”

He also helped break the mold for stand-up comedy, taking it from what actor-comedian Albert Brooks calls “the world of Henny Youngman and badda-boom” one-liners to a topical form in which comics suddenly began talking about things that mattered.

“Every comedian who is not doing wife jokes has to thank him for that,” says Brooks. “He really was the first, even before Lenny Bruce, in terms of talking about stuff, not just doing punch lines.”

When Sahl arrived on the comedy scene in the 1950s, he was clearly the hippest guy in the room, dressed in a V-neck sweater at a time when George Carlin, and everyone else, was still wearing a coat and tie.

“I remember seeing him on television at 12 or 11,” says comic Richard Lewis, another Sahl acolyte. “I didn’t know what to make of this guy. He was introduced as a comedian but he just seemed to look like a tennis pro.”

Pacing the stage like a caged lion, talking in a staccato, stream-of-consciousness voice that he sometimes punctuated with a nervous laugh, Sahl would keep the jokes on current events flowing rapid-fire as he held that day’s newspaper under one arm.

The decades that followed have turned Sahl’s thick, dark hair white and left his face lined and with a slightly frail look. But some things have remained constant, including the sweater and the newspaper, although he jokes that he’ll likely have to replace the latter with a laptop any day now.

The quick wit and the stream-of-consciousness delivery also remain, with Sahl flitting from one subject to another as he holds court with a couple old pals. He’s interrupted from time to time as admirers, including a few doing double-takes, stop by to offer a quick hello. Condoleezza Rice’s recent call for foreign fighters to leave Iraq suddenly pops into his head during a conversation on something else, and Sahl wonders aloud whether that means she wants the Americans to leave. Or does she simply not realise that in Iraq the Americans are the foreigners.

Then it’s on to President George W. Bush.

“He’s born again, you know. Which would raise the inevitable question: If you were given the unusual opportunity to be born again, why would you come back as George Bush?”

Such jokes have Sahl’s traditional liberal audience embracing him again after a few years of estrangement. During the Clinton years he was ostracised for castigating the president as having left behind as his only legacy an affair with “that woman” Monica Lewinsky.

Truth be told, Sahl’s humour has always targeted the powerful, whoever they were. He’s proud to have met — and made fun of — just about every president since Eisenhower.

He doesn’t list favourites, although he notes that he and Ronald Reagan became good friends. Richard Nixon, he says, liked being portrayed as a raving lunatic, once telling him that image intimidated other world leaders.

As for his own politics, Sahl shrugs and says he has remained what he was when he left the University of Southern California in 1950 with a degree in urban planning: “An independent, populist radical.”

Soon after college he began writing jokes for comedians, eventually taking to the stage himself.

“The comedians were so dumb they never understood the material,” he recalls with a laugh.

No one in the audience seemed to get it either until he arrived at San Francisco’s Hungry I in the mid-1950s.

“It had 75 seats. It cost a quarter to get in,” he recalled fondly. “I worked there for years and years.”

He became a star there, making the cover of Time Magazine in 1960.

Since then Sahl’s career has run hot and cold. He fell out of favour for several years when he became interested — some would say obsessed — with the Kennedy assassination and spent years helping the New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, investigate it. He still believes Kennedy’s killing was the result of a government conspiracy.

Sahl also suffered his own personal tragedy when his only child, Mort Sahl Jr., died at age 19. It’s a loss he can’t bring himself to discuss more than a decade later.

“My kid was like a more human version of me,” he says, voice trembling. “Great sense of humour.”

These days things are on an upswing. Jay Leno, Kevin Nealon, Bill Maher, Brooks, Lewis and numerous other comics are feting him with a June 28 tribute at Los Angeles’ Wadsworth Theater.