The Secretary-General

The British have such a dead-keen sense of humor that they will burst into laughter on hearing that Prince Philip likes to call his wife "Sausage." Perhaps desperate for relief, penny-wise BBC-TV spent $10,000 last week to import Mort Sahl for a single telecast. Treating him on arrival as if he were an uncommitted king, BBC trotted out 30 London TV and drama critics to hear Sahl at a press conference, including the Observer's Kenneth Tynan, who, in a red sport jacket, sat cross-legged on the floor at the comedian's feet, like an elegant retriever.

Wandering about town for a week before his broadcast, Sahl ritually shopped for his daily toy (a $25 Mont Blanc pen, a $5,000 E-type Jaguar), once went out at 3 a.m. into the grey vacuum of the London night just to have a look at the outsized eagle atop the new U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square. Then, taping his show before an audience full of political rebels and comedians (Lord Boothby, Peter Sellers), Sahl warmed them up with a note on his visit to the House of Commons ("I thought the debates were a little mannered; no one used the mace"), acknowledged his introduction as "the next Secretary-General of the United Nations" and swung into his show.

Putting old targets into transatlantic context, he started in on Joseph P. Kennedy--"You may recall he was in the embassy here in charge of Edward R. Murrow"--and went on spraying in all directions: "Our cars are different. You know, clocks up front and in back--different time zones." Turning Soviet-American relations into a latter-day bestiary, he noted that "our dogs are affectionate and can fetch newspapers. Russian dogs don't show affection, but they are all engineers." Getting around to women, he reached for a rare pun, said: "Women are getting more and more materialistic, always looking for security. They are saying, 'This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.'

Then Sahl claimed that he had once taught college math, and, as a blackboard illustration of the differences between the exact and inexact sciences, "I drew a woman on a couch, and I explained to the class that in mathematics you moved across the couch and got the girl. In philosophy you never reached her; and in psychology, you discovered she wasn't the right girl for you anyway."

As for Sahl, he discovered that he was not for Britain. Telly viewers thought him too mild and too American. One critic complained that Sahl had not even made fun of cricket or British pubs--obviously two unforgivable omissions.

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