So yeah, my name is Jake and we're gonna talk about smart contracts and in particular how to sort of detect what ether scan calls Internal transactions. This is notoriously hard sort of thing to do and we've heard from lots of people that it's challenging So we just wanted to kind of present our experiences with it issues We've seen and how to sort of handle these safely and how to prevent you from having similar sorts of problems in the future Like you said on the cryptocurrency team at coinbase. We are the team that runs our blockchain integrations for all the currencies hot Wallet cold storage sends receives. We're hiring if that's interesting to you. Just come talk to me afterwards So yeah, we'll get started though. And so who should care about this stuff? These are kind of the primary three we see here is like exchanges wallets and explorers The highest risk comes to exchanges, which we'll talk about but really matters for everybody And anybody, you know building on a theory and the reason is because if you're sort of accepting deposits of any sorts of Ethereum, there's different ways it can happen And so your primary responsibility is to take a transaction and sort of turn that into a set of Debits and credits to accounts or to update balances or whatever you're trying to do here And so if we take a transaction like this, we're gonna go here and you know inspect it and say, okay We should credit Alice one ETH and we do that But the risk here is, you know, what if that's not actually what happened, right? What if we shouldn't have credit as Alice's ETH and there's some sort of bug in our code? This is what comes up with contracts because it's not a straightforward thing to do And there's a lot of nuance to how to handle it. And so what this can lead to is a couple of different things Invalid data is sort of the first one here, right? Just having bad data showing a wrong account balance is Not ideal. It's not the worst, but it can lead to pretty bad experiences If somebody thinks they have 10 ETH and they try and send that and then it just consistently fails They might switch to a different wallet And if you have systems building on top of this, if it's some sort of API and you have downstream customers Then they're gonna get bad data and they're gonna have to update Accordingly their database and that's gonna be pretty challenging and there's not really good ways to handle that So you want to avoid this sort of as much as you can And like I said, the real risk is actually to exchange us here with lost funds because what they can do is this type of attack Where you send in Ether, but you don't really it just kind of looks like it you can trick the system And then they can sell that for some other currency and send it off somewhere else or they can You know just send off ether and in the exchanges cases a lot of them have pooled wallets where everybody's funds are together So if you send in and you send back out, it's probably not gonna be the same ether It's gonna be something different and so you can actually just steal a theory in that way and continue this until you know You're caught and So if you have these types of mistakes, this is the types of headlines you might see written about you It's it's not good if you see hacker one reports like this You also don't want to see these kinds of things and this is what we sort of saw at some point or in the year and Yeah, you don't want that and so what can go wrong here? And like how do we fix it to start that we need to talk about how a theory and moves So as I'm sure most of us are familiar with everything happens in a block Then you have a set of transactions and in those transactions a theorem can move But within the transaction it's not just one way you sort of have two different types here You've got what we can call account transfers It's just a standard transaction Sending from one account to another and you can also have this other bucket here Which is like contracts and contracts can be pretty clever things which we'll talk about here But the account transfers like I said are pretty straightforward This is what you'll see on ether scan and this is kind of what you'll get back from your like node If you're just asking hey give me a transaction It's gonna look a lot like this and calculating, you know, how much value went to where there's a from there's a to All that's pretty easy to do and there's not really much risk here If it says a transaction happened in this format it did and you're pretty good to go But where it gets complicated as contract transfers, they might look like this So now instead of you know, it's just sending to one user You can send to sort of n amounts of accounts and it scales up and then what's really sort of Difficult about these is that this is custom code people right So they have a lot of room outside of just what the protocol allows to trick you and to specifically target like issues in your system and You know pack you because of it. And so there's not a great API for this What you have to use is this API called the tracing API Which is fairly low level and not that easy to parse and it looks a bit like this You're not gonna be able to read it, but it's pretty complicated and this is actually a simple one This is you know, basically one of those sends where I showed like 10 in the previous slide So it gets more complicated. There's a lot of nuance here But if we started to think about inspecting these and seeing what it looks like if you zoom in you'll see like There's a from and a gas and a to similar to a transaction But if you were to take it and just treat this as such you'd be in for not a good time and So we're going over a few examples of here different types of problems that can happen and And the right ways to sort of handle this and so on this left side We have what we're gonna call traces here. There's different types of calls and we see one We send Alice one eith another to Bob and if we just turn that into credits and debits accordingly we would do that and The issue here is like I presented earlier It doesn't actually happen that way in this transaction and it's because we're missing something So not everything's gonna be on the slides here and we're gonna sort of bring those in over time And so in this case what you actually need to look at is this thing called the Transaction status, which we'll see here. So this came with an upgrade I believe last year I think of the Byzantium upgrade They added this new opcode and they also added the status to this thing called a transaction receipt And so when a transaction is including a block the blockchain will generate this thing called the receipt which tells you It's similar to like a store receipt. It's just you know Here's the final state of what happened And so if you didn't use all the gas or it failed for some reason that kind of information will be there And so in this case we see that the receipt is a failure And so what that means is actually none of the transfers that we might have that might have happened if it Didn't fail can actually happen or didn't happen and so accounting for that in this example We see here that nobody received any and we're good to go So for example to this is the same sort of scenario here Except we do see this thing that says fail on one of these calls And I didn't really describe the calls yet But a call is just this sort of it's this type of a trace There's different a few different types and so these sends are also calls But these ones are other ones that may just like call some function to you know log something or that doesn't actually transfer anything anywhere it's just you know calling a contract and so Generally, you might ignore these if you just care about sort of your customers information and So learning what we just learned we do check the transaction receipt status when we try and parse this and we see it's a success So we credit Alice and Bob And if if you sort of caught on from the previous example it didn't actually happen But what's interesting about this scenario is it's not that nobody received any it's that only some did So this transaction receipt status doesn't tell you everything There's this possibility of like a full failure where the transaction receipt is a failure But there's this partial failure states as well and these can get more complicated than this And so in this example what we really need to do when we're looking at these traces is turned it into a tree So it's actually if we can see this like hierarchy here We have this call at the root and then we have you know Alice receives one and then a few nested calls And then one of them is a failure and what this looks like in the trace is there's this thing called there's an error on it and If it has an error that means it failed and so when you put it into this tree format You can see that the send the Bob is actually within that part of the tree And when it's there what that means is that that doesn't actually happen and you shouldn't create any credits or debits And so accounting for that we give Alice the one ETH and we're good to go So the last example here looks entirely the same as the former one So there's even more here to kind of look at and so in this example if we did the same thing we credit Alice and then that's wrong and In this time Nobody should receive anything and So there's another thing missing here. So when we look at these calls, there's different types of calls There's not just one there's all sorts of different ones but in particular in this example, I'm using one called a Delegate call So we need to pick out the specific types of calls that can actually Transfer a theorem around and sort of either ignore the other ones or treat them differently And so in this case a delegate call Without going to sort of details of what exactly it does it looks identical to just sending a theorem somewhere except It doesn't actually do that and so in this example when we account for that We do see that Nothing happens So that was a little bit like how to handle these and it's a tricky thing and it could get more complicated in the future That's like it today, but a lot of really clever things are happening a lot of cool stuff People want to work on and it's really hard to get this right and these things aren't that documented either and so we got to figure out a way that even if we don't know the answer, how do we sort of Make sure we're not exposing ourselves to these issues because if you've been in many of the talks today So many of them are based around contracts right identity and all sorts of things are just contracts sending everywhere And so you have to be able to support these but many exchanges or many wallets Don't because of the complexity around this and because of the risk in particular to exchanges of getting like hacked and actually losing money And so the kind of answer here is this type of sort of detection and response And the first step of that is just acknowledging that you don't know everything Things are going to change and especially if you're working with multiple blockchains and multiple currencies That kind of stuff is just some of it's gonna slip by some little note in a release notes of some upgrade of your software Is going to change something and you may not realize it And so you just want to take a step back and say, you know, I might not know everything if you don't well Like how do you do this? Like how do you make an answer here? And so one way to do this is sort of cross-check your data But there's a lot of people building there's a lot of people you can talk to about this But really if you can automate this that's sort of the ideal here if you can cross-check your data and say Oh, well, I think this happened and then this other thing says it doesn't and it's a source you trust Then maybe you shouldn't do that. And so what you should do there is Actually like fail securely so rather than failing like open and letting some sort of payment go through and you know Credit an account and allow that to be hacked just set it aside Like put it in a queue alert somebody on your team They can investigate it and see what's going on and then they can determine if it's actually a bug or if it's not And so this is actually this is the kind of stuff We've done now and it's actually really helpful even outside of this like since we've implemented we actually haven't seen anything like this and But what we have seen is just little things being off here and there You know some calculation of a balance is slightly wrong or some type of send we didn't so or some type of receive we didn't support And it's just like oh it's off and it's like cool It's like it's alert just that something's wrong and we get to go in and fix it and figure out why and improve our systems Without ever affecting any of our customers, which is even even better that you get alerted of things that are wrong You're just like oh cool. I can fix that and so We'll kind of put things in a takeaways here and sort of sum all this up So the first step is check the receipt status. It's it's easy to check. There's apis for this. It's a Boolean field You know, it's true false. Basically. It's numbers, but So just check that if it says it failed then Not all the transfers happened the nuance here is like you do still pay for the gas here Like failed transactions are still included in blocks because somebody had to execute it all the miners and nodes You need to execute the transaction to the failure to validate it. So it still costs like resources So even though it failed you still need to check it and they still do actually pay the gas for it but but none of the transfers and The second one here is to parse the trace as the tree It's there's information in the way the trace is formatted and the traces I sort of showed here that I'm describing or parodies get has a tracing API like this to now But it's it's they're not the same. It's not a standardized thing And so you need to reference sort of gas documentation for how it works there I imagine it's similar, but you need to take this flat list They they provide you and sort of structure it into some sort of tree and then once you do that you can inspect These sort of aired sub trees and you like filter them out or mark them failed or you know, whatever you want to do there Thirdly we want to reject these like delegate and call code calls These are two different types of ones that kind of look like they transferring things in but they actually don't and Then if you if you kind of take the the earlier point about failing safely here What you really should do here is actually just select the ones you know do it So this is similar if there's an upgrade you don't know about if there's some sort of change At least you know these ones work I didn't mention these other ones, but these are like creators for creating contracts self-destruct for destroying one and Rewards for like block awards. These are the kind of things that can you know credit Ethan like other ways or like send it and so you just if you select those and handle those cases Appropriately, you know, you're sort of at least reasonably safe and then if you implement this next point Don't trust until verified right verify your data check with other sources You don't have to like trust it completely, but at least it's sort of a signal that something's wrong Right, don't just take that and write it to your database. You're like, that's the truth But what you should do is at least look at it and be like all right Something's weird here and also if you're getting a lot of false positives, you know, maybe pick some other source And yeah, that's it for today So I hope you all stay safe out there and hope everybody we learned something here and we've got I think Some time for questions about four minutes. So if you have any


What I'm going to be talking about today is sort of like a culmination of a lot of conversations between people in sort of the Ethereum community and the Falcom community And we have sort of been working in the intersection of those two communities for a long while But today I'm going to be talking about really how we can scale coordination Using some of the tools are starting to come out of the crypto ecosystem All right, so one one thing if you remember back in 2014 There's this thing going on with people were forking Bitcoin and creating different sorts of blockchains because they wanted to play around with different sort of features maybe they wanted to have like a naming system or Experiment with some other sort of proof of work for doing something useful or sort of experiment with sort of Company shares and sort of proto defi as you haven't bit shares Or just like for for the walls like door scoring And Then there was this insight by the Ethereum community to create like hey We can actually not make a new blockchain for everything because it's very difficult and takes a lot of time Can we just like make it the whole system programmable and and that's sort of like the history of like how Ethereum was born And this has brought us a lot of really cool stuff and we've been able to like sort of do things on chain do sort of various forms of Coordination and collaboration with capital, but we haven't really been able to like massively scale collaboration Like have really big online communities all working together to solve some sort of big issue And I think some of the problems with this is that we haven't been really figured out how we can do fair distribution of tokens We have done some airdrops, but it's sort of like Not the best mechanism we've figured out yet, but we have been able to actually have doubts that have Sort of accrued large Treasuries and have a lot of capital that they can deploy But the problem in these doubts is that we have not a good way to sort of distribute them and We sort of have this bottleneck where we have to vote on consensus on everything or have like sub-douse but it's like still and efficient and Every contribution you as like a kind of immunity member will always be siloed to like one particular Dow Because you maybe apply it for a grant or something like this You also have the problem of like predictability If you think about how Bitcoin emerged in the whole sort of crypto industry There was this sort of Bitcoin block reward and everyone sort of like coordinated about the predictability of like hey I know how many bitcoins is gonna be in the future and so I can invest in my mining company or my exchange company or whatnot But you don't really have that in in if you're starting a Dow So what can we do well There is sort of like a new movement of sort of approaches to try to figure out how we can do more sort of larger scale fair distributions And I think of these as sort of like contribution graphs. So here I have some examples Source credit was like an early one that looked at Contributions in GitHub and some sort of online forums coordinate is like a system where you can attribute sort of a weighted score to all of your sort of People you work with in a community Govern is sort of like this tool that allows you to say what you contributed and then as test to what other people contributed And other examples like praise by give it snapshot also like does this like graph and sort of off-chain data Puts it on chain info queues like a github thing and also like web 2 communities are doing this sort of things Just one giant lab is doing sort of a community-based peer review system but all these are sort of like Trying to build some particular feature on this contribution graph And I think what we're missing is that we can actually do the same sort of move as Ethereum did but for a programmable contribution graph And so that's that's what I'm gonna be diving deeper into now And so I think that the first building blocks for this is something called an impact evaluator So I learned about this like like maybe three weeks ago And it's a really cool concept that basically allows the community to do of contributors to have some sort of shared objective measure that and reward it and do that sort of like in an automatic fashion and so the Sort of basic example of this is the Bitcoin block reward But you can in theory like run this over any sort of Data, I think the contribution graph is like probably the most Interesting way to do this over so you measure the world you evaluate it and distribute some reward And you can actually if you do this I would like some sort of set function You can have like a the same sort of predictability as you have in in a Bitcoin block reward And so this a few things to think about when I'm building this sort of system one Is sort of how we reward people who are? Using the system so one could be to sort of distribute a new token and that could be sort of like a Distribution curve like the Bitcoin use you can think of that sort of like as a fair launch We can do sort of like the same thing, but we govern and shares So if you're familiar with the Moloch dial framework, it's basically allows you to have shares in the dial But not be able to transfer them or you could have some sort of treasury that you disperse as well As you disperse from a Dow or from a personal treasury or from some some company and Then the second piece we need to figure out is where to store this contribution graph where to store the data and the contributions and so This is where ceramic come in the protocol that I've been working on So it's so the centralized protocol for composable data Essentially what that means is that it allows developers to create data models and build applications based on these data models And then anyone can sort of compose and use these data models in their application And so the data is like open and not locked in and There's a few features that makes ceramic really good for like as a base data layer for these impact evaluators And so the main thing is that all data on ceramic is verifiable What this means is that is time-stamped. It's actually time-stamped into the blockchain. So we have like a tamper proof Time-stamped that no one can sort of alter all actions taken by users are sort of a hash-linked log and they're specific for that user So you can sort of synchronize the entire data set and It's stored in IPLD so you can't like modify it without that being noticeable And the most important aspect is that the data is attributable so you can see which user Made which sort of added which data so you can see like who did what essentially? And so this is of course a force to Enforced by cryptographic public key signatures and and these these Attributions are tied to your Ethereum address or your falcon address or whatever other blockchain address It's like tied to actually an address that can receive rewards. And of course if we have this sort of Data layer that can also be replicated using using peer-to-peer networking Right, so so what sort of applications are useful when we're thinking about these impact evaluators I think I think any sort of data any sort of application that you can imagine could actually feed into a mechanism like this So some use like top of mind would be like project management Dealing like planning and stuff like that doing task tracking opening and closing issues Maybe have like a personal contribution Log or evaluations of contributions. It's also interesting. I think one thing that we probably want to move to verifiable Data structures as soon as possible is are sort of like Dow governance forums where right now they're run by Some guy that just like has a server somewhere and sort of like it's run by the community But you know the person who runs the server could probably like change what people are saying and things like that because all day there's not like attributable and And signed by the people in the community Another thing that I'm super excited about and especially if we can make these impact evaluators reward distribution Roar payout reports to people contributing is knowledge graphs So basically representing different sorts of knowledge and sort of scientific discourse in in these sort of like attributable verifiable data graphs Then another thing that's important if we are to build these impact evaluators is that we need some sort of trust seed we need some sort of root of trust that We can base the evaluations upon because otherwise we would be sort of You could do a civil attack on the system and you create a bunch of sort of bogus data that might be hard to distinguish But programmatically So you probably want to start with some some root trust the cool thing though is that If you're familiar with like quadratic funding and what get kind is doing they have this sort of passport thing And the passport is actually already stored on ceramic So you can potentially pull that in this like an additional simple resistance mechanism here And so let's start. So if you remember the impact evaluator function, it first looks at the world So let's define what the world is I Think it's roughly like this. So we have data apps on ceramic So it's a set of data models that is imported into the evaluation of the function and basically the data sets define what the Sort of rewardable actions are in in the system and it's sort of like up to the function to define How to distribute the rewards based on like what's in there? We have this trust seed which is this sort of root of trust in the contribution graph, which I just mentioned Then we probably want to feed in what happened in the previous round So we have basically the previous rewards in as an input to our function And this provides us with like an feedback signal that allows us to the system to like sort of understand what's going on Finally, we probably want to import other sorts other data sources as well And here it's important that it's not just some random data of the internet that we don't can't really verify We probably more care about like the state of some smart contract of Ethereum or something similar Where we can sort of trustlessly verify that that was actually the data that and the state of the system And so the impact evaluator function based on what we've talked about would basically look like this you have an input which is a DAG or list of CIDs of Ceramic data so data and ceramic as I mentioned is stored in IPLD We have this trust seed which is basically is the list of accounts and we have the previous rewards And the previous rewards is most likely something we want to store as a miracle tree So we can do some sort of like miracle drops on chain, which is sort of just like an efficient way of distributing doing sort of like air drops on chain and then the the return of this function should probably just like be an updated miracle tree of rewards and Potentially include like an updated list of this trust seed that I mentioned Okay, so cool. Now we have this sort of function. We can evaluate it But how do we actually bring the results on chain? Well, there's sort of three different approaches, right? So one is an oracle either we trust someone completely or we have some sort of like semi trusted tokenomics based Oracle system And of course, this is like the least secure Approach, but it's sort of like the most easy to get started with approach and there are sort of cool ways cool things since data is verifiable ceramic if we have some sort of like Court system there's this sort of clear us and there are other lurks of on-chain court system that oracles can like dispute to The judges in this court system can actually run the computation for themselves locally and sort of be informed of how to sort of What they should vote for in this case Better yet is to have some sort of verification game. So fraud proofs essentially that's what optimistic roll-ups use That's what true bit use Uses The problem with these is that they're very complicated to implement And so it probably take a lot of effort I think the most ideal thing is probably to have some sort of trustless proof like a certain knowledge proof where We can just like compute a proof over this and put the proof on chain And then we can sort of just like we don't need to trust that the computation was done correctly We can see it by the proof However, doing this over sort of large computations and like an arbitrary language is not super straightforward Um, there are some some efforts like lurk and ck wasm. There are looks promising, but they're probably like Ways out still Okay, so what would actually an mvp look like of a system like this? Um, I think we can do it fairly straightforward Sort of make relying on uh, well, I just go through it. So we have this set of contributors They do their contributions which get written into ceramic Then we want to compute the impact evaluator function. And so essentially a developer has written this function and they sort of deploy it to to summer and They run it over the ceramic data. This could be run in something like back layout, which is the It's like a computer over data system that operates on sort of ipfs filecoin data The output of the function could be a merkle tree that's compatible with something called astro drop Which is essentially a way to have an updatable air drop On ethereum on dvm And then we want to put the results on chain. Uh, we can do this to so a lot of those are already using nosesafe so it's probably like a sort of safe bit and nosesafe has this reality module Which essentially is an oracle that in the end ends up in the claros sort of on-chain court Once the this this route is on chain The community of contributors they can choose to claim their rewards whenever they want. So Maybe they do a bunch of contributions to claim words later or claim them early But yeah, this is essentially what what sort of like an mvp could look like All right, so now that we've seen that what's actually the next steps here well We're putting together a grant so Ceramic together with the buck layout team are going to have a shared grant up very soon And the goal of this grant is to build sort of out the mvp of impact evaluators And once we have this mvp there The hope is that anyone can program any sort of impact evaluator that they like over any sort of contribution graph and I think one of the first things that We want to do is actually build an impact evaluator that evaluates How good or evaluates contributions to the impact evaluator framework itself And impacts how useful the the impact evaluator framework is to the rest of the community So basically turning the feedback loop back on itself So we hope that can actually accelerate a lot of these efforts and finally of course like People contributing Useful data sets to ceramic in general will not only be useful to impact evaluators But the ceramic network in general. So that's something that is likely going to get to work as well If you're interested in this, please join our chat at Discord and we have an impact evaluator channel there so you can get involved Yeah, thank you everyone Did we have time for questions? Hi, thank you for the presentation. It was really nice. I'm very curious about what would if you have any thoughts on Use cases where this would be easier to implement because I assume the step of moving from a contribution in the real world to Putting data on on on ceramic would be hard for some use use cases like deforestation or because you need to have some trust on How good these records I'm seeing are how how truth How truthful it is. So I'm wondering if you have like any thoughts on use cases where that is not an issue and so it's just a piping that Needs to be done. Yeah, I think I think that most of the use cases that are actually interesting are sort of these subjective use cases where someone Makes a contribution that's basically a claim that like, hey, I did this thing and it's useful for this cost And then someone else would like evaluate that and like say, yeah, that was really good or that was not so good And that's sort of like the approach that we have seen in in some of these like early Use case specific things where it's based on sort of the contribution graph and it's rooted in a set of initial Sort of participants in the community so they sort of like have the ability to How do you say like Direct the attention of this community based on what's actually helpful to the community if that makes sense Yeah, so you sort of have some Evaluators that say, okay, this is good or this is bad Yeah, and you can sort of think of the the sort of emergence of this system as like There is an initial group that's sort of like evaluating other people's work But then you can think of it as like this emergent web of trust where If if the initial group actually Sees that a bunch of people's contributions are very very useful And these people that initially did a bunch of useful contributions might also be able to evaluate other people's work So it's not like there's a committee or something like that of evaluators, but it's actually dynamic and gross over time Thank you Hey Joe super super interesting. I'm Andreas. Um, I'm uh, a co-founder of legacy. I'm going to actually talk one after that So I'm not going to spoil the beans But one of the things we look at is to have essentially a data to govern our system All right And what we want to do is not have that driven by how much equity or how many tokens you have in a doubt We don't want to have it One person wrote right because it could be millions of people involved and that becomes unmanageable. And so the thinking is to basically Give out voting tokens By people who qualify and the way you qualify is by making meaningful contributions All right, I think what what would you just explain here would be sort of Exactly the the approach of of doing that Um And and I think the the biggest challenge I see is is in step one, right? How how do you measure all right and Yeah, if you have sort of a semi-formal system, you know, like github or so, you know, then You know, you have a you have a starting point, but uh, you know if if it's If it's different kind of contributions, right? um I mean Well, maybe the question is, you know, how Have you looked at different types of metrics for different types of contributions? At this point in time or is that still a research question for you? Yeah, so sort of what I want to achieve and do here is The the realization is that there is already like a bunch of projects have started exploring the space of Of these different things and different ways of evaluating um How we distribute rewards and so the sort of the goal of this this effort here Is to create a general programmable framework for anyone to start like permissionously is like create a new way of evaluating contributions over An existing graph or over a new graph of information uh, so so sort of like What yeah, what we're trying to achieve here is make the the framework And then allow a community of people to just like hey, I want to build an evaluated 4x and then build that but have that be within sort of like Um This framework that anyone can plug into if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, so the other question I have is if you know One of the dangers I see is for example, if you have Airbnb, right? I mean the host is doing a review and the guest is doing a review Right and and there seem to be the tendency You know, you don't see you really say anything really bad and they don't say anything bad So it's sort of all one warm fuzzy happy family And and you don't really get to Will criticism in that way or so you don't really do a true evaluation Uh, wouldn't be the danger here too. And how do you would get around that? That's something you have been thinking about Yeah, I think it's a good question. I think I think the way we sort of get around it is that We can have multiple evaluator functions running over the same data distributing like two different tokens, right? So you have this Airbnb sort of Review system and then there's like Airbnb one and Airbnb two that's like Is doing different evaluations since there's like competing networks over the same sort of data graph And so I think I think that's like how we can have sort of a more balanced view on what's going on All right, thanks so much. Thank you


James Curtis is the author of W.C. Fields, a biography which was awarded the Special Jury Prize by the Theater Library Association and named one of the notable books of the year by the New York Times. He's also the author of William Cameron Menzies, The Shape of Films to Come, Spencer Tracy, a biography, James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, and Between Flops and Acclaimed Biography of Writer-Director Preston Sturgis. His new book is entitled Last Man Standing, Mort Saul and the Birth of Modern Comedy. Thank you for doing this, James. You're in Brea, California today? Yeah, that's a, it's a suburb of Disneyland. All of America's a suburb of Disneyland. That's how we ended up with Trump. Yes, that's true. Full disclosure, James. I'm obsessed with Mort Saul. I thought I knew everything about Mort until I read Last Man Standing, Mort Saul and the Birth of Modern Comedy. It came out last month. It's a masterpiece. Go buy this book. You will learn so much not just about Mort Saul but where modern stand-up came from. My first date was to go see Mort Saul. I was 16 years old and I took a young lady at the age of 16 to Danger Fields to see Mort Saul. Oh, New York. Yeah. I was obsessed and still am obsessed with Mort Saul. I can remember going to the library when I started doing stand-up. I would go to the library in Berkeley. I moved to Berkeley to do stand-up and I would just go to the stacks and look up old newspaper articles about Mort. I'm going to pretend I don't know who Mort is for the benefit of a new generation of comedy fans. Before I start asking you questions, I want to thank you for the book. Thank you. Well, no, thank you. It's seriously. No, no, thank you. Thank you. No, no, no. Seriously. I'm obsessed with Mort. I wasn't sated, but what you did is you have made me go back and listen to my Mort Saul albums. I was thrown out of my house four years ago for this divorce and I took very few things with me. But I took my Mort Saul albums and I haven't even unpacked them. I started listening to my Mort Saul albums and on YouTube you can find Mort Saul. He is a miracle of democracy and show business. Why did you pick Mort Saul? Well, let's see. I feel I've always had very good luck in terms of the quality of the subjects that I've been able to work on and Mort continues in that tradition. I've always been fascinated by Mort and I always thought that he merited a biography. It's a unique story, unique Americans, uniquely American story, I guess I should say. And so I considered it for years, kind of talked myself out of it on a couple of occasions because I had always done long deceased subjects and I was a little intimidated by doing a living one. But in this particular case it worked out well and I'm happy to have done it. I first discovered him in 1966 here in Los Angeles when he had a TV series on KTTV, the local Metro media outlet out here. It was kind of an early version. Well, Seven Nights a Week, KTTV had what you could call controversial talk shows at 11 o'clock. They ran for 90 minutes. Tonight's the week you got Joe Pine, if you remember him. Lewis Lomax, who was the Black Joe Pine at that time. Regis Philbin did it for a while, Melvin Belli. And on Friday night they gave that slot eventually to Mort and he came in and started to do a 90 minute talk show each week. And I just found him fascinating in the very first. Mort's show was canceled due to bad ratings. Then what happened? Then what happened was they found, well, first of all, there was a tremendous groundswell of protest. There was a listenership that was absolutely rabid and they took up arms figuratively speaking and proceeded to inundate the station, the station management with correspondence mail as we knew it back then. And then miraculously they found another set of ratings that showed that Mort's numbers were actually better than they had thought. He was a hit. He was a huge hit. He was a hit. And what happened was after a short period of time at 90 minutes, Mort took on a little troop of comedy sketch artists. He was kind of a very early prehistoric version of Saturday Night Live and they would perform topical sketches with the week's news and people like Pat McCormick and Anne Elder who were part of that. Lily Tomlin's partner, Anne Elder. Mark London and Jack Riley. And these guys were all poverty stricken at the time and probably worked for Nixon no money. And they were so impoverished. Anne Elder told me that they had to write out their material on the backs of your shirt cardboards, the sorts of things when you had your shirts come back from the laundry that they were packaging. Cardboard and they'd save this cardboard and write out their scripts on it. And they proceeded to, with Mort, I think establish a new standard for creativity in local television out here. And it was the place to be for a while. It was really a remarkable show. In your book Last Man Standing, Mort saw the birth of modern comedy. You interview Anne Elder. She went on to work with Lily Tomlin when countless Emmys, she said that Mort was very easy to work for, very encouraging of comedy writers. That's true. And that's easy to believe too. I don't think she's just telling me that. I think that Mort was very accepting of other writers and talents in his sphere and I think it made for a better program. I mean, if he had been hostile to what they were doing, it wouldn't have worked. As it was, they were a big family and they were doing a lot of important stuff together. And I think that came over the airwaves and I think that's what I responded to at such an early age. You said to me before we started the interview that Mort was a tough cell. He's been a tough cell since the early 60s. I want to talk about his history. I want young people to buy your book, learn about the origins of stand-up comedy. There is no modern stand-up comedy without Mort. Although my... I don't think there is. Yeah. What year did Mort start doing stand-up comedy and where did he start? He started in December of 1953 at the Hungry Eye, which was in North Beach in San Francisco. And who owned the Hungry Eye? Enrico Benducci, who was a restaurateur, very flamboyant character. Trademark was wearing a beret at old times, which I think he did to the very end of his life. And the Hungry Eye was in the basement of a Flatiron building on Columbus, which cuts right through the center of North Beach. The building is still there. It's known by Francis Ford Coppola. Beautiful building. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's a Zotro building. I don't think it was quite in the state of repair back then it is today, but in the basement of that particular building was the Hungry Eye and it was a little kind of thrown together night spot. Mold wine is what they served at the bar. And so... And like... And this is a pattern that Mort encountered throughout his early career was it was strictly a music venue until Mort was brought in. Actually, Mort was next to poverty himself at the time. And he was brought in to cover a week when the featured singer was away during Christmas season. And Mort just got up there and started to try to figure out how to put across what he had in his head about a new kind of commentary, a new kind of social satire. And it wasn't a lot of politics early on. But if you think about that period, the top comedians of the day on television, you had people like Jackie Gleason and Milton Berle, of course. And if you saw somebody in a nightclub or a live theater or some sort, they were typically in a tuxedo or otherwise dressed to the nines.  And so Mort didn't traffic in that stuff. He didn't have the Catskills in Doctrination, if you will. And so he had a completely different line of reasoning, a completely different way of presenting himself. And he said very early on, I got to thinking what kind of character would ruminate on this sort of material. And he came up to the graduate student persona and... Was he a graduate student? Was he a graduate student? Did he go to college? Did he go to college? He has a degree in civil engineering from USC. And he started to do advanced studies and kind of walked away from it at some point. And when he was up in Berkeley, he was essentially there because his girlfriend had gone up there and he followed her. And so he was kind of a vagrant around town at that point. They had all my coffee shops and the like. And he would hang out where... He was always kind of a nocturnal character. And so he would hang out and debate people and kind of hone what he had to say in his own particular peculiar way. And that's what was put forth at the Hungry Eye. It was December 22nd, 1953. The mythology about Mort is he came to the Hungry Eye fully formed on that night. He was living in Berkeley. Where did he get his comedy chops?  Well, it was... There was a little bit ahead of that, but it wasn't professional. He was kind of a roadie for Stan Kenton earlier on. Who was Stan Kenton? Who was Stan Kenton? Stan Kenton was one of the great West Coast band leaders of the swing era. And he had a kind of following all his own. Stan Kenton was very loud, very brassy on talking in terms of his music. He was a very bombastic piano player. And Mort appreciated the idea that he was all out.  And he really was the leader of the West Coast jazz movement in the 40s and late 30s. And he had a number of people, personnel with his band that went on to great solo careers, including his vocalist, Anita O'Day, originally June Christie after that. So, Stan Kenton was a tremendously influential guy. And Mort just had a bad case of hero worship. So occasionally, Stan Kenton, Stan Kenton could fill the palladium, 6,000 people on a Saturday night. And occasionally, he would allow Mort if it was arrangeable to go up on stage when the band took their break and he tried to make more impression. But this is not paid gig. Okay. So Mort, his analog for an open mic was before the hungry eye, he was a roadie for Stan Kenton. And then Stan let him get up on stage. So he got his comedy chops working for swing and jazz audiences basis. Yeah, that's it. He and Lenny Bruce, both of the Lenny Bruce at the time was working strip clubs and was doing a fairly conventional act. Lenny Bruce was doing movie parodies and imitations, that sort of thing. So it was the example that I think Mort set that inspired Lenny Bruce to push the envelope in his own direction. What was Mort thinking as a roadie for Kenton and getting up? Did he have aspirations of being a nightclub comic? I'm not sure he was that it was an idea that was fully formed in his mind at that time. He he loved the music. And he had a peculiar way of looking at things, a distinctive way of looking at things. And he was very articulate. He could fascinate people with the way he spoke and what he had to say how he put things. And that's true to this day. And it's hard to say where that came from. You know, at a certain point, it just becomes a certain level of genius that he was able to put things the way that he did. He came out of no established pattern of any sort. There's nobody that really predates him. Before Mort's Hall, your stereotypical stand-up comedian was Henny Youngman, someone like that. Nobody dared delve deeply into the political minutiae that Mort got into, primarily because it was the early 50s and it was considered dangerous. You didn't get up on stage and knock Senator Joseph McCarthy. Comics, you know, watch other comics. You know, at first, for lack of a better word, they steal the cadences and the rhythms and the areas of their comedic heroes before they find their own style and voice. I know that Mort is the Steve Wozniak of modern stand-up. He's a god, but he did not spring fully formed. There had to be somebody besides jazz musicians who he was getting his rhythms from. Was there some kind of underground intellectual circuit that he pulled from? Were there any comedians? There are no comedians, really. The people that he told me that he listened to on radio in the late 40s, besides Stan Ken, were Henry Morgan, were Herb Schreiner, and he also remembered back to the days of Will Rogers when he was a kid. Who turned out to be an anti-Semite, according to your book. Well, that's Mort's judgment. I don't think it's necessarily as simple as that. But I think that where Mort came from was a result of the reading he did, was a result of the people he hung out with, was a result of what he heard on radio, what he heard in the media. But there was no particular comedian who did exactly what he did. The irreverence, I can pretty much trace back to Henry Morgan, of course. The casual way of ruminating on subjects of significance, you could say, came from Herb Schreiner to some degree who was a latter-day Will Rogers type. But I do think that a lot of the delivery was influenced by the music that he carried in his head and was not a musician himself, but he had such a wonderful appreciation for it. And where the notes hit in a musician's ear, that's where the words hit from Mort. And I think that how Mort was able to ingratiate himself with the musicians and in effect become accepted as one of them made a tremendous amount of sense when it came to how he developed, how he formed, and also how he was able to essentially strike out and set up a network of clubs around the country that were strictly music venues until he came in. His style, if I go back and listen to his albums, he takes a theme like a jazz musician and then goes as far away as he possibly can from that theme until right before, on the precipice of losing the theme and then he goes back to it. That's what a jazz combo does and that's what he does in a live performance. He tells some kind of story about something and ventures as far away as he possibly can from what he was talking about then brings it back. So he learned that I would assume being around great jazz musicians. Did he play an instrument? No, no. He had no chops in that respect at all. He couldn't play, he couldn't sing, but he appreciated the stuff and they appreciated him. His entrepreneurial spirit, you say in the book and you just said it that he was smart enough to know that he couldn't play mainstream clubs, maybe Mr. Kelly's in Chicago and eventually the Playboy Club for Hugh Hefner, but for the most part he gravitated to specifically jazz rooms. That's true. That's smart business sense, right? He knew that. The hungry eye was essentially a folk venue when Mort went in there. All of these cases without exception were music exclusively policy rooms until Mort came in. That's true of Mr. Kelly's. That's true of the Blue Note. That's true of the hungry eye. It's true of Storyville in Boston. It's true of Basin Street East in New York City. It was true of the Crescendo in Los Angeles and the interlude above the Crescendo. All of these places without exception were strictly musical venues until he came in for the first time. In each case it was considered a risk on the part of the proprietory to bring someone like him in as a category that was known at the time if you went into the record stores, spoken word, but Mort had this unique appeal to the audiences that sought out and appreciated the music. That's the connection that he forged. That's the connection he forged in setting up that informal network of clubs. Once he had done that, then that same network is available to Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The other exponents of the so-called smart comedy movement, mothers, brothers, Woody Allen, etc. The first label that he was recorded on, you say, was Verve? Verve, correct. He brought Shelley Berman in, and he brought Jonathan Winters in, and Shelley Berman ended up recording his first album, his first comedy album, which I'm trying to think that was recorded at the Hungry Eye. I can't remember now, called Inside Shelley Berman, was a tremendous hit. It sold in the tens of thousands, and he underwrote by his sales a lot of musicians that Norman Grant's recorded at Verve that could not have been recorded otherwise. Some definite money-losers, but great albums on the left. Yeah, and Shelley Berman. So for a period, comedy was keeping jazz alive. That's true. That's true. That's interesting. Well, you know, one of the interesting things, because I interviewed Shelley Berman for the book, and he started in Chicago, and he, like Mort, did not work the Catskills. That was not his thing. He did not have that burden. He did not have that influence, which was great for him. But what I realized about Shelley Berman and what got emphasized to me was that Shelley Berman didn't come as a stand-up comic or as a comic that was going to get up in front of audiences and do routines as he did, finally. But he was rather gifted to a Shakespearean actor. And when he was first there in Chicago, discovering Mort, he was with the Compass Group. It was a provisional comedy group, and as were Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And so Shelley Berman's evolution to the point where he could get up in front of an audience by himself, in part came because he saw the example of Mort Saul in Chicago at Mr. Kelly's. Mort, is it fair to say, was the first comic with a college degree? Could be. I don't know, I don't, I haven't surveyed everybody's CV to see if they all came forth without college. Did Henry Morgan go to college? I'm not sure. No, he didn't. I knew Henry Morgan. He was a big influence on me. And I have a watch that Henry gave me, which I use to get backstage to meet Mort every couple of years. I have a watch that Henry Morgan gave me and Mort lets me in backstage. So he influenced Woody Allen, which I want to get to. But first, when I started doing comedy, the rap against Mort was he didn't like most stand-up comedians. And if you listen to his old albums and his current stuff, you can understand because while Mort invented stand-up comedy, he's really not doing stand-up comedy. He's doing these professorial jazz riffs that are more spoken word than they are stand-up. What I didn't know until I read your book was that he did support comics with Verve. He was the one who brought a lot of people along with him early on in his career. Yeah. Shelly Berman told me that he would never have gotten to where he was without Mort's example and Mort's encouragement. If you ask Woody Allen, if he would have become a performer without Mort's example and influence, he said, absolutely not. It's 100% true, he told me that it was Mort's example that convinced him that he should do it for himself. Did you interview Woody Allen? Yes, I did. And if Woody Allen had never been a performer, I doubt that he would have ended up being the filmmaker that he is today. I know that Woody says Mort changed his life. Yeah, and he said there was nothing else like it when he had seen it for the first time.  Was Mort in the military? Yeah, yes he was. He tried to get in during World War II, and he was in the Air Force. He tried to get in during World War II, and he was too young, which didn't stop him. He got in a couple of times. In one case his mother retrieved him before he got too far. He had kind of a five o'clock shadow when he hit puberty, and so he looked a little older than he actually was. I asked him one time where he was when he learned that Pearl Harbor had been hit. He said it was in the billion-dollar theater on South Broadway in Los Angeles in the afternoon. He remembered the band leader coming up on stage and telling the audience what had happened. He remembered going out to the street afterwards. I said, what was your action? He said I went out and tried to enlist. I tried to enlist. He tried to enlist, and he was 14 years old at the time. But he did serve in the military. Did he serve overseas during Korea? Did he see any actions? No, no. This was just after the end of the war, 46 when he got in. He was there for a year. He was sent up to Alaska ultimately where he got himself in a lot of trouble. He put out a very irreverent base newspaper called Poop from the group. He antagonized the commanding officer to the point where he did some record number of days of KP as a result of that. It was not a happy experience for him, but boy he was gung-ho during the war. He saw the great military movies of that period. He was a tremendously successful figure in ROTC. He won an Americanism award one time from the American Legion during the war. This was at USC? No, this is before USC. This was when he was in high school. He went to Belmont up on the hill above Los Angeles. He had an ROTC company and eventually became the commanding officer. He was steeped in all that. He liked the formality and the pageantry of it. What he didn't like was the corruption of authority, as he saw it. So a year in the military kind of did it for him, I think. That's why we need a draft. Everybody should serve. Tell me about his love affair with America. He was born in Montreal, Jewish. He came to America. How much does he love this country? Well, I think immensely. I think that the interesting thing that came out of the talks that we had, we recorded 40 hours over the space of a year. We'd get in all kinds of topics. But the thing that struck me when we got into his childhood in his early years was that when he was living in downtown Los Angeles, his father was a civil servant and didn't make much money. He was an only child. So they would take one bedroom apartment and more would sleep on the couch. As a result of that, Moore tried to get out of the house as much as possible. So he'd go out and walk down to Main Street in Los Angeles. There were a collection of small grindhouses on Main Street that would be open all night in some cases.  And he came to Los Angeles in 1935 just after the production code started to be enforced. The Hays code. And so as a result of that, there was a certain enforced view of America that was put forth by Hollywood to the world. And criminals were punished, and people didn't have sex before marriage and all that stuff. But in a way, it was kind of a very idealized view of what the American idea was put forth by people like Frank Capra and George Stevens and the like, and Leo McCary. And as a result of that, Moore grew up with that impressed upon him. He saw these films again and again at a very impressionable age and they stuck with him. And I think maybe the culmination of that was in 1939 when he saw Mr. Smith goes to Washington for the first time.  Right. And he wanted to remake it at one point. Yeah, at one point, yeah. He did. He calls himself a romantic. Which is true, very true. Yeah. And it seems to me that America has treated him the same way every woman ever treated him. Yeah, that's probably true to some degree. I think that his wife, Tina said at one point that Mort's stance toward America has always been as if it were a woman who had been unfaithful to him, which I thought was very perceptive. But he still believes.  Right. One of the the last line in the book really is just kind of reaffirmation of the romanticism, the thing that really animates him. And I think that's missing in a lot of assessments of him, just how important that is. He was a true believer and it came through. It came through in his relationships with women. I don't think he was an easy guy to live with or get along with in particular, especially in his prime. I think however that he attracted a fascinating and really high quality type of woman. And it's kind of like who was available at that time that he was seen with and took up with at various points. Everybody from Diane Cannon to Tippi Hedger into, well, Yvonne Craig, of course. Phyllis Kirk. Phyllis Kirk. Just one after the other. And Gina Lee who was a historic in the sense that she was the first Asian centerfold in Playboy. Without prying into his personal life, the takeaway from your book is that she's the love of his life. I kind of think that was the case. I kind of think that was the case. I wouldn't presume to speak for him. But I think it's one of those situations where when it was great, it was really great. And when it was bad, it was really bad. And you had two very strong, forceful individuals. And they fought as much as they loved. And I think that there was a point at which it just kind of blew apart for all kinds of reasons. But they were in a lot of ways of an ideal pair given their temperaments. And at the same time, it was probably always destined to break apart. But they made a good team when they were together. He was attracted to really, really brilliant women. Phyllis Kirk was a brilliant, brilliant woman. That's true. How's it pronounced? China? China. China. It's pronounced, it's spelled China, but it's pronounced China. Also, a brilliant woman. He was trying to understand women before most men thought they were worth figuring out. I mean, he was hanging out with Hugh Hefner, who was not interested in, was not interested in their head. No, not at all. But more genuinely was thrilled and turned on by a woman's mind, treated them as intellectual equals. And I think a little trouble that he got into with women was he treated them as intellectual equals and may have been misconstrued as a misogynist because he figured they could give as good as they take. That's a fair statement in the early 60s when you're trying to sort this stuff out early on. Yeah, I think so. I think so, sure. Yeah. Women found him sexy, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, definitely. I've talked to him about that. And he, we're told he radiated energy and testosterone and attitude and a little bit of danger. I think that was attractive also. Plus, he was really powerful at that time in terms of his presence on stage in terms of his fame, in terms of his influence, and also the people he knew. I mean, he knew everybody, everybody, and hung out with them. And they appreciated him as much as he appreciated them. It was really quite a time. There's a great moment in the book that I remember vividly because it really spoke to me about the problems women faced up until recently. Phyllis Kirk had an eye, she was probably smarter than Mort. I think Mort would admit that. She met Jack Kennedy and she wanted to talk to Kennedy. I think it was in Palm Springs. It was some party in Los Angeles. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, automatically assumed she was making a move on him. When, in fact, she was an intellectual who wanted to talk to Jack Kennedy, but she was reduced to a woman. Yeah, he hung out with Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando. He almost became more than a character actor, a leading man at one point. They were, right? Wasn't he being groomed as an actor? Well, Jerry Wald, specifically the producer, was a big fan of his and had plans for him. Jerry Wald died in 1962. And so he didn't have the chance to really put those plans into motion. But I think had Jerry Wald live, that Mort would have done more films. As it was, Mort, Yvonne had an interesting thing to say about that, which I think was true because Mort took on some stage work and that sort of thing. And the problem was he was not geared. He had a good memory, but he was not geared to learning lines. She said if you're going to do something and improvise it, he'd be home free. But having to learn and repeat lines the same way every night, that was not something he could do. Or wanted to do. Or wanted to do. And he said at one point, which I think is absolutely true, that he said a lot of people can act. I'm the only one that can do what I do. And that's true. I mean, that's kind of the trap of true genius is that you do something so unique and startling that you kind of get fall into that pit. You can't move sideways. You can't move up or down necessarily.  And I think that was very true in Mort's case. Nobody else could effectively do what he did. But as a result of his not being able to say carve out a career for himself in television or movies, that when the nightclub world as we knew it in the early 60s went away, Mort had nowhere to go. Even though he had already learned how to network with jazz clubs, right? Oh, yeah. But jazz went into a decline about 1962, 63. Part of it was because of the way the tax code was being rewritten. So that the people who frequented the clubs in, say, in Chicago, Mr. Kelly's, I mean, they could not write off whole evenings entertainment the way they could before. And that was Kennedy himself that was pushing that particular agenda. So by the time 62, 63 rolled around, a lot of the clubs had closed or had gone off their entertainment policies. That was something I didn't realize before I started digging into this. Yeah. And you can find the news items of the time. It was a time of extreme crisis. But back in the late 50s, here in Los Angeles, I'll use an example. The Sunset Strip, that two miles of unincorporated roadway that connects Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, you had the clubs like the Crescendo, which was basically a jazz venue, the McCombo places like that. And any given night, you could go see maybe Duke Ellington downstairs at the Crescendo, with Mort, upstairs the interlude, you'd have some like Jerry Southern or Shorty Rogers, who came from the Kenton Band, across the street would be Sammy Davis Jr. At the Coconut Grove would be Judy Garland. Slate Brothers would have a very early version of Don Rickles. You had the Mulan Rouge, Louis Prima, Keeley Smith. All of this stuff was going on continuously at that time. And most of these places, you could, well, use an example, Mort fell ill with mononucleosis the day before he was to open at the Crescendo. And Gene Norman, the impresario on 24 hours notice, was able to get his replacement. June Christie, a really great, great vocalist, and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. And you could see that show for a two dollar cover and a two drink minimum. It's just astonishing, the amount of live entertainment that was available. I mean, first rate top tier entertainment, same was true in San Francisco, same was true in New York City, of course. He started in 53, or at least he became known in 53 at the Hungry Eye. How long did it take before he was known nationally? Well, that took a little while. Nord says, and he said at the time, it took him about six, eight weeks to really kind of find his center there and click in with audiences at the Hungry Eye. And he stayed there a good long while, most of the year. He was encouraged to go off to Chicago at one point to do a two week gig at a club back there. And again, he was not immediately accepted by the audiences. I mean, they had to get their bearings with him. They hadn't seen any like him before when he went on television for the first time. It was the Steve Allen show in 1955 in New York. And again, he started off and there were a few minutes where he got no response from the audience. He said then the dam broke and all of a sudden this wave of laughter came through. But it took them a few minutes to figure out what was going on. And that happened pretty quickly for him. I mean to go. Yeah, it did. It did have two years to go from the Hungry Eye to the Steve Allen show to the Tonight Show in two years. That's pretty quick. I think where he really broke out was when he opened in Los Angeles in 57 at the interlude, which was a small bar performance space that was up on top of the Crescendo on Sunset Boulevard and seated about 85 people about the same size as the Hungry Eye was. And he would alternate with a musical act, Shorty Rogers initially. And he would do these really bracing tight 30, 35 minute sets. And he'd do two or three a night on the weekends. He'd do as many as five. And it was it was electric. When you hear a recording of what he did at the interlude, for instance, it was just electric. What's the earliest recording we have of Mort? The Sun Authorized album that was recorded in 1955 in Carmel, actually, in the Monterey Peninsula. It was recorded by Fantasy Records. Mort worked an evening at a place called the Sunset Auditorium. And it was with Dave Brubeck with Paul Desmond. And Mort went in as the comedy act. And they were looking out for him in such a way so that the Brubeck organization did their first set of, I think, five numbers. Then Mort came on. And he did about 40 minutes of material. Then Brubeck and Desmond came back and did their final set. And Fantasy Records in Berkeley was recording Brubeck's music for a potential album that night. They had engineers and taped in the back of the room. And as it turned out, they recorded Mort as well, though Mort was unaware of it at the time. And that album was eventually issued as Mort's solid sunset. But it was unauthorized. It came out after Mort's first official album for a verve, which was called The Future Lies Ahead. And Mort had to sue to get the album off the market because by that point he considered it dated. It was 1958 and the material was three years old. Were they paying him for that? Or they were just ripping him? No, they were just pulling a fast one, if you will. And so if you can find a copy of Mort's solid sunset these days, it's a real collector's item. Are there any recordings of him before The Hungry Eye? Not that I'm aware of. Not that I'm aware of. That's the earliest. There are two tapes in his collection that were recorded after that. There's about 70 minutes of material from the interlude about a month after he opened in Los Angeles, spring of 1957. There's a tape that's marked Hungry Eye 1954, I think. I gotta look back on my list now. That hasn't been digitized yet. That is pretty early as well. The interlude tapes are really fantastic though. They're really exciting and fun to listen to. I'm telling you, and I made my kids listen to Mort when they were growing up because my kids hate me. Just so you know why my kids... In order to go to Disneyland, we had to go to the Nixon Library in Whittier first. That was one of the big complaints. That was like, you have to earn Disney. Well, then we just... Finally, I lost all authority and we just went straight to Disneyland. If you want to learn American history, one of the ways I learned American history was filtering it through the prism of Mort's albums. I wanted to know who these references were, and now that I'm old enough and steeped in enough history, his stuff, to me, it's timeless and just jaw-droppingly brilliant, was the height of his career in 1960 when he made the cover of Time Magazine. If you were to ask him what was the absolute peak of your career in terms of fame and money and power and influence hanging out with the Kennedys, was 1960 the Zenith? Probably, running up to the election in November, sure. And did he suffer once Kennedy got elected because he didn't have any friction? In other words, he was up against Eisenhower, but now you have Kennedy, which is... You would assume Kennedy would be what Mort wanted. People would come to him after the show and when he was knocking Kennedy and they'd say, well, isn't this what you wanted? And he would say, you didn't have to do it for me. No, when he started, he had... He was looking at two terms of Eisenhower and Nixon. And so he cut his teeth on Nixon, especially. And he had a nice long run with those guys. And he participated unofficially in the Kennedy campaign, although he was really a Stevenson man. And so the run-up to the election was really a time of tremendous excitement, not only in show business, but in the country as a whole. I mean, I remember it because I was a kid back then, that the real excitement of having a man in the White House or the prospect of having a guy in the White House who was not only as charismatic as Kennedy was, and boy was he charismatic, but also someone who had actually been born in the 20th century. I mean, Kennedy was the same age as my father. And all those World War II vets at the time were in the early 40s. And they had the world by the tail. And I have to say that I can equate it in some ways to when the Obamas went into office, because there again, you had a great charismatic leader, not only that, but a really photogenic family, good, solid. Now we've learned that there were cracks in the facade with Kennedy, but there was a lot of that same feeling, I thought. Also, there was a lot of dissension about Kennedy, especially in the South. He was reviled. But I think that in that time, there were a lot of hopeful people in the world, and they didn't want to hear about Kennedy getting knocked. But Mort's attitude was really that he considered anyone who was in power to be a target. Looking back, because he ended up writing jokes for Kennedy. Yeah, that's correct. Looking back, he got a little close to Jack Kennedy. Yeah, I'd say so. Was that a mistake? I think he fell under that particular... You know what may have happened ultimately, I think, is that because he had fallen under Kennedy's spell in a way that when Kennedy did become president, remember what a close election that was, I think that he, in a sense, was determined to go all out against Kennedy just to show that he hadn't been compromised. So I do think that that had something to do with it. Mort had a lot to work with Kennedy. I mean, Kennedy's brother was the Attorney General, remember at that time, and Robert F. Kennedy. And Mort came up with a line, little brother is watching for that. There were a lot of things going on that Mort could grab on to. The Cold War was a big one, for instance. But I think that there was a period of time when people were sensitive to any kind of fund that got made of the Kennedy family. And Mort, that was his stock and trade. So yeah, it was tough for him for a while. And then when... Well, we'll get to that. But as I understand from your book, Jack Kennedy was okay with Mort's barbs. It was the Praetorian guard that was protecting him. He was told that by some insiders. And that's easy to believe that people assumed that the President wanted to be protected when really he perhaps did not want to be, or he didn't consider Mort to be a serious danger, though it was kind of a compliment to Mort that some people did, I think that... Did Mort saw, going back to the early 50s, did he curse? Did he talk blue? He talked about women. He talked about relationships. How vulgar did Mort ever... He was... Mort was a real puritan. He didn't smoke. He didn't drink. And he didn't work blue on stage. He won't to this day. Right. So he was kind of the anti-Lennie in terms of Lenny Bruce and what Lenny Bruce was up to. But no, Mort was a straight arrow in comparison. When you say he didn't drink at all? Or he would go out and have an occasion? No, not really. He never had a taste for the stuff. He was asked one time in a playboy interview if he ever drank. He said only with chicks, which may have been the case. But the wives, for instance, knew he was a safe guy for their husbands to go out with because Paul Newman was a heavy drinker. And Mort was usually along with Newman because he would drink orange juice or something and Newman could get as blasted as he wanted to. And he knew that Joanne Woodward knew that Newman was safe when he was in Mort's company. Well, Mort was the designated driver and it seems to me... In a way... Driving was Mort's vice. Cars were his indulgence. In the early 50s when he was starting, was it really the height of McCarthyism? I don't have an almanac in front of me, but it seems to me by 1954 McCarthy had already been exposed by Edward R. Murrow? No, Murrow did it in early 54, like the spring of 54. I'll see it now initially. But Mort started in December of 53 with McCarthy jokes and that was not considered cool at that time. The only guy that poked fun at McCarthy in a very, very, very mild way was Bob Hope. His quips came across as friendly in comparison. But Mort was developing the philosophy of savagery with these targets. He was not going to give any slack to any of these people and McCarthy was right through the top of the list. And he and Banducci both told stories of how the plungry eye was a basement place, a cellar place, and people would come along toward the end of the evening.  And they'd have to fight their way out of the club at night because of that. Do you think he played against type? Mort was a college educated Jew and people automatically assumed this is when the Rosenbergs were getting electrocuted and you ask most of middle America, they would think that all communists were Jewish. Didn't he play against type in that you go and listen to him in the early 50s while he was making jokes about McCarthy, Nixon and Eisenhower. It was brilliant. It was funny. It was more dint, more dint, but not vicious, not over the top, mostly sly and patriotic. Right? It wasn't, was he ever arrested? No, right? He was never arrested. No, no, no, he didn't push the balance of decency the way Lenny Bruce did. Lenny did things purposely to get himself arrested, I think. I think that was part of his persona and self-image, let's say. No, Mort never got arrested, but there were two sides to Mort. There was the political side, the thinker, if you will, and the other side was the guy who was living the Playboy philosophy a lot of ways. You don't see him with a martini in his hand or a cigarette, but he was driving the fastest of cars and he was dating the most famous and beautiful actresses, and he certainly loved the music. There was a lot there that coincided with what Playboy was putting forth to its readership as being the kind of guy you wanted to aspire to be. I think that Mort's riffs on lifestyle fit right in in terms of of what you saw as the disillusionment of the post-World War II set. These guys that went to college like Mort did on the GI Bill and achieved a level of financial and personal security, and were wondering at that point what was left or what there was to it all. The point of it all would be to be able to buy a better brand of gin and live in a bigger house, that sort of thing. What did it all add up to? Mort's commentary at that time really kind of pointed to that. You're getting into the area of the man with the gray flannel suit, which is a big bestseller in the mid-50s. The idea, the questioning as to what America was putting forth as the ideal and was it intellectually vacuous? Were there things that one should be considering that were not encouraged at that time? I think that Mort was the guy that gave voice to that rebellious nature in people, that questioning nature in people. A revolutionary so much as he was. He played at middle class aspirational when it came, as you said, to women, to toys, to things. And then the disillusionment, as you said, that comes from pursuing empty things like beautiful women and fancy cars. So that kind of played into the 50s and was capital. So he was the quintessential playboy role model in a lot of ways and at the same time he was biting that particular hand as it was feeding him. Right.  You cannot pigeonhole them. Hey, go ahead. I was going to wrap it up and invite you back next week because I could talk about Mort Sol forever. Well, can we do this again? Thank you. Sure. I can talk about Mort. I had him on my show in 2013 for the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. There's so much to talk to him about other than the Kennedy assassination. Very quickly before you go, this is just a personal question. Mark Russell, how's he doing? Very well, as far as I know. Had a nice chat with him. He gave us a very nice comment for the book when he read it. And he and his wife, Ali, live in Washington to this day. And as far as I know, everything's copacetic with him. Good. Good. Well, this has been a thrill. Thank you. You were very generous with your time. Again, thank you for the book. James Curtis is the author of Last Man Standing, Mort Sol and the Birth of Modern Comedy. You're also the author of W.C. Fields, a biography, which I'm going to go get on my Kindle after we hang up. And a lot of other books, Spencer Tracy, a biography, James Whale, a new world of gods and monsters. And Between Flops and Acclaimed Biography of Writer-Director Preston Sturges. I know his son, Preston Sturges. I met him through Jeff Garland. Very sweet. Preston or Tom Sturges? Preston? Preston, the son. Preston. Okay. Yeah. He used to live next door to my friend Jeff Garland. Well, James Curtis, thank you so much. I will call you next week. And if you can slum it for another hour with me to talk about Mort, nothing would thrill me more. So why would you do it? And I appreciate your interest. Well, the book is great. And I'm obsessed with Mort Sol. He influenced an entire century of comedians. I thought I knew everything about him. No book could sat my curiosity about Mort. What you did do was I am now falling asleep at night listening to Mort Sol. And you have reinvigorated my appreciation for the father of modern stand-up comedy. So thank you for that, James Curtis. Your book is Last Man Standing, Mort Sol and the Birth of Modern Comedy. I hope to talk to you next week, sir. Thank you, David. Stay on the line for one second.


Tarzan and the Diamond of Arshere! Tarzan, Tom and his little safari are now a part of the Tarzan-Gregory expedition. Tom has agreed to proceed with Tarzan and his friends to Tuinbaka under the leadership of the Eight-Man, the forbidden city of Arshere being the common goal. Tom is after the father of Diamonds, the talismanic gem of the Hesse Herrings, while Tarzan and his companions hope to find Helen Gregory's brother, Brian. Helen mysteriously vanishes from the midst of the encamped safari and without pausing to pick up a weapon, Darno rushes blindly out into the black jungle night in search of her. Tarzan disappears into the branches of a tree near the edge of the Boma. Tom walks slowly back to the fire and magra, where Wolf and Larsen presently join him. A look of mystification is in Tom's eyes. Oh, never do that. I thought now, Tarzan, you were for dreaming when you told me this man's ability to swing into the trees like an ape. It is uncanny, Atan. Even now I am not yet used to it. You watch, he'll have that Frenchman back here in a year free. Hmm, I can't understand what happened to that girl. She wouldn't have walked out into the jungle alone this time of night. The shock of losing her father may have temporarily affected her. But she appeared to be getting over it wonderfully. All day long, she fought her tears and kept us under control. Yeah, sure. But it worked inside. She hid it from us. Yeah, I know what it means to put never mind. We get up a search spot in the morning, we'll look for her. If she wandered off alone, she cannot be far. We'll find her. But if she did not go alone... What do you mean, Atan? If she did not go alone? I was merely thinking about magra, to vanish like that syrup by friends and natives. Strange, is it not? Why? Yes, it is strange. I cannot... There, Tarzan and the Frenchman coming back. This Tarzan, he is in love with the young lady magra. Is that not self-evident? Tom, I'm leaving magra in your care. Magra has been under my protection for many years since she was a child. Tarzan, you and Wolf carry on. Yes, sir. Tom has the map, according to his suggestions. Tarzan, you are aware that you will not leave the safari. Of course, my friend, but I... That's all I want. You are not to leave the safari under any circumstance. I'll be back sometime. You will be back. But where are you going? To find Helen. I'll catch up with you all with you as soon as I can. But how are you going to find her? There isn't a trace. Leave that to me. Tom, I have your word that the natives will be treated properly. You have? They will have no cause to complain. I may be gone for a few hours only. It may be days. But don't worry. Keep going toward Toonbaka. Here's my gun, Tarzan. He will take Gregory's. Keep your rifle, Arson. I don't need it. But for protection, arrive. I have all the weapons I need. You... you will not let me go with you, Monami. Yeah, I was just saying, if you organize a search party in the morning, wouldn't that be... And waste time, Wolf. No, Dono. This time, I'm going alone. I want to make speed. Ah, oui. Moi, je comprends. Then that's all. Keep things moving, Tom. Dono, goodbye. Good-bye, Tarzan. I suggest that we follow his advice to the letter. Lieutenant Dono? Absolument. We will press on. After day, through mile after mile of chronic verger that cries aloud its beauty, the safari forges ahead, deeper into the thick green oppressiveness of the jungle. All but Dono have given up hope and finding Helen Gregory alive. Even the Frenchman's great abiding faith in his friend's ability to accomplish the impossible is gradually waning as the days pass and Tarzan fails to return. This is a great thing, my friend. But even that has its limitations. The shadow moves as the sun directs. Oui, monsieur Tom. But you do not know Tarzan as I know him. I believe him to be absolutely immune from death caused by man or beast. Non, non, je vous assure, he will return. None of us are immune from death, Dono, particularly in the jungle. It stares at us from behind every bush, every tree beside our path. Still, I hope you are correct and that Tarzan will return. Eight days we have gone on. And still no trace of either one or the other. Strange. I like that other. What are you thinking of? And what is so strange? I was merely indulging in my usual pastime, thinking aloud. It is odd how one can vanish from the midst of a large camp without leaving so much as the slightest trace. I've been thinking of it ever since the night Helen Gregory disappeared. Et moi, I cannot understand it. We should have found at least some indication of what happened. It recalls to my mind the similarly peculiar disappearance of the young lady's brother, Brian Gregory. I understand now what you mean, Atan. Do you, my child? I wonder. Come on, Tom. There appears to be trouble. What is it, Mbule? What do you mean? Where has he gone? Who are you, Mbule? He never spit it. Where did he go? Pusko, Buannalasen. Shetani, Angusha, Buannalasen. Duli, Watamishi. Duli, Simila. No, Mbule. What has happened? Buannalasen walk along Cut Trail. Pretty soon no more. Shuka, Don. Buannalasen go into the ground. Where, Mbule? Where did Buannalasen go into the ground? Shuka, there. Along Big Hole. Tarzan, come over here. What is it, Lieutenant? What has happened to Mr. Lassner? Mbule says something about his going into the ground. Disappeared. What have you found, Tom? I do not know. Magra, stay away from that hole. It looks like some sort of native trap. An elephant trap or... No, no, no. Lassom, are you all right? Where are you, man? I came up to see what is stopping the safari. Will you get one of the prepared flares, Donald? Still more. Just one more more. Well, one got to svillent home. What is the svilletowing down in that hole? Some kind of an animal trap into which he fared. Hey, wait. Here is the torch, Mr. Tom. Here is the flare, Lassom. Have you matches? Yes, sir. Dessert looks like it had been turned over recently. Well, get ropes. I am going to the... The man is right. Look here. Just inside this hole. Sir. Wolf, give me two of those flares. Remain here with Magra and keep the natives back from this opening. Yes, sir. Use the torches. What in the devil is this? Bats. They were not hurt, Joe. Here, Donald. Take this flare. Go ahead. I will follow. Donald, this has been made by the hand of man. This stairway. Those stone walls. A causeway. Disused. Ancient. But you are correct, Tom. It is my name. Yeah, sure. That's a thank you. There must be ventilation. Here is dry, hot, but pure enough. Come over here, old tenant, Mr. Tom. See if you can make this out. It's writing on the wall. Mesa. Priestie. All the torches closer. There. So, can you decipher it, Tom? Hieroglyphs. Egyptian, if I'm not mistaken. This sort of picture, I think, dates back to three or four thousand years before Christ. Tom, there, but it is most certainly very well preserved. I wonder what it means. You cannot, by any chance, dig it, Mr. Tom. I? Of course not. Why do you ask that? Merely because I should like to know what that writing means. No, no. I have no idea what it means. But I shall nevertheless make a copy of it and look it up later. Larson, you go and bring Wolf and Margaret down here. Then we shall explore a little. Did you notice, Tom, that this causeway seems to be leading well in the general direction in which we are going? At least in the other direction through the tenant. We hit it between both ends.  What does all of this mean, Mr. Tom? I do not know. There is no doubt that causeway was built by man back in the dim past. Look at that masonry. Those rock-hewn stairs. What sort of people built and used these centuries ago? Egyptians probably. Because hieroglyphs seem to prove that. Eh, what they find for an archaeology, sir? What a strange place, Tom. What have you found? I found something. You were? What is it? Well, I was snooping around up there before Larson came after us. And I regret my life that the earth around that hole that Larson fell to has been dug up lately. It is soft. You know not back down like the ground. All are now certain of that? Eh, positive. You know that ground was put there from the outside or thrown up from the inside to cover up the hole. I wonder. Tom! Margaret! Tom here! All of you, thief! What have you found, Baron? Here, look, close to the foot of the wall. Good heavens. It is writing.