How I Almost Killed Mort Sahl (R.I.P.)

The comedian Mort Sahl, “a major influence on comics from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin to Jon Stewart,” died yesterday at age 94. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him a decade earlier.

The near miss occurred during my stint as a magazine photographer. I had an assignment to photograph Sahl at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, where he was performing and where, in a way, he’d been taken under the…