THIRTY YEARS AGO TOday, ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ ended the first show of its third season with a very bold piece of television.
Harry Belafonte sang a pro-demonstration song, “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” while footage of riots and police brutality at the previous summer’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago was projected behind him.
That’s the way Tom and Dick Smothers ended their show, but not the way viewers may remember it. CBS refused to broadcast the Belafonte segment and cut the number from that show.
Before the season was over, CBS and the Smothers Brothers were at such odds that the network canceled many other segments and then abruptly canceled the series itself even though the show was a very profitable hit.
In the eyes of CBS, the Smothers Brothers had gone too far with all their topical humor and championing of young comics and musicians. Had they not gone as far as they did, though, television and viewers would never have seen the shows that followed: “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live” or “SCTV.
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In the battle for new ideas, and a new generation of voices in TV, singing siblings Tom and Dick Smothers weren’t merely on the front lines. They were at ground zero.
Perfect timing
Everything the ’60s was about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, the generation gap, civil rights, the anti-war movement, distrust of presidential candidates was played out on the air, or behind the scenes, of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
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In addition, there was the seminal talent: Pat Paulsen delivered editorials with such beloved deadpan style that the show ran him for President. Mason Williams was not only head writer but also the show’s “moral guide,” as Tom Smothers calls him. He also composed and performed the hit instrumental “Classical Gas.
” The show’s other writers and/or performers included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner and Bob Einstein.
Comic David Steinberg recalls: “It was certainly the ‘Seinfeld’ of its time. It was THE show to do, and there’d never been anything like it. They were pushing the envelope very far.
” (Steinberg’s comic sermonette about the biblical story of Jonah and the whale turned out to be the last straw for CBS.)
Actually, the Smothers Brothers got their CBS prime-time platform, and their clout, almost by accident. NBC’s “Bonanza” was such a ratings powerhouse in the mid-’60s, having topped the Nielsen charts three years running, that the CBS hour opposite it, “The Garry Moore Show,” was the lowest-rated show on TV.
CBS decided to cancel the show at midseason, and offered the hour to the Smothers Brothers who agreed to mount a variety show, but only if they were given contractual creative control. The network, with nothing to lose, agreed.
Amazingly, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” caught on almost immediately; within two months of its February 1967 premiere, it was a Top 20 hit.
Each week’s guest list was deliberately, almost defiantly eclectic: Bette Davis and Mickey Rooney appeared on the same show as the Who, and Kate Smith shared the bill with Simon & Garfunkel.
“It was a great mix,” Tom Smothers, now 61, remembers proudly. “We did have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.
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Censors & sensibilities
In that first season, the Smothers Brothers first ran afoul of the CBS censors when guest star Elaine May wrote, and performed in, a lengthy sketch in which she and Tom Smothers played people who got sexually aroused watching a movie. Ironically, the characters they were playing were motion-picture censors. The censors at CBS, disregarding the show’s contractual freedoms, cut the sketch.
Then came the summer of ’67, when everyone was listening to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and getting their consciousness raised. Tom Smothers was getting his personal preview courtesy of John Lennon himself.
“There was a lot of stuff happening there,” he says of those summers.
Before long, the Beatles would be giving their videos, like “Hey Jude,” to the Smothers Brothers to premiere in America, and George Harrison even showed up as a surprise guest on one show to support their battles against censorship.
“Whether you can say it or not,” Harrison told them on their show in November 1968, “keep TRYING to say it.
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And they did.
That insistence eventually got them fired by CBS, and torpedoed their careers though the firing eventually was found by a jury to be a breach of contract.
“I’m still intellectually and morally just pissed off when I think about it,” Tom Smothers says now.
But the fights that Tom and Dick Smothers fought, and the battles they won and lost, deserve to be remembered decades later, because “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” in a very real way, changed the face of television.
“Variety shows then were so different,” Dick Smothers, now 58, says. ” ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ wasn’t even close to anything else. ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ wasn’t close to anything else. ‘The Carol Burnett Show,’ that was really a sketch show; it wasn’t a variety show. You couldn’t have more variety within a variety genre if you tried. They weren’t the same kind of shows at all.
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Daring to be different
No show, though, stretched boundaries like the “Comedy Hour:”
Pete Seeger, then still a victim of TV’s unofficial but very real McCarthy-era blacklist, was booked on the show at the insistence of Mason Williams and Tom Smothers and when CBS deleted one of Seeger’s anti-war songs, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” Tom Smothers complained and campaigned in the news media until CBS relented and allowed Seeger to perform it.
When Belafonte appeared on the show 30 years ago, “Don’t Stop the Carnival” didn’t make the cut but another socially conscious segment, a spoof of “Bonanza” in which race relations became an issue on the Ponderosa, was kept in.
“It was an infinitely wider platform compared to the platforms we didn’t have at the time,” Belafonte says.
“To have a platform that took you into the homes of millions and millions of Americans, who watched you in a very favorable mood, was indeed an important platform to have.
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After David Steinberg had done one sermonette for CBS, the network complained. So naturally, the next time Steinberg returned to the show, Tom Smothers talked him into adding another sermon during the dress rehearsal.
“Jonah ran away from the face of God,” Steinberg intoned solemnly. “He got into a ship that was commandeerd by 23 gentiles a bad move on Jonah’s part. And the gentiles, as is their wont from time to time, threw the Jew overboard.
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CBS not only refused to air the show, but it immediately canceled the series an event big enough to make the front page of The New York Times.
“During the course of the show,” Tom Smothers acknowledges, “there were some games played that I enjoyed. We put in some overly harsh things we put them in [the scripts] so they could take them out and feel like they were doing their job. They were doing stuff to irritate me; I was doing stuff to irritate them.
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The Pat Paulsen for President campaign, an outgrowth of his droll editorialist, was a great way for the show’s writers to speak their piece, and to promote peace even when they had Paulsen sarcastically supporting the idea of censorship.
“The Bill of Rights says nothing about Freedom of Hearing,” Paulsen said in one such piece. “This, of course, takes a lot of fun out of Freedom of Speech.
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“My presidential character, he was a little bit of a cheat, you know?
” Paulsen told me shortly before he died. “First, I denied I was running. Then Tommy had film of me saying I was running, and then I said I was misquoted.
“That’s how we kicked off the campaign.
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The “Comedy Hour” made jokes about drugs and sex, but made the most impact with rock ‘n’ roll. Pete Townshend of The Who ruptured his eardrum when explosives were overloaded in Keith Moon’s drum kit for their “Comedy Hour” appearance. And everyone from The Doors and Jefferson Airplane to Dion and Ray Charles performed on the show.
“It was really the roots of MTV,” Williams says. “And we really don’t ever get credit for it.
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“The ’60s are almost caricaturized now,” says Dick Smothers, the quieter brother. “And that’s not a real memory. Watching our old shows, with all their flaws, was a real opening of the door, like we were really sitting in there.
“That WAS the ’60s and the feeling was loving, and good.
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