The Smothers Brothers have spent 50 years in funny business. And sure, that’s a milestone, but the Lifetime Achievement Award they’ll receive at the Boston Comedy Festival on the event’s closing night, September 20, at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, is for something even more enduring: their contribution to America’s cultural identity.
From 1967 to 1969, Dick and Tom Smothers starred in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. At first the program was just another entry in the era’s line-up of variety shows, but it became a pipeline for ’60s youth culture, channeling ground-breaking musicians, anti–Vietnam War sentiment, and reefer-fueled cosmic consciousness into the nation’s living rooms every Sunday night. Artists from Jimi Hendrix to the Muppets got their big break on the Smothers Brothers’ show. Tom and Dick even pulled the great activist musician Pete Seeger off the blacklist, all while mixing silly songs about star-crossed love between crabs and lobsters with subtly barbed quips about foreign and domestic policy.
When in April of 1969 the show was cancelled by CBS, despite being at the top of the ratings, Tom and Dick were shocked. But nearly 40 years later, Dick, who spoke to me by phone from a hotel room on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, says that’s probably why he and his brother remain famous.
With anti-war figures like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez on the show, were you tempting the network’s wrath?
No, not at all. We were totally surprised. We didn’t think we did anything controversial. We were just doing what comedians do — making fun. In retrospect, the firing probably cemented our reputation. People don’t like having anything taken away from them before its time.
You had a show that failed before the Comedy Hour?
Yes, The Smothers Brothers Show, which was a sit-com where Tommy played an angel working to get his wings. The funny thing about that is that CBS wanted us because we were great at telling jokes and being spontaneous in front of an audience. We’d been on The Tonight Show with Jack Paar about 11 times and were selling out shows in New York clubs. So the first thing they did when they picked us up was take away the audience and give us a script.
Did you plan to be political when you got another shot with The Comedy Hour?
No, although Tommy has always been a radical left-winger and I’m a raging moderate. We came up as entertainers embracing the world of mainsteam show business. Steve Allen and George Burns and Milton Berle were some of our early reference points, although we never intended to have careers as performers. We were just brothers who argued and sang on stage, and people laughed, so we kept going.
We thought the Comedy Hour might very likely fail, and that if it did, we would at least have fun. They gave us a time slot opposite Bonanza, the highest-rated show on television. Everybody got killed going up against Bonanza. We thought it was risk-free. If we bombed, well, nobody did well opposite Bonanza. And if we succeeded, we’d be heroes.
We had a lot of very popular entertainers, like Bette Davis and Kate Smith. Kate Smith objected at a rehearsal when she saw a script that called for her to play Oliver Hardy to Tommy as Stan Laurel. “Who wrote this?” she boomed in her great big voice. And nobody spoke up.
When Jack Benny and George Burns put on red jackets and did a skit as the Smothers Brothers, that was a real stamp of approval for us. We thought their faces should have been on Mount Rushmore.
When did the nature of the show change?
During the third season, which we’re just now releasing on DVD for the first time. Tommy was the heart and soul of the show, and he made it a point to hire as many talented young writers as we could get: Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Mason Williams, Pat Paulson, Don Novello. As the times changed, the show did as well. It wasn’t until late 1967 and ’68 that the youth social movement really came into focus, and we wanted our show to be relevant.
Once the New Yorker wrote that Congress had to take a break before voting on a major issue to find out what the national consensus was by watching the Smothers Brothers. It wasn’t quite that big a deal, but Lyndon Johnson watched the show fairly often, and sometimes he’d call his friend, CBS’s CEO William Paley, and say, “Bill, do you think maybe the Smothers Brothers could take it a little easier on me? I’m fighting a war here.”
