Colby Cosh: Honouring Tom Smothers, network TV's accidental Sixties troublemaker

Tom Smothers, who died of lung cancer Tuesday at the age of 86, is being commemorated in the U.S. press as “ one half of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo .” Nobody gets to pre arrange his own obituaries, and probably nobody would choose to be remembered as 0.5 of something. Tom Smothers was in fact a central figure in the history of U.S.

network television — a defining, revered figure of the medium and of America’s late Sixties social struggle. This happened sort of by accident, and it’s an accident every ambitious comedian knows like scripture. Its cautionary effects are still being felt today. Tom and his younger brother, Dick, grew up in Los Angeles as the sons of a war widow.

In the early heyday of folk music they formed a duo, with Tom on guitar and Dick playing double bass. They discovered pretty quickly that their fraternal stage banter went over with audiences better than “Jimmy Crack Corn” or “John Henry,” and they became a unique hybrid of comedy folk, with Tom playing the slow witted naïf and Dick being the stern, dominant straight man.

The truth, which was no secret, was that Tom was the unquestioned boss of the partnership. The Smothers Brothers as a comedy act are still very watchable despite their vaudeville flavour: they pretty much had one joke (“earnest traditional ditty descends into verbal chaos”) but they had the inimitable timing you find in siblings.

Jack Benny, surely the purest “timing” comedian of the 20th century, was an important influence on the pair and helped to advance their career. In the mid Sixties they sold a lot of comedy records and, being L.A. locals, started popping up on television. In 1965 CBS tried sticking them into a hokey situation comedy, The Smothers Brothers Show, with Tom playing a literal guardian angel to his grey flannel suit bachelor brother.

The short lived show had no music and was an unhappy experience for everybody, arguably including the viewers. Tom got an ulcer and a (first) divorce out of it, and told himself that if he got another chance to make a TV series he was going to insist on control instead of being pushed around by producers.

If you’re gonna fail, why fail taking someone else’s advice? It was in 1967 when he got his second shot — and a long, long shot it was. CBS had a terrible problem in the form of NBC’s Bonanza, which dominated the ratings in Sunday primetime like no network series before or since. CBS went through agonies trying to create a niche in the “kamikaze (time) slot,” euthanizing show after show when it got flattened by the cowboy Cartwrights.

Someone got the idea of giving the Smothers Brothers a variety show, letting the pair do their actual act and bring on some hip guests to attract young viewers. The network had nothing to lose, and agreed to Tom’s demands for creative autonomy. It was a truly desperate gamble. The story of what happened next is told brilliantly in a 2002 documentary directed by Maureen Muldaur, Smothered.

You can find Smothered pretty easily with Google, and I recommend it. Nine times out of 10 I would discourage the use of a documentary as a means of understanding history — even the history of electronic media — but even though Smothered is a piece of officially approved biography, it is admirably candid about the war that blew up between Tom and CBS.

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, contrary to all expectations, started challenging and occasionally pasting Bonanza in the ratings. Tom had assembled a staff of very young writers with underground credentials and a taste for the absurd: these included Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, Don Novello and Bob Einstein, the future Super Dave Osbourne .

The show’s prime time real estate allowed it to attract a lineup of musical guests that now staggers the imagination. In the short life of the Comedy Hour viewers saw Cream, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel, Ray Charles, Ike and Tina Turner, and George Harrison, among many others.

A performance by the Who concluded with Keith Moon detonating his drum kit, which was dangerously overloaded with firecrackers: a flying cymbal mutilated Moon’s arm and the blast gave guitarist Pete Townshend permanent hearing problems. This kind of thing never happened to Hoss or Little Joe. Tom and Dick had seemed ludicrously safe, clean cut, and all American to CBS executives.

Behind the scenes, however, Tom had been experimenting with the mind expanding drugs of the day and had developed an awkward conscience about the Vietnam War and civil rights (along with sideburns and a taste for Nehru jackets). The show began to feature coded drug humour, politically daring guests like Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, and frank antiwar messages and political critiques which seemed all the more radical and subversive in the setting of a cheesy variety show.

CBS showed initial courage in letting this stuff go to air and honouring their hands off promises to Tom. He had, after all, given them an enormous hit out of nowhere. But affiliates in the U.S. heartland began to balk, and when Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968 there was a corresponding regime change at CBS.

Meanwhile, street warfare and a spasm of assassinations were raising the political temperature across the U.S. to levels still not experienced since. The network’s standards and practices department began to raise hell about the show’s content more and more, insisting that videotaped copies of upcoming shows be flown across the continent for scrutiny in advance of the air dates.

Tom Smothers found multiple layers of executivedom looking over his shoulder constantly. At any moment he might be pestered simultaneously — over different issues — by CBS’s West Coast representatives, by the network’s censors, and by the boardroom brass in NYC. He became litigious and defensive, as anyone might.

He stubbornly tried to stick to a single chain of command, and stopped talking to anyone but the top authorities. He insisted that every complaint about the show’s content be made in writing and that it must cite chapter and verse from the Standards and Practices handbook. He was, by his own account, something of a short tempered martinet who didn’t deal well with decision makers in person.

The show itself became increasingly preachy and absorbed with its own fights over politics and censorship. Ratings dipped. Eventually, in 1969, Tom simply stopped sending the preview videotapes East, and the network reacted by cancelling the show. In retrospect this sequence of events is usually interpreted as a struggle over free speech values.

But, of course, Tom Smothers’ fight was ultimately with the broadcast affiliates who owned monopolistic, federally issued local licences over the theoretically public airwaves. Those licence holders wondered why they ought to be forced to air programming that had network bona fides but that their local audiences disliked.

(Canada’s bravura comedy historian, Kliph Nesteroff, has been commemorating Tom Smothers by tweeting some of the unhinged public attacks on the Smothers Brothers that appeared in the papers.) To conservative station owners in a period of political conflagration, it was their right to reject locally problematic content that was being threatened.

A TV network is ultimately nothing but its affiliates: this was a war Tom Smothers could not win. He took CBS to court over breach of contract and was victorious in a jury trial, but lawyers must have devoured most of the US$766,000 damages award. The world would probably have moved on from a comedy folk duo around 1970 anyway, but the tragedy of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had incalculable effects on the television comedy of the next decade.

Social commentary took on subtle and elliptical, even evasive, forms. Norman Lear, the brilliant producer who died earlier this month, figured out that you could put liberal messages on network TV as long as the bigoted right wingers were the ones getting the laughs. Lorne Michaels created Saturday Night Live, which is technically a variety show, and established a late night TV outpost for social critique, cutting edge music and improv ensemble comic values.

Traditional standup, a medium where anybody could say anything, regained some of the prestige it lost in the ‘60s when TV seemed like the all consuming inevitable future. Eventually cable came along and served as an escape hatch for high risk televised comedy, and of course the internet has since added another crucial degree of freedom to the equation — but technical progress has also flung standup comics into a panopticon of ubiquitous handheld cameras.

The old fights over free speech and the jester’s impunity don’t stay put in the past even when the world changes: that’s why it’s worth honouring veterans like Tom Smothers. National Post.