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The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: Its Beginnings and Near-Death

Since the end of the Second World War, the new medium of television had been dominated in the United States by a trio of immensely powerful and influential networkers: the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Sitcoms portraying the zany day-to-day lives of upper middle class families had dominated the TV sets of the 1950s with shows like I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best, and were accompanied by various comedy and variety programs, most famously the Ed Sullivan Show. Starting in the late 1950s and going into the 1960s, rural and western shows began to take over the airwaves, with programs like The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres rising in popularity. More science-fiction oriented programming like Lost in Space, Star Trek, and Batman became more popular with younger audiences starting in the mid-1960s, however, variety shows and westerns reigned supreme. The highest rated show of the time was NBC's Bonanza, a western about a family and their frontier ranch as they came across setting-specific problems, usually involving some sort of moral dilemma. Bonanza played at the highly valued 9:00 p.m. Sunday slot, which was prized by advertisers for its high viewing numbers. Desperate to compete with NBC's smash-hit, CBS had put nine shows up against Bonanza in succession, before each one due to low ratings. With scant time to prepare another program, CBS hired Tom and Dick Smothers to fill the time slot. The Smothers Brothers, actual brothers, were a musical comedy act that had performed at night clubs before appearing as guest stars on various variety shows. Their first show of their own, The Smothers Brothers Show, was an unsuccessful sitcom in which Dick played a publishing executive and Tom was a ghostly guardian angel. Tom frequently complained that the show did not play to their strengths, and his battles over creative control with their producers. The fighting got so intense that Tom developed an ulcer, and damaged his marriage sufficiently that he and his wife divorced soon after. Believing that they had nothing to lose but everything to gain by going up against Bonanza, the Smother Brothers agreed to try their hand at their own variety show, titled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but only on the condition that Tom would have creative control. CBS accepted after minimum consideration, believing the show would tank like all the others.


The show first aired for its first season in the winter of 1966. The preppy, folksy brothers came across as a non-threatening duo. Early episodes were what one would typically expect from a variety show, with comedy bits and piano-playing chickens. However, Tom and the other early lead writer, Mason Williams, quickly began to experiment with political and social commentary, something that had never really been done before on network television. In the first season, comedian Pat Paulsen was usually the conduit of their political bits. He frequently played a deadpan, mentally unstable politician, who was later 'promoted' to vice president in order to more easily mock Hubert Humphrey and the Johnson Administration. In his political 'editorials,' Paulsen would typically frame an issue in the worse possible light and then go on to defend it. Taking a stand against gun control, Paulsen remarked that it was, “every American's God-given right to kill.” In a later episode, “Vice President” Paulsen spoke in favour of conscription, stating, “What are the arguments against the draft? We have heard it is unfair, immoral, discourages young men from studying, ruins their careers, and their lives. Picky, picky, picky.”

Despite their political commentary, much of the first season was what one would expect from a variety show, with apolitical musical and comedy numbers taking up most of the run-time. Despite this, Smothers Brothers began to skyrocket in the ratings, becoming competitive with Bonanza. The main reason was an overwhelmingly young audience who came to see what political commentary there was. However, it was not long before Tom Smothers and CBS came to a confrontation, when part of the ninth episode was cut. CBS had censored a comedy bit with Tom Smothers and the improv comedian Elaine May, where they play censors censoring a program. Complaining about it to the media, Tom and the censors reached a compromise where he could make an uncensored sketch about the sketch that had been censored.

Experimenting with the extent of what he could get away with, Tom also hired Leigh French, a Los Angeles based stage comedian, to play the role of the hippie flower child Goldie Kief. French appeared as Goldie for her own segment titled “Share a Little Tea With Goldie” where she would give household advice that was laden with double-entendres and innuendos coded in the slang of the teenage Baby Boomers, most of which went over the heads of the censors. The political commentary of the first season concluded with Pat Paulsen declaring his was running for president. While working as good satire at face value, the writing team also believed that it would be a way to inform the public on about the political process.


When the second season of Smothers Brothers began in September of 1967, their political humour became a more prominent fixture of the program, with the first episode beginning with a song titled “the Draft Dodger Rag.” This caused complications, as the President of CBS, Frank Stanton, was a close friend of President Lyndon Johnson. On more than one occasion, Stanton would join the Johnsons for a Sunday dinner at the White House. He would then find himself in the excruciating position of watching the latest episode of Smothers Brothers, where two comedians were mocking the President on his network while the man himself was hovering right over him. Unamused with the Smothers Brothers' brand of humour, Johnson frequently pressured Stanton to intensify censorship.

As the second season went on, Tom and the writing team began to try and pick out prominent performers associated with the counterculture movement to have on the program. Musicians like Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, and Simon & Garfunkel began appearing on the show, and Smothers Brothers' reputation for controversy and an anti-war stance was further solidified by the appearance of Pete Seeger. A well established folk musician and former communist, Seeger had been blacklisted during the Red Scare. While Seeger had been allowed to appear, his latest song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” an allegory about the Vietnam War, had been cut by the censors. Once against relying on media outreach, the Smother Brothers complained to the press, putting enough pressure on CBS for Seeger to appear later in the season to perform the song. Seeger's performance was the first time that Smothers Brothers got a noticeable amount of hate mail for an appearance on the show.

While preparing for their third season, Tom had brought on a team of new writers, including Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Carl Gottlieb, but there was some question on if they would even be renewed. Ultimately they got approval from CBS to prepare for the 1968-1969 season. As the first appearance of the third season, the brothers sang their own song, “We're Still Here.” The growing conflict between the writing team and CBS continued to escalate as soon as the third season began. A segment featuring Harry Belafonte singing “Don't Stop the Carnival” with footage from the 1968 Democratic National Convention playing in the background was cut entirely, to Tom's frustration. According to the Smothers Brothers, all of their earlier work had never been intended to create controversy, with many of their sketches only being deemed controversial by the CBS censors. However, after Belafonte was cut from the show, Tom, egged on by the rest of the writing team, began to pick fights with CBS by creating intentionally controversial material, to the dismay of Perry Lafferty, CBS' Vice President of Programming, and the liaison between the Smothers Brothers and the network. This confrontationalism culminated in a performance by the comedian David Steinberg, where he gave a sermon that was a comedic retelling of the Bible story of Moses and the burning bush. In the wake of the Steinberg piece, the show got more hate mail than it had ever received before. The shows ratings had also slipped, in part because of conservative backlash, but mostly because they were getting so involved in political issues and media controversies that the writing team was spending less and less time actually trying to work the scripts to be funny. Likewise, many of the more conservative affiliates and local syndicated networks under the CBS umbrella began to drop Smothers Brothers and replace it with reruns of other shows.


Despite this, in early 1969, CBS agreed to pick up the show for a fourth season for 1969-1970. Additionally, the seismic shift in the political landscape with the election of Eugene McCarthy gave a different tone to the show. With an anti-war figure as president, many counterculture figures believed that, to at least some extent, they had 'won,' and those considered cutting edge or radical became somewhat more comfortable with the established order of things. This was most keenly felt when Mary McCarthy, the daughter of the President and the most politically active of the McCarthy children, appeared on the show for an extended segment where she was interviewed by “former Vice President” Pat Paulsen. With the aegis of an implicit presidential endorsement behind them, the studio hesitated to play hardball against Smothers Brothers, and the general sense of a satisfaction by the counterculture movement indirectly caused a deescalation between the writers and the network. The writing team decided to put out an olive branch to the network by inviting back Steinberg but acquiescing to the request that he not perform another parody sermon, while the studio reciprocated by not censoring a performance by anti-war singer-songwriter Joan Baez [1].

While still remaining the most politically focused comedy show on television, Smothers Brothers began to return to its roots of being fun first. With its ratings bouncing back in mid-1969, the show's pioneering social commentary and edgy brand of humour would entertain young audiences for years to come.


[1] ITTL there was no such deescalation between the Smothers Brothers writers and CBS. Steinberg came back for another controversial sermon. These factors, including a very heated argument between Tom Smothers and CBS' chief executive, William S. Paley, have been butterflied away. IOTL, the show was unceremoniously cancelled mid-season, with a two day late script delivery being used as the excuse by CBS to terminate their contract. An extended lawsuit followed, in which the Smothers brothers ultimately won a breach of contact case, although they would never again reach the same popularity or ratings they had gotten with the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.