https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/12/27/tom-smothers-brothers-comedy-dead/

Tom Smothers, half of Smothers Brothers sibling comedy duo, dies at 86
Tom and Dick Smothers saw their CBS variety show canceled in 1969 after censors cut sketches that skewered politics and the Vietnam War
By Fred A. Bernstein
December 27, 2023

Tom Smothers, the older half of the Smothers Brothers comedy duo whose hit CBS variety show of the late 1960s was canceled amid controversy arising from sketches that skewered politicians and the Vietnam War, died Dec. 26 at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 86.

The death was announced by the National Comedy Center, which released the information on behalf of Mr. Smothers’s family. He had been under treatment for cancer.

With their clean-cut, glee-club looks, including matching blazers, the Smothers Brothers were unlikely rabble-rousers. They started out as folk singers, with Dick also on string bass and Tom playing the acoustic guitar. But they quickly distinguished themselves by spoofing the genre and incorporating wry banter founded on sibling rivalry. Developing the material was easy, Mr. Smothers once said, because they had been “arguing from the time that we could talk.”

“Mom always liked you best!” became Tom Smothers’s catchphrase (as well as the title of the brothers’ 1966 album). They were a major nightclub act and frequent guest stars on late-night TV shows before putting their irreverence and impeccable timing in the service of their own network variety show.

CBS had initially hired the brothers in 1967 to create a variety show for the Sunday night slot opposite NBC’s “Bonanza,” then the highest-rated show on television. TV critic David Bianculli wrote in his book “Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” that network executives promised Tom Smothers “creative control” but that the phrase never appeared in a contract.

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was a ratings success from the start, some weeks attracting more viewers than “Bonanza.” The show’s formula, designed to draw in viewers across generational lines, featured rock groups like the Who and Jefferson Airplane and established stars like belter Kate Smith and jazz singer Mel Torme.

Non-musical segments featured such Hollywood grandees as Jack Benny and George Burns along with promising new comedians like David Steinberg and Steve Martin. Pat Paulsen, a master of dry wit, delivered droll, double-talk editorials on social issues before mounting a presidential campaign in 1968 with the Straight Talkin’ American Government (STAG) Party. Impersonator David Frye did an impression of President Lyndon B. Johnson marrying off his “semi-beautiful daughters.”

[photo Tom Smothers performs on July 30, 2003, in West Hollywood, Calif. (Giulio Marcocchi/Getty Images)]

Tom Smothers, who described himself as a liberal, was the program’s creative force and a key instigator of its political humor. On camera, Dick was the haughty “straight man” and Tom a well-meaning dolt, exasperating his brother with his ludicrous assertions and inability to stay on topic.

“You can tell who’s running the country by how much clothes people wear,” Tom announced during one routine. Powerless people, who can’t afford a lot of clothes, he explained, “are the less-ons.”

“Who’s running the country?” asked Dick, perplexed.

“The more-ons.”

The scripts began including references to sex, marijuana and politics, a reflection of the burgeoning hippie culture and antiwar movement. And by the third season, the show’s humor had become far more pointed.

In one routine, when Dick mentioned a U.S. government request for citizens to refrain from visiting foreign places of violent unrest, Tom turned to the camera and said, “Okay, all you guys in Vietnam, come on home.”

The brothers “were the first members of their generation with a prime time pulpit, and they used it,” Bianculli wrote.” ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’ was about as topical, influential and important as a TV show could get.”

That came at a cost, namely a continual battle between Tom Smothers and network censors who objected to making fun of societal mores. An entire skit written by Elaine May — ironically, a sendup of overly prudish movie censors — was scissored by the network.

CBS initially cut Pete Seeger’s 1967 performance of the antiwar ballad “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a song set in World War II but that clearly had contemporary resonance and a thinly veiled criticism of Johnson: “We were knee deep in the big muddy,” he sang. “And the big fool says to push on.”

The Smothers Brothers used their ratings clout to invite Seeger back several months later to sing the contentious song. But they kept encountering stiff resistance to their artistic independence. Late one night, Johnson called CBS founder William S. Paley at home to complain about an unflattering portrayal.

A segment in which Harry Belafonte sang “Lord, Lord, Don’t Stop the Carnival” against clips of the violence outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention was deleted two days before its scheduled broadcast.

Fighting with the network, Mr. Smothers became an impassioned advocate for free speech.

Despite his vacuous persona on TV, he “was a very serious-minded guy who cared deeply about what was going on in the country,” Rob Reiner, who wrote for the show, said in the 2002 documentary film “Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” He “wanted to use his television show as a forum to let people know.”

The tension between Mr. Smothers and the network peaked in 1968, during its third season, when Richard M. Nixon, a longtime scourge of liberals, was elected president. In April 1969, CBS canceled the show.

The network claimed that Mr. Smothers had failed to deliver a preview tape of an upcoming show, as promised. Mr. Smothers insisted that timely delivery had been made. The brothers sued CBS and, in 1973, received more than $775,000 in damages. But it was too late to save the program.

A melancholy upbringing

Thomas Bolyn Smothers III was born at an Army hospital on Governors Island in New York Harbor, on Feb. 2, 1937. His father, an officer, served in the Pacific during World War II and survived the Bataan Death March, only to be killed in 1945 when an Allied pilot mistakenly bombed the Japanese ship ferrying him and other POWs to Korea, Tom Smothers told Bianculli.

He said his mother, who had moved the family to California, was an alcoholic who often left her children with friends or relatives. For a time, according to Bianculli, the brothers lived at a home for asthmatic children, even though neither had asthma. But, Mr. Smothers recalled, he and Dick, born in 1939, were always singing.

Mr. Smothers graduated in 1955 from high school in Redondo Beach, Calif., and enrolled at what is now San José State University, where he formed a folk-singing trio (soon to be a duo) that included his brother.

At clubs such as the Purple Onion in San Francisco, they gained attention for their unorthodox routine, with Mr. Smothers deliberately messing up lyrics and going off on factually dubious tangents.

TV talent scouts spotted them at New York’s Blue Angel, and they became frequent guests on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” appearing 13 times in just one year.

In 1965, CBS cast the brothers in a sitcom called “The Smothers Brothers Show,” in which Dick portrayed a young executive and Tom an apprentice angel. The show didn’t play to the brothers’ strengths — among other things, they rarely got to interact — and it was canceled after one season. It reportedly gave Mr. Smothers an ulcer.

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” promised to make better use of their talents. But it, too, was ulcer-inducing. At the same time he was fighting with the network, Mr. Smothers found himself in conflict with his brother, who was more politically conservative. (Mr. Smothers later described himself as hot-tempered, prone to starting fights with just about anyone in order to get his way.)

After the show was canceled, “I lost perspective, my sense of humor,” he said in a 2006 interview with a Vancouver website, the Comedy Couch. He protested the Vietnam War and took part in John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-In for Peace honeymoon in Montreal in 1969.

His marriages to Stephanie Shorr and Rochelle Robley ended in divorce. In 1990, he wed Marcy Carriker, with whom he lived at their wine-producing Remick Ridge Vineyards in Sonoma County, Calif. In addition to his brother and his wife, survivors include two children from his third marriage, Bo and Riley Rose; a sister; and a grandson. A son from his first marriage, Thomas Smothers IV, died this year.

The brothers, who had taken time off from performing with each other, reunited in the early 1980s. Over the next decades, they made more than a dozen TV specials and performed thousands of live shows.

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” writing staff won an Emmy Award in 1969, but the politically controversial Mr. Smothers had omitted his name from the roster of nominees to avoid hurting the chances of the other writers. To rectify that omission, he was presented in 2008 with a special Emmy by Steve Martin.

In his acceptance speech, Mr. Smothers dedicated the award, in part, to people who “won’t shut up.”