Tom Smothers, a Counterculture Comedy Legend With the Smothers Brothers, Dead at 86

Tom Smothers, one-half of the famed Smothers Brothers comedy duo, who brought a revolutionary hit of music and political satire to late Sixties television, has died, The New York Times reports. He was 86.

Smothers died at his home in Santa Rosa, California, following a “recent battle with cancer,” according to a spokesman for the National Comedy Center, on behalf of the family. No additional details were shared.

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Tom’s younger brother and comedic partner, Dick, said in a statement, “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner.”

Tom and Dick broke through with an act that combined folk music and comedy: Tom played guitar, as well as the goofball, while Dick balanced him out as the straight-man with a stand-up bass. Their famed show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, premiered in 1967 and became a counterculture staple with pointed bits and sly references to everything from recreational drug use to the Vietnam War.

Recalling the show’s origins in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, Smothers said, “I said I didn’t want to do the standard bullshit. We wanted the sketches to be more relevant. You couldn’t help but reflect what was going on.”

But while that kind of cavalier comedy earned wide praise, a devoted audience, and even an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy, Variety or Music, its also caused controversy and led to friction with the censors at CBS. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was canceled in 1969 after just three seasons.

Still, the show’s impact and influence was vast. Tom and Dick assembled a writing and performing staff filled with future comedy luminaries, including Steve Martin, Rob Reiner, and Elaine May. They also featured an array of major musical acts, including Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Ray Charles, and, maybe most famously, the Who, whose rendition of “My Generation” was punctuated by Keith Moon’s exploding drum kit.

“Without our infamous appearance on the Smothers Brothers’ show, who knows if The Who’s prominence as a band would have ever happened,” frontman Roger Daltrey told Rolling Stone. “Their live TV show gave us our biggest break, which almost led to theirs… being canceled by CBS. He was the ultimate professional, a real gentleman.”

On Twitter, Reiner paid tribute to Smothers, writing, “In 1968, Tommy Smothers plucked me out of the improv group, The Committee, and gave me my first writing job for his show. Tommy was funny, smart, and a fighter. He created a ground breaking show that celebrated all that was good about American Democracy. We loved you best, Tommy.”

Smothers was born Feb. 2, 1937 in New York City, and his brother Dick was born a year later. The pair endured a difficult childhood: Their father, an Army Major, was taken prisoner in the Philippines during World War II and survived the Bataan death march, only to die from injuries in 1945 after American forces accidentally bombed the prison ship transporting him and others to Japan. The Smothers’ mother re-married multiple times and battled alcoholism.

Growing up, Smothers played guitar and was part of musical groups with his brother, but at the time showed more of a flare for athletics (he even won a California high school state championship in the parallel bars). In college, he studied advertising, but as the Fifties drew to a close, he and Dick decided to try their shot at folk music, which is when they started incorporating comedy into their act.

As Smothers recalled in an interview with the Television Foundation Academy, during performances, he started ad-libbing song introductions that frequently got laughs. He and his brother soon expanded those improv speeches to full-fledged bits centered around their bickering.

“It took about a year to make it a comedy team,” Smothers said. “It was mostly me, and pretty soon, [Dick’s] pragmatism worked in it, and it became a working conversation of disagreement, which was based, in part, a genuine disagreement that we’d had since we could talk to each other. Which is a frequent things that siblings have, so we put it onto stage and it worked.”

Folk revival satire and fraternal competitiveness — exemplified by Tom’s recurring mantra, “Mom always liked you best” — became the bedrock of the Smothers Brothers’ act. During the early Sixties, they released numerous comedy albums, and even had one song/bit crack the Billboard Hot 100: “Jenny Brown,” in which Tom and Dick joked about pivoting from folk to pop love songs for teenagers, before delivering a saccharine tune about a fake drowning.

Along with their albums, the Smothers Brothers toured constantly (especially the college campus circuit) and appeared on hit TV shows like The Tonight Show, The New Steve Allen Show, and Jack Paar. They actually scored their first TV show in 1965, a sitcom called The Smothers Brothers Show, but chafed at the format and creative environment. The series was canceled after just one season, but not long after, in 1967, the Smothers Brothers were given the chance to try their hand at a variety show.

At the time, television variety programs weren’t exactly cool; Ed Sullivan had famously hosted the Beatles and Rolling Stones in 1964, but the format still wasn’t exactly a fount of youth culture. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour helped change that, tapping into anti-establishment currents, and even managing to best the towering Western series, Bonanza, in the ratings.

As Smothers put it, Comedy Hour didn’t help instigate counterculture sentiment, but reflected it. “It was the Sixties that we reflected, and we tried to reflect it with the passion that we felt, and our awareness that the country was going through a revolution,” he said, adding: “We reflected that alternative view, the non-standard, establishment view. We took the other side, and we were the only show that was doing that.”

Despite the show’s success, the Smothers Brothers quickly found themselves at odds with the censors at CBS. The comedy was frequently a target — including a sketch about television censors — but so were the musical bookings. Smothers fought to secure Pete Seeger’s first television performance since he was blacklisted in the 1950s approved (the folkie’s performance of his antiwar anthem, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” was recorded in 1967, but aired in 1968). A Harry Belafonte performance of “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” paired with footage of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, was axed and replaced with a commercial for Nixon’s presidential campaign. (Ironically enough, a performance that did make it to air was Jefferson Airplane with Grace Slick done up, for some reason, in blackface.)

It got to a point where the Smothers Brothers were even joking about their censorship on air, even once alongside George Harrison. After Harrison said he had something “very important to say on American television,” Tom deadpanned: “You know, a lot of times we don’t have the opportunity to say anything important because it’s American television, and every time you try to say something important, they uhh…”

Harrison replied, “Well, whether you can say it or not, keep trying to say it.”

The sketch that effectively got The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour canceled in 1969 was a satirical religious sermon delivered by comedian David Steinberg. The network had been demanding advanced copies of episodes so affiliates could review them, and they claimed the episode with the sermon sketch failed to arrive on time, twice. CBS said the Smothers Brothers were in breach of their contract, and axed the show. The Smothers Brothers, in turn, sued CBS for breach of contract and eventually won after a multi-year legal battle.

The Smothers Brothers weren’t off the air for long, but their return, Smothers Brothers Summer Show, on ABC lacked its predecessor’s bite. A few years later, Smothers embarked on a show of his own without Dick, Tom Smothers’ Organic Prime Time Space Ride, but the show was bogged down by self-righteousness. In a 2006 interview, Smothers admitted that, after Comedy Hour’s cancellation, he started to perceive himself as a “poster boy for the First Amendment,” leading to a few years where “I was deadly serious about everything.”

In the coming decades, the Smothers Brothers — both together and separately — took an assortment of film roles, and even some theatrical parts. There were a few more attempts at television, too, but none took off. But throughout it all, the Smothers Brothers toured and performed regularly, updating their act along the way. In the late Eighties, Smothers added a new character, “Yo-Yo Man,” to the act, goofily performing elaborate yo-yo tricks while Dick provided narration. The Smothers Brothers continued performing up until 2010, when the pair announced their retirement.

As much as the Smothers Brothers helped define a major moment in American political and cultural history, Smothers himself seemed to chalk it up to coincidence, and a willingness to meet the occasion. In that 2000 Television Academy Foundation interview, Smothers said all he and his brother were was “a pretty good comedy act,” but they happened to arrive at a certain point, at the “scene of the accident.”

That, Smothers continued, “elevated it to, ‘They handled themselves well in that environment of confrontation and maintained their integrity.’ That’s a sweet little thing to have. I hope my son looks back on that and sees that, says, ‘The guy stood up, my dad stood up.’”

This story was updated 12/29/23 @ 12:54 with a tribute from the Who’s Roger Daltrey.

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