Wednesday, February 19All That Matters

Catching up with the Smothers Brothers | CBS Sunday Morning

8 Comments

  • What a sweet piece. I remember the Smothers Brothers from their come-back in the 90s, and wasn’t even aware of the CBS/Vietnam controversy until years later.

    The boys look great, and sound great, and thanks for sharing!

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  • My favorite story about the Smothers Brothers was when they really wanted to get Pete Seeger on the show but he had been blacklisted for being a communist. None of the networks would let him on.

    The brothers wrote a sketch where they poked fun at Lyndon Johnson’s daughter. It aired on their show and that night, at 3 am, the president of CBS was awakened by his telephone ringing off the hook. He answered and it was a very angry LBJ. He told the head of the network that his family was off limits. They could make fun of him, but his family was out of bounds.

    Obviously getting a call in the middle of the night from a furious President of the United States is the type of thing that would get someone’s attention, so the head of CBS called Tommy and Dick into his office and said under no conditions were they allowed to make fun of the families of politicians.

    The brothers instantly saw this as an opportunity. They set to work writing the most offensive sketch about LBJ’s family that they could come up with knowing that it wouldn’t get past the CBS censors who, at this point, were constantly battling the Smothers Brothers over the content of their scripts.

    Sure enough, the censors came back and told them absolutely not, the sketch could not air. The brothers put on a real song and dance, saying that this sketch was very important to them and they were so appalled to have something with such artistic merit struck down.

    Finally they said fine, if they couldn’t get this sketch, which they claimed to really care deeply about, on the air, they suggested a kind of compromise: no sketch, but the censors had to relent and finally let Pete Seeger on the show. The censors agreed not knowing that the brothers didn’t really care about that sketch at all but had just used it as leverage to break the blacklist against Seeger.

    Pete Seeger then came on their show and sang a song called “Big Muddy” which on its surface was about soldiers in WWII getting swept away while try to ford a flooding river while their commanding officer stubbornly insists they continue ignoring the facts in front of his face that his plan wasn’t working. Really though, the song was an allegory about LBJ’s handling of the war in Vietnam (“waist deep in the big muddy, the big fool says to press on” with LBJ being the analog to the “big fool”).

    To sum up, in order to avoid offending LBJ, the censors stopped a sketch from airing that Tommy and Dick didn’t care about, only to invite on a scathing critic of LBJ who sang about what an idiot the president was.

    If anyone is a fan of TV and comedy history, I highly recommend the book “Dangerously Funny” about the Smothers Brothers and their battles with the censors. It is epic and they were absolutely way ahead of their time.

    Also, always remember that if you fall into a vat of chocolate, be sure to yell “fire”, because no one comes to help if you yell “CHOCOLATE!”

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  • Growing up, my friend’s parents had all of their comedy albums. I regret never listening to them. Years later I found one in CD during a big stand-up kick I was on in the 90’s. L

    I ran into one of them at a hobby shop in Vegas, where he lived. I honestly can’t remember which of them it was, but I asked him about re-releasing their old material. He said there had been talk of a CD collection. Though, if it ever happened, I missed it.

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