When CBS Canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for Criticizing the American Institution and the Vietnam Conflict (1969)

Rig­or­ous­ly clean-cut, com­pe­tent on the acoustic gui­tar and dou­ble bass, and sel­dom wearing any­factor extra dar­ing than cher­ry-red blaz­ers, Tom and Dick Smoth­ers seemed just like the antithe­sis of 9­teen-six­ties insurgent­lion. After they first gained nation­al recog­ni­tion with their vari­ety present The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour, they should have come off to many younger view­ers because the form of act of which their moth­er — and even grand­moth­er — would approve. However the broth­ers’ cul­ti­vat­ed­ly sq., neo-vaude­vil­lian seem­ance was deceiv­ing, as CBS would quickly discover out when the 2 took each likelihood to show their professional­gram right into a satir­i­cal, relent­much less­ly writer­i­ty-chal­leng­ing, but some­how entire­some present­case of the coun­ter­cul­ture.

The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour pre­miered in Feb­ru­ary of 1967, and its first sea­son “fea­tured min­i­mal con­tro­ver­sial con­tent,” writes Sarah King at U.S. His­to­ry Scene. There­after, “the present turned increas­ing­ly polit­i­cal. The broth­ers invit­ed activist celebri­ties onto their present, includ­ing people singers Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and singer-actor Har­ry Bela­fonte.

The present additionally professional­duced its personal polit­i­cal mate­r­i­al crit­i­ciz­ing the Viet­nam Conflict and the politi­cians who sup­port­ed it,” not least Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son. Carry­ing on Seeger was a dar­ing transfer, giv­en that he’d been black­checklist­ed from web­work tele­vi­sion for the guess­ter a part of twenty years, although CBS’s cen­sors made certain to chop out probably the most polit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive elements of his act.

Much more so was the broth­ers’ personal per­for­mance, with George Segal, of Phil Ochs’s “Draft Dodger Rag,” which they finish­ed by urg­ing their audi­ence to “make love, not conflict.” All this will look honest­ly tame by immediately’s stan­dards, but it surely locked the present — which had turn into top-rat­ed, maintain­ing its personal in a time slot towards the cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that was Bonan­za — right into a grudge match with its personal web­work. Earlier than the third sea­son, CBS’ excessive­er-ups demand­ed that every present be turned in ten days prematurely, osten­si­bly with a view to beneath­go evaluation for sen­si­tive mate­r­i­al. In a single occasion, they claimed that the useless­line had­n’t been met and aired a re-run as an alternative, although it might not have been complete­ly irrel­e­vant that the intend­ed professional­gram con­tained a trib­ute by Baez to her then-hus­band, who was being despatched to jail for refus­ing to serve within the mil­i­tary.

CBS did broad­solid Baez’s per­for­mance on a lat­er date, after clip­ping out the ref­er­ence to the spe­cif­ic nature of her hus­band’s offense. A sim­i­lar strug­gle came about across the “ser­mon­ettes” deliv­ered by David Stein­berg, certainly one of which you’ll see in the video above. The irrev­er­ence towards U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, reli­gion, and far else moreover in these and oth­er seg­ments even­tu­al­ly proved an excessive amount of for the online­work, which fired the broth­ers after it had already giv­en the inexperienced gentle to a fourth sea­son of the Com­e­dy Hour. Although they suc­cess­ful­ly sued CBS for breach of con­tract there­after, they nev­er did regain the identical lev­el of tele­vi­su­al promi­nence they’d as soon as loved, if get pleasure from be the phrase. At any charge, the autumn­out of all this con­tro­ver­sy agency­ly put in the Smoth­ers Broth­ers within the pan­theon of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry free-speech conflict­riors, and their expe­ri­ence reminds us nonetheless immediately that, with­out the free­dom to offer offense, there might be no com­e­dy wor­thy of the title.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Steve Mar­tin Make His First TV Seem­ance: The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour (1968)

When The Who (Lit­er­al­ly) Blew Up The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour in 1967

Watch 3000 Years of Artwork, a 1968 Exper­i­males­tal Movie That Takes You on a Visu­al Jour­ney By means of 3,000 Years of Effective Artwork

Revis­it Flip-On, the Inno­v­a­tive TV Present That Acquired Can­celed Proper within the Mid­dle of Its First Episode (1969)

Pink Woman and Jeff: Japan’s Largest Pop Musi­cians Star in Certainly one of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Reveals (1980)

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e-book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.