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Comedian Dick Smothers has learned the importance of not taking himself too seriously.
By COLETTE BANCROFT, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 24, 2002
Dick Smothers isn't really a serious guy. He has just played one on TV. And onstage for more than 40 years as half of the Smothers Brothers, playing upright bass and straight man to brother Tom's shenanigans.
"I'm the silly one," Dick says. "In real life it's flipped. Tommy's always got his ducks in a row. My life's a mess, but I have a good time."
His life sounds pretty good these days. Smothers, 63, lives in eastern Manatee County with his wife, Denby. When he's not on the road as a Smothers Brother, he's bicycling and kayaking and whipping up healthful concoctions in his juicer.
Florida's a great place for many of his passions, he says, but its crowded roads require vigilance.
"Florida picks off cyclists -- more than anyplace else. We're near the bottom in education but at the top for cycling deaths. I have no idea if there's any correlation," he says.
"Lately I've started kayaking. There are great kayaking waters around here. And I figure the only way the motorists can get me in a kayak is if they plunge right off a bridge. So I just stay away from the bridges."
When he's not pedaling or paddling, what does a former television star watch on TV? Smothers says he doesn't watch a lot of current programs, preferring classic movies. But he watches news.
"I like to watch Fox News, just to get the other side of things. I liked Bernard Goldberg's book Bias, about the tremendous liberal bias of the New York news media, and they're thinking they're in the middle," he says.
"What we need is a fair presentation of what's going on, and we don't get that. When we were doing the show, all you got was the other side, so we tried to balance the other way."
That may be a surprising view coming from Smothers. The show he refers to was The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which from 1967 to 1969 stirred up a firestorm of controversy and kept CBS censors hopping with its antiwar, pro-counterculture satire and political commentary.
It's a show he's proud of. But he's also proud of what he's doing now. "You keep changing. That's what keeps life interesting."
How did a lifelong show biz type end up living in Manatee County? Smothers' wife is a fourth-generation Floridian whose family is from the Fort Myers area. Between them, they have 11 children; Smothers' six kids range in age from 13 to 41, and he has one grandchild. One of his daughters and a sister live in Florida.
He and Denby moved to Manatee County about a year ago. Their home east of Bradenton gives him easy access to the airports in Tampa and Sarasota, an important consideration for someone who's on the road six or seven months each year.
"I like Florida a lot," he says. "It's great for the boating, the fishing, the water. It's a pretty arty area, too -- lots of live theater."
After he and his wife moved to Manatee County, they became Realtors. "She wanted me to go with her, so I took the class. It's not what I want to do now, but it was fun for me to learn about it.
"Denby is an active agent," he says. "If things don't go to hell in a handbasket, it's got a good future. All us baby boomers are ready to settle down, and we want some sunshine. Let's just hope we have enough water for everybody."
Though he's not selling houses, he is interested in architecture, he says. "I love the Sarasota school of architecture. The building my office is in is kind of in that style."
The office has a 26-foot-wide window that overlooks a creek in Sarasota. "Sometimes the river comes into the house, so I got a good deal," Smothers says."You just put out a trout line. . . .
"Florida is light. It's color and vegetation and light. That's what I love about it."
Tom and Dick Smothers were born in New York City. The family moved to California, and the brothers, both accomplished musicians, began to perform their song-and-comedy act in the late 1950s while they were students at San Jose State University.
Their first professional appearance was at the Purple Onion in San Francisco in 1959, and their combination of sibling bickering and sweet harmonies soon gained a following.
"We started in the folk area," Dick says. "If the Kingston Trio hadn't been so big, we wouldn't have happened."
Their act often poked fun at the sometimes solemn attitude of folk purists. Folksingers, Smothers says, "did 20 verses of John Henry. We told the whole story in one verse. We did that with Tom Dooley, all those songs. We had fun with it."
But what audiences remembered most was the byplay between goofy, unpredictable Tom and prissy, by-the-book Dick. Much of the comedy grew out of two clean-cut, well-educated men being revealed as squabbling children: "Mom always liked you best" was their trademark line.
Jack Moore, a retired University of South Florida English professor and scholar of popular culture, says the Smothers Brothers created a twist on a style that was a staple of American comedy throughout much of the 20th century. Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Dick and Tom: "You have the smooth, smart guy and the not very smart guy. But then he turns out maybe to be smarter than you thought."
Most of those comedy partner acts came up either through vaudeville or mainstream nightclubs. The Smothers Brothers, though, developed in smaller folk and beat clubs with less traditional audiences. "Comedy is always subversive," Moore says, "but they were subversive in a different way."
The Smothers Brothers were one of the top comedy acts of the '60s, with several bestselling albums. But they made their biggest impact on American culture and politics with a one-hour variety show.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour made its debut as a midseason replacement on CBS in 1967. It was just another in a string of shows to go up against the powerhouse Western series Bonanza, television's No. 1 show.
The brothers had limited TV experience -- lots of guest shots on such shows as The Ed Sullivan Show and Hootenanny, plus a short-lived 1965 sitcom in which Tommy played an angel and Dick a playboy -- and the network probably didn't expect much from their variety show. No one had outgunned the Cartwrights in their time slot, not even Judy Garland and Jack Benny.
Certainly the network didn't expect what it got. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour began with a fairly traditional variety show format of skits, songs, dance and the brothers' stage act. But as the show entered its second season in the fall of '67, things began to get a little weird -- and more than a little political.
"Politics was part of the times. We didn't choose it; it found us," Dick says.
The political satire that made the show a sensation then would seem mild amid today's anything-goes postcable deluge. But in 1967, no other network show was making hip references to the counterculture and recreational drugs, few shows aimed at white audiences regularly featured black performers -- and no shows were criticizing the country's involvement in Vietnam.
"Politics was never the main point," Dick says. "It was the seasoning of the show." But the show's antiwar stance made it a standout in an otherwise bland television landscape.
So did some of its surreal counterculture humor, such as Leigh French's "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" segments, kind of a hippy-dippy precursor of Martha Stewart, and deadpan comedian Pat Paulsen's wacky presidential campaign.
A quick hit with young viewers, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour became the first contender to knock Bonanza out of its No. 1 slot. "We must have had a divine hand in there somewhere, because we didn't know what we were doing," Dick says. "Actually, a lot of the credit goes to Tom, who was essentially producing the show. He made a point of hiring young guys, all well under 30," as writers and performers.
"He wanted the show to have soul. So he hired (writer and musician) Mason Williams, who was really the soul of the show. And other very talented people: David Frye, a brilliant political satirist, and later we had Rob Reiner, Steve Martin, guys like that (as writers). And we had the great hot rock groups."
Despite the show's buzz and its expanding audience, the network censors were working overtime to neutralize it. Everything from phrases to entire skits were scissored out.
The battle over control of the show made it hotter. As Tom said at the time, "I didn't realize I was important until they made me shut up."
By the end of the show's third season, CBS was demanding each episode be turned in early for editing, claiming Tom was holding onto them until the last minute to keep the censors at bay.
The breaking point for the network, or at least what CBS blamed for its cancellation of the show, was one of the mock-historical "sermons" delivered by comedian and writer David Steinberg. His riff on Moses was deemed too offensive to air.
CBS also said that episode, the last of the 1968-69 season, had missed its deadline, although in a subsequent lawsuit it was proved that CBS had the tape on time.
Rumor had it that Richard Nixon, who had become president a few months before, applied pressure to get the brothers and their antiwar commentary off the air, not wanting to put up with the kind of attacks Lyndon Johnson had endured over Vietnam. In June of '69, the show got the ax. Its slot was filled by Hee Haw.
Though cancellation muzzled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the show's influence lives on. Shows from Laugh-In to The Daily Show have borrowed its topical, irreverent approach. Tom Smothers has become something of a patron saint for the controversial: He was one of Bill Maher's last guests before Politically Incorrect went off the air this year.
"We're still reaping the benefits of that show," Dick Smothers says. "People see them as better than they were. They remember the best parts. There were about 75 shows, and some of them were pretty mediocre."
The show's cancellation was a painful blow for the brothers. They even broke up their act briefly, leaving show business to establish a winery in California. But they didn't stay offstage for long.
The brothers took a couple of stabs at reviving the show in the '70s, first on ABC, then on NBC, but neither version clicked like the first one.
They returned to CBS in 1988 during a long, bitter strike by writers that shut down every TV show in Hollywood. Tom and Dick were the writers, producers and stars of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the only prime-time show in production during the strike.
Dick says that was "the show I'm most proud of. . . . But they kept moving us around, saying, 'Okay, we'll take four more shows,' but we had to keep letting staff go. You can't do that."
Compared with their earlier shows, he says, "It was terrific, quicker paced. You know how it is when you watch Saturday Night Live -- you keep hoping those skits will be shorter, but they're not."
Dick says the brothers have no plans for another series, though they will be on the air again soon. On Dec. 4 Bravo will broadcast Smothered, a documentary that focuses on the controversy about the original Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
The brothers' stage act continues to evolve and fill halls. "We get better reaction now than we did 10 years ago," Dick says. And with plenty of profane comedy acts and more profane music readily available on the TV screen, they're controversial no more: "It's a very family act. We get a lot of compliments on that. It's a clean act."
The Smothers Brothers format has stayed very much the same over the years, he says. "It used to be little kids arguing. It's always been singing and conversation, sibling-type disagreement. But our continuing dialogue has matured with us over the years. It had to.
"We don't do our earlier material. When we did the TV show, Tom was about 30, and I was in my late 20s, and we looked about 10 years younger."
But the audience's long familiarity with the brothers helps create a context for the act, Dick says. "We don't have to say 'Mom always liked you best.' You only hear that in the introduction."
Their musical repertoire has expanded beyond folk music. "We might do a madrigal, a Latin American song, a spiritual, a Broadway song like Impossible Dream. In a 75-minute show, we might do six songs. And often we don't do the whole song," Dick says. Many of their performances team them with orchestras.
Political commentary doesn't drive the act. "It's not political from the standpoint of the daily news. It's more conceptual, from the point of ethics and morals. It's like you're having cocktails with friends and you talk about the political, the social, everything -- it's part of your life."
Dick says he feels more at home onstage now than he did for a long time. "Denby really helped me connect with the fans again. We don't do this now, but for a while, before the shows we would sell the T-shirts, the videos and CDs.
"I got to talk to the fans. I hugged the little old ladies in walkers and talked to the kids. They brought me their lives, and I was part of them. It wasn't just me up onstage and some people out there."
He loves performing, he says, but he misses his family while he's on the road, and it can be tough to maintain his healthful regimen.
"I'm a vegan, into juicing, raw fruit. Right now I'm drinking a green drink, 38 ounces of pure green stuff: bean sprouts, green peppers, cucumbers, parsley and lime," he says. "Juice goes right into your system. After abusing my body for 35, 40 years, it wants something different."
When they're offstage, Dick says, he and Tom, 65, get along famously. "Tommy and I are so different, we don't get all over each other. We respect each other," he says.
But people expect the squabbling Smothers Brothers. "We have dinner out together and we're having a conversation, and people around us start laughing. And we think we're just having a serious conversation."
Not that he's interested in being serious. "I want to give people some of the lightness of life. Silly is art, silly is spiritual."
Dick says he and his brother found that to be true even in the days after last year's terrorist attacks. "Three weeks after that, we played a show on Staten Island (in New York). I was worried about it, but it was packed. People loved it; they wanted to laugh."
Comedy isn't just his job, he says. "It's like the image you see of the wise guru on the mountain, the old man with all the wisdom. His advice is always whimsical: Take nothing seriously.
"That's the answer: Don't take things seriously. Take care of your responsibilities, but don't take yourself so seriously.
"If I had to live in the Winnie the Pooh books, I'd like to be a little more like Tigger. I'd be a little like Pooh, too, but I'd prefer dancing through life."
For information about the Smothers Brothers, including their tour schedule, visit www.smothersbrothers.com/.