Tom Smothers; as part of duo, he erased boundaries of comedy, commentary
Tom Smothers, the older half of the comic folk duo the Smothers Brothers, whose skits and songs on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in the late 1960s brought political satire and a spirit of youthful irreverence to network television, paving the way for such shows as “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 86.
He died “following a recent battle with cancer,” a spokesperson for the National Comedy Center announced on behalf of the family.
The Smothers Brothers worked their way to network television as a folk act with a difference. With Tom playing guitar and Dick playing stand-up bass, they spent as much time bickering as singing.
With an innocent expression and a stammering delivery, Mr. Smothers would try to introduce their songs with a story, only to be picked at by his skeptical brother. As frustration mounted, he would turn, seething, and often deliver a trademark non sequitur: “Mom always liked you best.”
Hoping to reach a younger audience, CBS gave the brothers creative control over “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a one-hour variety show that made its debut in February 1967. For the next three seasons it courted controversy as it addressed US policy in Vietnam, religious fundamentalism, racial strife, and recreational drug use.
Running such features as Leigh French’s “Share a Little Tea With Goldie,” replete with drug references, either delighted or scandalized, depending on the age and the politics of the viewer.
“During the first year, we kept saying the show has to have something to say more than just empty sketches and vacuous comedy,” Mr. Smothers said in a 2006 interview. “So we always tried to put something of value in there, something that made a point and reflected what was happening out in the streets.”
Mr. Smothers, more liberal than his brother and largely responsible for the production of the show, brought in writers attuned to the thinking of the Baby Boom generation — among them Rob Reiner, Steve Martin, Pat Paulsen, and Mason Williams — and stretched the boundaries of taste at every turn.
“Easter is when Jesus comes out of his tomb, and if he sees his shadow he goes back in and we get six more weeks of winter,” Mr. Smothers said on one show.
Far more combative than his mild-mannered brother, who he leaves, Mr. Smothers fought network executives and censors until CBS, tired of complaints from its rural affiliates, especially in the South, abruptly canceled the show in April 1969 and replaced it with “Hee Haw,” a corn-pone counterpart to the fast-paced (and often controversial) “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” that featured country music stars.
“In any other medium we would be regarded as moderate,” Mr. Smothers told reporters at a news conference the day after the show was canceled. “Here we are regarded as rebels and extremists.”
Thomas Bolyn Smothers III was born on Feb. 2, 1937, on Governors Island in New York Harbor, where his father, a West Point graduate and major, was stationed. The family relocated to Manila, Philippines, when his father was reassigned. Shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the family moved again, to the Los Angeles area, where Tom and Dick’s mother, Ruth (Remick) Smothers, had grown up. She found work in an aircraft factory.
Mr. Smothers’ father remained on Corregidor in Manila Bay to fight and was taken prisoner on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. He survived the Bataan death march, but in 1945 he died of injuries sustained when American planes mistakenly bombed the prison ship transporting him to a camp in Japan.
Mr. Smothers attended an assortment of schools as his mother descended into alcoholism and moved from husband to husband. In 1955, he graduated from Redondo Union High School, where he was a state champion on the parallel bars.
While in high school, he and Dick, two years his junior, sang in a barbershop group that won second prize on “Rocket to Stardom,” a local talent contest broadcast from the showroom of a Los Angeles Oldsmobile dealer.
At San Jose State College, where Mr. Smothers studied advertising, the brothers decided to ride the folk music wave and formed the Casual Quintet. In early 1959, by then a trio with Bobby Blackmore as lead singer, they began performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, a popular showcase for folk singers and comedians, billed as the Smothers Brothers and Gawd.
Gradually, the brothers introduced comic patter into their act, satirizing the folk music scene and turning their sibling rivalry — which was genuine — into shtick. The act “slowly evolved to be a running argument between two brothers who sang but never finished a song,” Mr. Smothers said in 2006.
Audiences loved it. Their two-week engagement at the Purple Onion was extended to nine months, and in 1961 the Smothers Brothers, now a duo, were booked into the Blue Angel in New York.
Robert Shelton, reviewing the show in The New York Times, compared Mr. Smothers’ delivery to “a frightened 10th grader giving a memorized talk at a Kiwanis meeting.”
He added, “He speaks in a nervous, distracted sort of cretin double-talk that has him stumbling over big words, muffing lines with naive unconcern, singing off-key, committing malapropisms, garbling lyrics and eternally upstaging his younger brother.”
The brothers became regulars on “The Tonight Show” with Jack Paar, “The Garry Moore Show,” and “The New Steve Allen Show.” They signed with Mercury Records and recorded “The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion,” the first of several successful albums. They toured college campuses nonstop.
In 1963, Mr. Smothers married Stephanie Shorr. The marriage ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Rochelle Robley. In addition to his brother, he leaves his wife, Marcy Carriker Smothers; their son, Bo, and daughter, Riley Rose Smothers; and a grandson. His son from his first marriage, Thomas Bolyn Smothers IV, died this year.
In a statement, Dick Smothers said, “Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner.”
In 1965, CBS gave the brothers their own sitcom, “The Smothers Brothers Show,” produced by Aaron Spelling. It did not play to their strengths: Mr. Smothers played a probationary angel sent back to earth to move in with and watch over his brother, a swinging bachelor played by Dick.
The ratings were strong, but it was a miserable experience. Deprived of their instruments and a live audience, and saddled with a laugh track, the brothers struggled.
“It was a nothing show,” Mr. Smothers told The New York Times in 1967. “There was no point of reference, nothing meaningful, no satire in it.”
After “The Garry Moore Show” failed to challenge “Bonanza” on Sunday nights, Michael Dann, the head programmer at CBS, took a chance on a Smothers Brothers variety show.
Expectations were low, but “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” connected with viewers, especially younger ones, and outperformed “Bonanza” in the ratings. The humor was irreverent, the writing was sharp, and musical guests like the Who and Jefferson Airplane broke the variety-show mold.
The brothers looked like clean-cut collegians, but their cheery, up-tempo songs could bite. “The war in Vietnam keeps on a-ragin’,” one began. “Black and whites still haven’t worked it out. / Pollution, guns and poverty surround us. / No wonder everybody’s droppin’ out.”
A war with CBS executives began almost immediately, and a pattern quickly developed. The censors would cut words, lines, or entire sketches. Mr. Smothers would fight to have them reinstated, often successfully. When thwarted, he would complain loudly and publicly.
After CBS cut the words “breast” and “heterosexual” from an early sketch, written by Elaine May, about two professional censors (played by Mr. Smothers and May), Mr. Smothers told the Times: “The censors censored the censorship bit.”
He lost the first round of his campaign to have Pete Seeger, absent from television after being blacklisted in the 1950s, perform his antiwar ballad “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.” The segment was pulled in 1967 but broadcast a year later.
“Television is old and tired,” Mr. Smothers told McCall’s magazine in 1968. “Television is a lie. The people who censor our shows are all conditioned to a very scared way of thinking, which is reflected in the kind of programs the networks put on. Television should be as free as the movies, as the newspapers, as music to reflect what’s happening.”
CBS began insisting that an advance tape of each week’s show be sent to the network and its affiliates for their review. In April 1969, when the tape of a show that included a satirical sermon delivered by comedian David Steinberg failed to arrive on schedule for the second time, CBS informed the brothers that they had broken their contract and that the show would be canceled.
The move was not a complete surprise.
“Tommy has been sticking pins in CBS ever since he started feeling his oats when he found he could command good ratings,” Percy Shain, the television critic for The Boston Globe, wrote. “He has been at times snide, ugly, resentful, bullheaded. . . . Every deletion meant a battle.”
TV Guide, in a stern editorial, deemed the cancellation “wise, determined and wholly justified.”
The brothers briefly returned to network television in 1970 with the tepid “Smothers Brothers Summer Show” on ABC. The next year Mr. Smothers, increasingly outspoken on politics, starred, without his brother, in “Tom Smothers’ Organic Prime Time Space Ride,” a syndicated half-hour variety show that was long on relevance and short on laughs.
“I lost perspective, my sense of humor,” he said in the 2006 interview. “I became a poster boy for the First Amendment, freedom of speech, and I started buying into it. It was about three years when I was deadly serious about everything.”
Mr. Smothers pursued a career as an actor, in “Serial,” “The Silver Bears,” and other movies. With his brother, he appeared in the comedy “I Love My Wife” on Broadway in 1978 and on a national tour.
The brothers reunited on television in 1975 for a new, tamer version of “The Smothers Brothers Show,” broadcast on NBC, and a 1988 reunion show. But their career ended as it had begun, in concert performances.
Mr. Smothers added a new comic persona to the act, Yo-Yo Man, performing dazzling yo-yo tricks that he learned after falling in love with the song “(I’m a) Yo-Yo Man.” In 2010, Mr. Smothers announced that he and his brother were retiring as an act.
In an interview for the Archive of American Television in 2000, Mr. Smothers looked back on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” and its impact: “The country was going through a revolution — a social revolution, a political and consciousness revolution, about government and its part. We tried to reflect that.”