Tossing the complete-season
model for TV-on-DVD out the window, Tom and Dick Smothers are debuting The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on DVD with its infamous third season: the one that led
to CBS unceremoniously firing the duo for stretching the boundaries of
acceptable social commentary in a lighthearted variety show. And the Smothers
don't offer the whole season, either—just 11 of the season's 25 episodes.
According to Tom's audio introduction, he wishes he could've cut even more. If
he'd had his way, the set would only contain the season's most memorable,
trouble-stirring moments.
Frankly, if Tom had gotten
his way, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: The Best Of Season 3 would be insufferable. As
Tom points out in the intro, in spite of the show's reputation for being
incendiary and controversial, the political jokes and sketches typically took
up five to 10 minutes of any given hour. The rest of the airtime was filled out
by musical performances and relatively benign stand-up comedy by the Smothers'
weekly guests. By the time the brothers reached the third season of the Comedy
Hour in
1968, they'd begun to drum up media attention for their behind-the-scenes
battles with the network censors, and were occasionally making jokes about the
ruckus on the air. As a result, the more socially conscious material on the Comedy
Hour now often
comes off as self-congratulatory and insular, alluding to offstage business
that was headline news at the time, but feels distant today.
Nonetheless, The
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour is still entertaining—and radical. A lot of
the material that CBS cut still stings, like David Steinberg's "sermonette"
about Jonah's trouble with Gentiles, or Harry Belafonte's comparison of the
1968 Democratic Convention to a carnival attraction. But what plays even better
are the Smothers themselves, harmonizing on old folk songs, then slipping
easily into semi-improvised banter, in which Tom would fumble for words and
Dick would chastise him, not entirely in jest. The's wonderful sense of
recklessness to the Smothers' bits fits squarely between the parade of
entrenched showbiz types and quasi-radicals they invited onto their stage. The
show's politics were so potent because they were part of an hour of
entertainment as mainstream as a voting booth.
Key features: A slew of interviews, previously censored
material, archival rehearsal footage, a hilarious 2000 U.S. Comedy Arts
Festival panel with the Smothers and three of their best-known writers (Mason
Williams, Bob Einstein, and Steve Martin), and a fourth disc containing the
one-hour 1968 Pat Paulsen For President special, plus related arcana.