The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Before Carl Gottlieb wrote the screenplays for Jaws and The Jerk, he was a member of the group. “The Committee was a huge hit,” he says. “It was playing through the summer and they were drawing tourists, the Berkeley crowd, beatniks and hipsters.” Larry Hankin, a future Breaking Bad actor, recruited Gottlieb. “Larry Hankin told me how great San Francisco and Los Angeles was. There were ten rock ’n’ roll clubs on the Sunset Strip. The Byrds were playing at the Whisky a Go Go and there were clubs called It’s Boss and The Trip. It was happening in Los Angeles. In San Francisco you had the Jefferson Airplane and Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium, and all this stuff happening at the same time.”

  As with The Premise and Second City, The Committee was very much influenced by Lenny Bruce in terms of language, subject matter and drug use. The Committee’s first scripted show was to be the life story of Bruce, and the man had sanctioned it himself, before paranoia took over. He decided the hippies were trying to exploit him and threatened to sue if they went forward with the show. It did nothing to diminish their admiration. “We in The Committee all looked up to him tremendously,” says Gottlieb. “He was influential in that he made it okay to riff onstage, to find material in performance, which is why improvisers related to him. Because Lenny was a junkie and some of the folks in The Committee were junkies, they would spend time together.”

  After its success in San Francisco, The Committee joined the influx of hippies crowding the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. “We got the Tiffany Theater, which at that time was a three-hundred-fifty-seat movie theater,” says Gottlieb. “We opened in 1968 to uniformly rave reviews. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter gave us raves. The L.A. Examiner and the L.A. Herald gave us a rave. The Avatar and the Free Press, the underground papers, gave us a rave. We were a success across the board, full houses and doing great business, so much so that the Hollywood establishment all came to the show.” Among those in the audience were Tom Smothers, who loved them; Groucho Marx, who hated them; and Sandy Good of the Manson Family, who creeped them out. “Sandy Good had seen me perform with The Committee,” says Paul Krassner. “When people used to ask Sandy Good about Charles Manson, she compared him to me. It was a bizarre compliment.”

  Tommy Chong was a big fan of The Committee. While still an unknown, he regularly checked out its shows. “I went down to Los Angeles and I caught The Committee’s new show while I was there. They were even funnier and fresher than they were in San Francisco. They did a bit where the entire cast got down on their hands and knees and started acting like dogs, sniffing one another’s butts. I thought it was hilarious. We came up with a variation for our next show . . . Even though we were using somebody else’s material I didn’t even think about it at the time.” The sketch morphed into the ass-sniffing dogs Ralph and Herbie, one of the most famous Cheech & Chong routines.

  Marijuana and LSD were huge influences on comedy at the end of the 1960s. It was not uncommon for talk show guests to show up high. George Carlin said he took “a perverse delight in knowing that I never did a television show without being stoned.” Paul Krassner dropped acid before a Tonight Show appearance with guest host Orson Bean. Krassner was immersed in his trip when he walked through the curtain. “I kept staring at Ed McMahon because his face was melting into his chest. Orson asked me, ‘Have you taken LSD?’ He meant in a general sense, but I had this thought, ‘Oh, no, he can tell!’”

  Phyllis Diller encapsulated the older generation’s ignorance of counterculture elements when a reporter asked her if she would remarry. She responded, “What kind of LSD have you been smoking?” Such cluelessness was common as Hollywood’s gatekeepers struggled to relate to the new hippie demographic. Television shows like Dragnet and My Three Sons portrayed counterculture protestors as morons. Carl Reiner’s son Rob was cast in several sitcoms playing such roles. “I did three Gomer Pyles, played a hippie in a couple of them. Did a Beverly Hillbillies, played a hippie in that. I was like the resident Hollywood hippie at the time. I had long hair and they needed somebody. In one of the Gomer Pyle episodes I actually sang ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Gomer.”

  Veteran filmmaker Otto Preminger gave LSD the Hollywood treatment in 1968 with a motion picture called Skidoo. Preminger contacted Rob Reiner to help write dialogue for the hippie characters in his film. “Preminger was a very interesting, liberal guy and he took acid early on,” says Carl Gottlieb. “He wanted to meet The Committee. So we all trooped down to his offices with Rob Reiner.” Reiner said, “I went in and turned out some pages for hippies so that they would say ‘groovy’ in the right place.”

  Groucho Marx was cast in Skidoo as an LSD dealer named God. It was surprising he agreed to it, as he was contemptuous of the new social mores (“That Midnight Cowboy. It’s about a stud and a pimp. I hated that movie”). Marx may have hated the counterculture, but he was hip to many of its elements. He subscribed to Paul Krassner’s paper The Realist, which featured articles about the drug culture. Krassner says, “Groucho was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD, which he had never tried but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip.”

  Groucho Marx high on LSD? Some who knew Groucho question the story. “It’s a fucking lie,” says producer George Schlatter. “Groucho never took acid. He didn’t need acid. Everyone else needed acid!” Carl Gottlieb agrees. “I doubt that story, because my contact with Groucho was around the same time. He was pretty infirm. The acid that was around in those days was the Owsley acid—­Windowpane. It was brain-breaking.”

  “Well, that was the reason Groucho asked me,” Krassner responds. “I have a letter from Lionel Olay, a popular magazine writer. He had interviewed Groucho and Groucho told him he was very curious about LSD. He read The Realist and about my taking trips. Bill Targ, my editor at Putnam, was a friend of Groucho. The writer of the movie Skidoo, Bill Cannon, introduced me to him. Groucho and I had lunch. He asked me if I could get him some LSD. Groucho was not going to go around boasting about this. It was just to prepare for the movie Skidoo. I accompanied him on his trip. We used the home of an actress in Beverly Hills. Phil Ochs drove me there. It was Owsley acid. Three hundred micrograms.”

  Skidoo entered production with a cast that seemed plucked from Hollywood Squares. It included Frankie Avalon, Carol Channing, Frank Gorshin, Peter Lawford, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang and Jackie Gleason. It had a sound track by Harry Nilsson and an unforgettable scene in which Gleason, high on psychedelics, is haunted by the disembodied head of Groucho Marx.

  Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, was not happy with it. “It was a zero on every level,” said Evans after the screening. “The guy [Preminger] cost us a fuckin’ fortune. His new entry belongs in the sewer, not on the screen. He’s such a prick; he gets his nuts off seeing us sink.”

  Several comedians considered their psychedelic trips important, life-changing experiences. “Pot fueled Cheech & Chong during our heyday,” said Tommy Chong. “Pot and to some extent acid. It had changed our world and it put me on a path to artistic and financial success. The spiritual effects and the revelations never leave. The secrets that LSD revealed to me changed my life forever.”

  George Carlin felt the same. “I know exactly when I first did acid—it was in October 1969 while I was playing a major, now long-defunct jazz club in Chicago called Mister Kelly’s. Next to my [notebook] record of that booking, which was otherwise uneventful, is written in a trembling hand the word ‘acid.’ Actually in the course of a two-week gig I did acid multiple times, maybe five, maybe ten. Fuck the drug war. Dropping acid was a profound turning point for me, a seminal experience. I make no apologies for it. More people should do acid.”

  Chris Rush was another comedian who came into being with the counterculture. Psychedelics informed his act. “When I took lysergic acid diet
hylamide I started rapping comedy: full, polished conceptual chunks. It just flowed through me, and I was a stream-of-consciousness comedian. I started doing it for fun in loft buildings and I started doing some clubs. This guy Mark Meyers from Atlantic Records came to see me. He said, ‘This guy talks like George Carlin.’ Bingo, I had a record deal.” His album First Rush sold half a million copies in the early 1970s, mostly to pot-smoking college kids. “They’d get high with twenty of their friends and put the album on.”

  Comedy and the counterculture coupled with the new technology of FM radio. During the early 1960s FM radio was mostly used to simulcast aurally superior versions of AM sister stations. In 1967 the FCC passed an ordinance that ended such simulcasts. It forced FM to devise original programming. In order to fill mass spaces of airtime in a pinch, young disc jockeys turned to playing entire sides of LPs rather than just one song. Soon FM was a place where hippie rawkers and their long jams received maximum exposure. Likewise, comedians who aligned themselves with the counterculture found entire sides of their comedy records being played on FM. College-aged kids tuning in to hear their favorite hippie music were turned on to the comedians being played on the same stations—and those comics saw their ticket sales increase enormously.

  Amid the FM scene emerged an audio comedy troupe called the Firesign Theatre. Phil Austin, David Ossman, Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman met at the newly minted Los Angeles FM station KPFK. They worked in various executive positions and eventually left for KRLA and improvised drug-influenced comedy on the show Radio Free Oz. Surf music producer and KRLA employee Gary Usher used his industry connections to secure the boys a deal with Columbia Records. “I’d see The Byrds at Columbia Studios when we were all recording,” said Phil Proctor. “We didn’t realize how much history we were observing or even making. There was very easy access. People were very friendly and the music brought everybody together. Pot brought everybody together. It was a very sociable scene, you know, hot and cold running girls all the time . . . We were using the Columbia studio where The Byrds recorded, [but] also the radio studio where Fred Allen had been.”

  The Firesign Theatre, George Carlin and Cheech & Chong owed their vast success to FM. The radio stations were listened to by thousands of impressionable college students. “FM radio helped expose the records, and that led to our ability to headline shows on college campuses,” said Proctor. “We were asked to go on the road with the Maharishi.”

  Comedian Jimmie Walker says FM radio was a platform for comedians who never would have been accepted in traditional circles. “They would never have gotten on Carson or anything like that. Lou Adler from A&M Records came up with these guys from ­Vancouver—Cheech & Chong. There was a new thing called FM and Lou said, ‘I’m going to make an album with these guys.’ These guys started selling out colleges, and we were stunned. Nobody was doing that. FM changed everything. It changed the face of comedy.”

  Jack Margolis, a comedy writer who once wrote for Jay Ward cartoons, composed the seminal counterculture comedy record of the time. A Child’s Garden of Grass was based on his satirical paperback of the same name, the first in-depth comedic look at the effects of marijuana. Released by Elektra, the same label that had Jim Morrison and the Doors, A Child’s Garden of Grass had its advertising turned down by every major magazine, was denied a spot on the shelves of Wallichs Music City in Hollywood and was banned in Washington State. An FCC ruling that forbade “drug lyrics” kept program managers from playing it. Despite the kibosh, it sold four hundred thousand copies. Its only real advertising came from a large billboard on Sunset Boulevard across from the Whisky a Go Go. It is impossible to calculate the number of joints that were rolled on its gatefold surface.

  The longhairs dominated radio. Cinema was maturing rapidly. Battles against censorship were being won on both literary and nightclub fronts. But television, beyond its odd spontaneous talk show moment, appeared unaffected by the times. “There was a real revolution happening in other media,” said comedy writer Rosie Shuster. “There were all these Jack Nicholson movies coming out that reflected that sensibility of the sixties. In music there was Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, the Stones and the Beatles. But television was still stuck in some time warp that was more like the fifties.”

  Comedians appearing on The Tonight Show still had to adhere to a traditional dress code. “For a long time the rule on Johnny Carson was tie and jacket,” says Robert Klein. “I came on without one once and Johnny didn’t say anything, but it came down through [Tonight Show producer] Freddy de Cordova: ‘Tie and jacket!’”

  The Smothers Brothers were tie-and-jacket men turned counterculture champions. Initially a common television sight with their baby faces and sharp haircuts, guesting on The Jack Benny Program and The Jack Paar Show, their impeccably timed act led to an insipid 1965 sitcom that was right in line with the Mister Ed genre. Tom Smothers played an angel who could only be seen by Dick Smothers, and the show embraced every cliché in the sitcom book. “It was just vacuous, silly shit,” said Tom. “It went thirty-two shows and won all its time slots and whatever, but it put us off. I said, ‘Man, if I ever had another show, I’m gonna have creative control. There’s gotta be some substance.’”

  The industry was certain the Smothers Brothers were harmless, that they deserved a piece of the showbiz pie. But after his sitcom experience Tom Smothers was ready to quit. In 1966 he was going through a divorce and suffering from a chronic ulcer. He was searching for something else, and the Summer of Love gave rise to new considerations.

  The Smothers Brothers were booked at the Flamingo in Las Vegas when a CBS executive came backstage. He wanted the brothers to consider a variety show on his network. Tom was hesitant, but the money would be good and Dick needed to cover the cost of his growing race car collection. They signed on, and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had three infamous seasons.

  CBS assembled a coterie of Jack Benny veterans to shape the show. Assigned by the network as they were, Tom Smothers was suspicious of their motives. Marijuana influenced his thinking and fueled his skepticism of these older men. He respected the Jack Benny style, but didn’t want to emulate it. Likewise, the writers didn’t trust Tom, believing he was too inexperienced to make rational judgment calls.

  Starting in 1967 an effective group of toilers wrote the program: Gene Farmer, Cecil Tuck, Ron Clark, Al Gordon, Hal Goldman and Sam Bobrick. Saul Illson and Ernie Chambers were producers. Illson says the legend of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour has been distorted, that the third season was not as controversial as some say—and that its early seasons weren’t as tame. “They did a documentary on the Smothers, and for some reason they never mentioned myself or Ernie. When they did the documentary they talked about all the controversy, but they showed clips from our season. Even in those years Lyndon Johnson was just going crazy and we used to get letters from the Bible Belt saying, ‘This show will not go unpunished by God.’”

  Tom Smothers fought the network over every note, but according to Illson, Smothers never had the creative control he believed. “Tommy always went around and said the only reason he did the show was because he got creative control. It’s not true. They had just come off a failed sitcom and CBS was not about to give Tommy Smothers creative control. They didn’t even give that to Jackie Gleason.”

  The most subversive element of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour at that time was a deadpan comedian named Pat Paulsen. Paulsen was a stand-up comic who satirized folksingers. On the television series his persona was altered forever when he delivered editorials as a two-faced politician, a square doofus who took an ambiguous stand on every issue. His character was a cause célèbre for disenchanted voters. Paulsen ran a comedic campaign on the Straight Talking American Government Party (or STAG Party) ticket. “I want to be elected by the people, for the people and in spite of the people.”

  “Tommy told me he wanted to talk about things that were real in the world, but he wanted to
do them seriously,” says Illson. “Tommy wrote the first editorial, but it didn’t belong on the show. I said, ‘It’s not funny. You’re not a spokesperson. If we’re going to do them, then do them with satire.’ So we took the piece and gave it to the writers Hal Goldman and Al Gordon. They wrote the piece and shot it with Tommy. It still didn’t work. So we said, ‘Let Pat Paulsen take a crack at it.’ And Pat was hysterical with the same piece of material. And that’s how the Pat Paulsen editorials started on the show.”

  Paulsen spoke non sequitur wisdom in a monotone voice. A selection of lines from his many monologues during the run-up to the 1968 presidential election:

  I will not run if nominated—and if elected I will not serve . . . I did not want this support. I have not desired it. As I have said, I would rather remain as I am today—a common, ordinary, simple savior of America’s destiny . . . Issues have no place in politics. They only confuse matters . . . The current system is rigged so that only the majority can seize control . . . A good many people today feel the present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers . . . What are the arguments against the draft? We hear it is unjust, immoral, discourages men from studying, ruins their careers and their lives. Picky, picky, picky . . . If you’re old enough to be arrested, you’re old enough to own a gun. Let’s preserve our freedom to kill.

  Paulsen’s campaign culminated with a clever television special, shot on film and narrated in all-American fashion by Henry Fonda. Paulsen wanted to do more television appearances, but his comedy was plagued by FCC interference. His pseudo-presidential campaign was subject to the FCC equal time provision. He filed a complaint with AFTRA—the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists—which fought for the Paulsen side, calling the restriction “an obvious infringement on the right of an artist to pursue his art.”