Paulsen never had another successful year like that of 1968. Despite the fame it brought him, he regretted the campaign in the years that followed. “The problem was that the 1968 election was so close that it took days before anyone could admit that Nixon actually won the thing,” said the Bitter End’s Paul Colby, who booked Paulsen. “Pat ran his campaign as a joke and actually wound up getting about one percent of the vote. Pat regretted it because he knew that those votes cast for him would have likely gone to [Democratic challenger] Hubert Humphrey.”
The quiet subversion of the Paulsen segments spread to the general sketches during the program’s third season in 1969. Tom Smothers hired a brand-new staff of untested writers for the program’s summer replacement, starring Glen Campbell. The group included Steve Martin, Bob Einstein, Carl Gottlieb, Mason Williams, Lorenzo Music, Rob Reiner and Murray Roman. Steve Martin says the outgoing old men “were very nice. There was no real conflict. It was just kind of an undercurrent.” Smothers says, “The guys were pretty young. There were a couple older guys, and the young guys thought they were CIA.”
Bob Einstein was the son of Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein. Like his father, he started in advertising and entered show business as a sideline. In 1967 he made some amusing appearances on Bob Arbogast’s regional Los Angeles talk show. Like his father, Einstein was a master of the deadpan put-on. He sat beside Arbogast posing as the man in charge of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, explaining his job in preposterous, convincing detail. Tom Smothers caught the segment and hired him. Einstein says, “We all started on Glen Campbell’s Summer Brothers Smothers Show and then we moved en masse to the Smothers [program].”
Smothers liked hiring musicians for writing positions. He knew many of them from the Ice House in Pasadena and the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard. New hires Hamilton Camp and Mason Williams were adept at playing folk songs. “The first thing we wanted to do was bring in people with fresh ideas and new approaches,” said Smothers. “A musical background gives a person more freedom and depth than anything else. People in music are used to expressing themselves; they have more rhythm, better pacing. By the time we completed our staff, we only had two writers who weren’t musicians.”
Cy Howard was no musician. An unlikely straggler at The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he was three times older than the rest. The former Martin & Lewis screenwriter just didn’t fit in. “Cy Howard was one of the oldest people in the world,” says Einstein. “Tommy went to his house to buy it. Cy said, ‘I wrote My Friend Irma!’ Tommy said, ‘Do you want a job?’”
“Cy Howard was a concession to the network,” says Carl Gottlieb. “The network was concerned that there were too many young writers and not enough old hands. I found him irritating, superfluous and nasty. Cy Howard would participate in the pitching with old radio jokes. When we’d pitch to the brothers and they rejected an idea, Cy would say to us in front of the Smothers, ‘I told you it wouldn’t work!’—when he hadn’t told us anything of the sort. He was out of touch, but he tried to ingratiate himself by wearing a marijuana leaf belt buckle.”
Smothers Brothers staff writer Murray Roman was a stand-up comic in love with Lenny Bruce and LSD. Initially he worked at MCA under his birth name, Murray Rosen, managing acts like the Righteous Brothers. He moved into stand-up after his agent’s license was revoked. Television writer Ken Kolb was one of his clients, and said, “The D.A. came and got him. After he served time in Chino [prison], he became a nightclub comic. He [was] the prison librarian. He made a fairly decent living selling the key to the library restroom to various guys who wanted a place to meet their lover! The locked restroom in the library became Murray’s whorehouse! When he went to jail he swindled all thirteen of his clients, for various sums.”
By 1959 Roman was a free man and started playing San Francisco clubs like the hungry i. In the mid-1960s Elaine May was directing him at The Premise in a one-man show called The Third Ear and he was recording a comedy record that sounded almost like a Lenny Bruce impression. Comedy writer Marshall Brickman called Murray Roman “like Lenny Bruce without the genius.” He was the primary counterculture figure in the hallways at CBS Television City, providing his coworkers with sativa and psilocybin.
“Murray turned the Smothers Brothers on to acid and was their dope guru,” says Gottlieb. Bob Einstein says, “He was absolutely wild-looking with the hair and yellow glasses and the way he dressed. He was a yidlock from New York, but he lived as Lenny Bruce.” His psychedelic comedy record, You Can’t Beat People Up and Have Them Say I Love You, featured routines about police brutality and smoking banana peels. Psychedelic reverb echoed at the end of every punch line. “He was in the right place at the right time,” says Gottlieb. “His performances are recorded, so you get a flavor of what the trend was in comedy. He found Lenny, idolized him and channeled him. He got a record deal and he worked as a writer with Steve Martin.”
Martin says, “He wasn’t really a writer. He was very patterned after Lenny. He just sort of stood up in the room and spoke. His ideas came from just being spontaneous, which kind of irritated us writers. He was always cheering for the right side and going against the establishment. He was a sweet guy at heart.”
On a 1968 episode of The Les Crane Show, there was an on-air fight between Roman and television comedian Marty Ingels. Ingels said Roman’s comedy LP was filthy and Roman yelled, “You will do anything to make yourself a star. I haven’t. I was offered fifty thousand dollars if I would cut out two words and I refused because I felt they were social context. I had a chaplain say, ‘Kill a gook for God, boys.’ That was social comment.”
The third season of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was greeted with skepticism from the network. “The head of West Coast CBS sent a letter to Tommy Smothers after he saw the first show,” says Einstein. “[He] blasted Tommy for hiring young kids who didn’t know what the hell they were doing and he should be ashamed, all this stuff. And then the reviews came out and the ratings came out and he wrote a great letter back calling himself an asshole.”
Enjoying the power of a hit television show, Tom Smothers became a mogul in the hippie scene. He oversaw a mini-empire that managed and bankrolled other artists. He, Ken Fritz and Ken Kragen founded a company that represented musicians Mason Williams, Kenny Rogers and the Hammond Organ–playing Detroit Tiger pitcher Denny McLain. They bankrolled the West Coast production of Hair, made a documentary called My Brother, The Racer about Dick Smothers’ obsession with fast cars and invested in a primitive tech company called Computer Image. Tommy had a hand in everything, even introducing Otis Redding at the Monterey Pop Festival while high on acid. Smothers, now a counterculture tycoon, sat in the CBS office that once belonged to Danny Thomas. Where Thomas once sat gloating, beaming, smoking a big fat cigar, there was now Tommy—gloating, beaming, smoking a big fat joint.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was renewed for a fourth season in March 1969. So it came as a shock when just weeks after that announcement, it was canceled. Reasons for the cancellation vary depending on whom you ask. “It was my fault,” said Tommy Smothers. “I was a head; I smoked, I was a weed dude. I’d come on and try to be so cool.”
Gottlieb says, “In a strategy to avoid network censorship, Tommy would delay the delivery of the Sunday show tape until the last possible minute. Even then the network would preview our show for the affiliates and they would make notes on what was objectionable. Even though they couldn’t physically edit the tape anymore, the red states would instruct the transmitter engineer to dump the sound at questionable moments.”
Comedian David Steinberg contended that his appearances on the program led to the cancellation. Steinberg delivered satirical sermons in a church setting, which upset some religious viewers. Gottlieb says there were other factors. “Steinberg likes to say that his monologues were pivotal in the cancellation. They weren’t. It makes him appear more important than he was. Tommy chose to portray it as a poli
tical disagreement, but it was also that we were pushing the envelope of general taste—tit jokes and erection jokes. CBS was the ‘Tiffany Network’ at that time, the favorite network of the older people in the country. It was as much about general censorship as politics.”
Smothers was angry, but he still had his production company. He sold a series to ABC called Music Scene that showcased the top pop acts on the Billboard charts. It featured comedy interstitials with Lily Tomlin, David Steinberg and members of The Committee. Gottlieb wrote for that program as well. “Our producer was partially deaf—a nice guy, but completely out of touch and old-fashioned. We had Janis Joplin and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on the show, but he’d be pushing for Nino Tempo and April Stevens. It started at 7:30 and ran till 8:15 in an attempt to break the channel-switching habit. [Committee founder] Alan Myerson wanted casting control and to rotate members of The Committee. The network said no and insisted on a fixed cast. Steinberg’s manager at that time was very aggressive. She had disproportionate influence. Halfway through the season she convinced the network that David should be the focal point of the show. They pushed everyone else aside. They fired Lily Tomlin, but kept David Steinberg.”
Lily Tomlin had a repertoire of characters she honed at the Upstairs at the Downstairs in the mid-1960s. Inspired by the classy stand-up of Jean Carroll and the records of Nichols & May, Tomlin was essentially an actress with a comic bent. She performed on programs like The Garry Moore Show and The Merv Griffin Show as a smarmy telephone operator, a barefoot tap dancer and a rubber-eating maniac on programs. Joan Rivers was one of her earliest champions. When Music Scene let Tomlin go, producer George Schlatter immediately hired her to do the characters on Laugh-In. Her telephone operator Ernestine—a direct descendant of a bit done by 1930s actress Helen Troy—was the breakout character. It wasn’t long before Tomlin had a best-selling comedy record and a pair of award-winning specials.
Laugh-In, more than any other program of its period, was a starmaker. It featured fast sketches, go-go dancers in psychedelic body paint and the Joke Wall, in which cast members poked their heads through cardboard doors doing one-liners. It was an effective combination of old-fashioned burlesque methods and 1960s hippie aesthetics. George Schlatter ran with his “comedy vérité” invention, working closely with editor Carolyn Raskin to develop their jump-cut technique. Schlatter says, “She was fucking brilliant. Carolyn started with me as a script girl and did all of the editing on Laugh-In. Those bright, fast cuts—all of that was Carolyn. When you watch shows now, everything is a two-second shot and the camera is always moving. Laugh-In helped create that.”
It altered the pace of television comedy. The comedy itself was not particularly influential, but the speed at which it was presented was. Furthermore, much of its cast and crew, from writer Lorne Michaels to actress Goldie Hawn, became important industry players. Hawn was an unknown with only one sitcom on her résumé when she was cast. When Schlatter aired outtakes of Hawn stumbling over her lines and giggling, it charmed America and she became a sensation.
Laugh-In landed on the cover of Time. It was merchandised in the form of trading cards, lunch boxes, a magazine, linens based on the backdrops and even an ill-fated restaurant chain. It became so popular that it spawned a succession of spin-offs: Turn-On—a fast-edit comedy with an accent on sexual content; Letters to Laugh-In—a daytime game show based on viewer mail; Arnold’s Closet Revue—a sketch vehicle for cast member Arte Johnson; Soul—an all-Black version of Laugh-In featuring Redd Foxx, Lou Rawls, Slappy White and Gregory Hines; and Burlesque Is Alive and Living in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, starring Goldie Hawn—which the network refused to broadcast because it showed too much skin.
Its success spawned imitators. Manager Bernie Brillstein implemented the Laugh-In concept for the country and western comedy Hee Haw. “I’d found a list of the week’s top ten shows on my desk and I’d been staring at it, waiting for inspiration to strike. Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Laugh-In . . . Suddenly it hit me: How about a country Laugh-In? We’ll have a cornfield instead of a joke wall. Obviously, I’d liberally helped myself to everything I could from Laugh-In.”
Hee Haw replaced psychedelia with hayseeds, marijuana with moonshine, but 1960s influences were unavoidable. Hee Haw cast member Lulu Roman was busted for amphetamine, marijuana, LSD and “some unknown capsules.” Sentenced to four years in prison, she brokered a deal that allowed her to appear on Hee Haw, provided she return to jail after each taping.
The changing tides of late 1960s America were well exemplified by George Carlin. He went from being a mainstream darling on laugh-tracked variety shows to comedy’s spokesman for the hippie generation. LSD was partially responsible for Carlin’s change of direction, but he also knew that with the counterculture influencing fashion, music and political discourse, it was a sound business decision to gear things toward the hippies. “It seemed to me at the time that he was emulating hippies—not being a hippie,” says Carl Gottlieb. To a degree, Carlin’s transformation was a marketing choice.
Carlin’s seven appearances on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965 widened his audience. “The Merv Griffin Show was my big breakthrough,” he said. “All that happened afterward flowed from that.” In 1966 he opened for crooner Jack Jones in Las Vegas and did a sitcom pilot for Fred de Cordova called Manley and the Mob. He was cast as a regular on the Marlo Thomas sitcom That Girl and wrote for The Kraft Summer Music Hall, along with fellow staff writer Richard Pryor. Singer John Davidson hosted The Kraft Summer Music Hall, and it featured comedian Flip Wilson in his first major television appearance. While most comedians in 1966 chose marijuana or psychedelics as their drug of choice, Wilson was already deeply into cocaine. Backstage he shared his wares with Pryor and Carlin, long before either developed their habits. The summer replacement was inconsequential, but it got Carlin and Pryor into the Writers Guild. “John Davidson himself was bland as hell but easy to please,” said Carlin. “Nothing seemed to upset him. One reason could’ve been, as he told me years later, that he’d fucked every girl on the show.”
Carlin appeared on The Hollywood Palace in October 1966. He had to follow Adam West dressed as Batman and singing “Orange Colored Sky.” It was the kind of gig Carlin was tired of. “I was in the depth of this kind of discontent. I’d open for the singer and I’d do these cute little things and I just knew I wasn’t being true to myself. I was a victim of my own success.”
A couple weeks later, at the Roostertail supper club in Detroit, RCA engineers recorded a weekend’s worth of shows. The result was the 1967 release Take-Offs and Put-Ons, Carlin’s first solo comedy record. “Take-Offs and Put-Ons came out and went gold,” said Carlin. “It was nominated for a Grammy and lost by a squeaker to Bill Cosby.” The record took Carlin to the next echelon. “I was playing the biggest nightclubs in the country.”
Hollywood called in 1968. With Six You Get Eggroll, starring Doris Day and directed by Sid Caesar’s former stooge Howard Morris, was Carlin’s film debut. It was again at odds with his new psychedelic perspective. “From when I was a kid, I wanted to be Danny Kaye. It had to do with being in the movies and being funny. But underneath there’s this pot-smoker. Psychedelics helped me to have confidence in instincts and to act on them. All of that came to fruition after With Six You Get Eggroll. I found out I can’t do this shit. Man, they want you to change a little bit here, get out of Doris Day’s light . . . Fuck all that!”
Carlin was an emergency replacement for Sarah Vaughan at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago in November 1969. He did three shows high on LSD. Variety noticed something was different, but had no idea he was tripping: “He looked to be a trifle under the weather, which affected his normally first rate timing and delivery and as a result came across as somewhat uneasy. It is to his credit that despite these difficulties he provided the type of solid 45-minute act that had the auditors palming for more.”
Coming down from his p
sychedelic experience, Carlin played Washington, D.C., where he entertained Vice President Spiro Agnew and other enemies. From there he went to the Copacabana, opening for pop star Oliver. Jules Podell objected to Carlin’s reference to a bordello and fired him.
Such conflict became more common, as Carlin sabotaged his mainstream standing. “All of my friends had been working their way through the folk movement and were going into the hippie movement . . . They were saying what they were thinking about, what they saw wrong with the country. And here I was doing silly things for audiences of older people who were the parents of my friends and I realized what assholes they were. I had a few incidents in nightclubs where I provoked the audience or they provoked me and it became a scene.”
He emerged in Las Vegas in September 1970 with his first beard. He was booked at the Frontier as the opening act for the Supremes, their first time without Diana Ross. He was held over when Al Martino came in as the headliner. “I don’t say shit,” Carlin told the conservative Martino fan base. “Down the street Buddy Hackett says shit, Redd Foxx says shit. I don’t say shit. I smoke a little of it, but I don’t say it.” The Frontier fired him for “offensive and abusive language toward the audience.”
On November 28, 1970, Carlin and Bette Midler were performing at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a venue attached to a bourgeois ski resort. Carlin made mention of the Vietnam War. “Of course, we’re leaving Vietnam. We’re leaving through Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. It’s an overland route! Gotta remember why we’re there in the first place.” Carlin adopted a confused look as he tried to recall why America was in Vietnam. The audience grew restless during his second show “and management feared for his personal safety.”
Carlin next played an outdoor festival with folkie Arlo Guthrie along Lake Michigan. He was arrested by a police officer who “couldn’t believe [his] ears.” With a cop waiting in the wings, Carlin’s wife walked onstage and removed his jacket, which contained a vial of cocaine. When Carlin walked off he was busted for language, but escaped further charges. The grievance was later thrown out of court.
The Comedians Page 31