The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Carlin used forbidden words and was fired at the Oakton Manor in Wisconsin, the Club Copa in Ohio and the Lake Club in Illinois. America was changing, and defiant figures like Carlin were helping erode the old obscenity laws. Newspaper columnist Jack O’Brian was aghast. He wrote that Carlin “seems lost on the Lenny Bruce path to notoriety and ultimately obscurity . . . To Carlin’s fans who adored his TV and record performances . . . it was a blow to discover he’d gone over to the anti-everything side . . . George seems now an artistic dropout . . . long pony-tail hairdo . . . a totally unwashed, shambling, savagely apologetic aspect as if speaking straight from a hobo jungle.”

  Vice squads were overwhelmed as community standards changed. Topless bars were springing up in urban areas, banned books were being published, marijuana use was flaunted; feminists burned their bras, Black Panthers made demands and protestors occupied the Pentagon. George Carlin’s transition from a clean-cut crowd-pleaser to an underground rebel rouser mirrored the transformation of America in the late 1960s.

  As Carlin became comedy’s hippie spokesman, Bob Hope turned into the spokesman for Richard Nixon’s America. Just like Jack O’Brian, Hope used the phrase “anti-everythings” to describe those who objected to the Vietnam War or marched on behalf of equal rights for minorities. It was a big change for the Hope persona. For many years, a mass audience had enjoyed his movies and radio shows. His programs and films were usually top ten moneymakers. If there was a Hope dissenter it was usually a disgruntled employee, but by the late 1960s he was a controversial figure. He had a distinctive political point of view that made him a hero to some and a pariah to others. If Carlin exemplified the change in America, Hope exemplified those who resisted that change.

  Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, had his first gig writing jokes for Hope and considered him a progressive guy in the 1940s. “He didn’t care if you were Chinese or black or Jewish, you wrote a good joke and he would love you.” Hope worked extremely hard to earn his $25,000 per episode. His radio show broadcast thirty-nine episodes per season and for a long time there were two different broadcasts each week, one for the East Coast and another for the West Coast, totaling an insane seventy-eight live broadcasts per season.

  Hope was the first comedian to invest in volume writing. In the old days, it was unusual for a show to have more than three writers. “Hope really invented a new way of writing comedy,” said Schwartz. “Jack Benny had two writers originally—then all of a sudden, Bob had seven or eight guys. At that time, nobody was doing that.”

  By the mid-1960s Hope was one of the wealthiest men in America and one of the largest private landowners in California. Radio star, television star, movie star—he’d achieved every possible show business goal. There was nothing left. And without ambition driving him, the quality of his comedy plummeted. He was still doing up to six television specials each year, but he was phoning it in.

  John Barbour, a stand-up comic turned commentator, became disenchanted with his hero. Working as an on-air critic for NBC in Los Angeles, he objected to Hope’s television work. “I saw a Bob Hope special and it was absolutely dreadful. I said, ‘At sixty-five I have to retire because, like those who work in factories, it’s compulsory. Well, they should have the same law for comedians—or ­ex-comedians—like Bob Hope.’ The phone started to ring. His lawyer called, his agent called and then the general manager came over. ‘John, you’re going to have to talk to these people.’ The phone rings and this voice says, ‘Hey, pal! What I ever do to you?’ It was Bob Hope. I said, ‘You bored me, that’s what. Mr. Hope, you were one of my favorites when you were in radio and movies, but you were just god-awful on your special, and shame on you.’”

  Woody Allen was quick to credit Hope as a major influence, but had to clarify that he was referring to his early work. “There is a tendency to confuse his television work and his politics with the best of his stuff—and that’s wrong. His politics, in my opinion, have been atrocious. His television shows—he just walks through them and reads off cards. But I found him [to have been] a very, very gifted comedian. There are films that he did, that if you watched with a full audience, you would find them quite hilarious.”

  But in the late 1960s his movies, just like his television work, were shoddy. Despite supporting comic talent like Phyllis Diller, Peter Leeds and Jonathan Winters, Hope’s later films played like bad sitcoms with anti-hippie jokes and generic situations. His focus was elsewhere. The majority of his time was no longer devoted to film or television. Hope channeled most of his energy into a formulaic but effective stand-up act done for American soldiers stationed around the world.

  When Hope first started with military tours, his film studio wasn’t thrilled. Paramount suspended him in 1944 for abandoning a movie to entertain troops instead. “The studio says they’ve suspended me,” said Hope. “They’ve got it all backwards. I’ve suspended them.”

  He cultivated his all-American image during the Korean War and was hailed as a selfless patriot. By 1963 the persona was so entrenched that kidnappers planning to snatch his son changed their minds. “Hope is a good American and has done so much in entertaining troops,” decided one of the culprits. They kidnapped Frank Sinatra Jr. instead.

  Hope had not articulated a political position prior to Vietnam. He golfed with politicians of either party and was a friend as long as you were powerful. If he addressed politics it was on a superficial level, making fun of the president’s golf game. He didn’t take a stance for fear of alienating world leaders. John Lahr of The New Yorker wrote, “All clowns in the American theater have been conservative men. Outsiders who crave to be insiders. They can’t risk being offensive because they might be pushed out in the cold again. [Bob Hope] may use political humor but basically he preaches acceptance, satisfaction with what is.”

  It was a lesson Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl did not care to heed—and it was no coincidence that their careers faded out. Hope lamented that Sahl and Gregory “go a little too deep and people resent it, so they aren’t invited anymore.” But Hope lost sight of this very advice and would suffer a similar fate. His opinions bolstered supporters of the Vietnam War, but alienated moderate fans. Vietnam was polarizing, and Hope could not comprehend the dissent. On the lecture circuit, he insisted antiwar protestors were “on some kind of dope” and consisted of “fringe groups that are trying to louse it up, backed by certain people, subversive forces.”

  Vice President Spiro Agnew chastised protestors at the end of 1968, elevating his crotchety persona. In an effort to improve Agnew’s image, Hope assigned his writers to punch up his speeches. “We’re reluctant dragons,” said an anonymous Hope employee. “We hate writing for a repressive reactionary like Agnew, but when you work for Hope these days, that’s part of the job.”

  Hope had never publicly endorsed a politician in the past, but now he endorsed the actions of Mayor Daley in Chicago after the riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and stood behind Ohio governor Jim Rhodes when he called Kent State protestors “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” Hope told Life magazine that he “looked into the Kent State thing very carefully and I believe—I know it for sure—that that wasn’t just students there. And if they were students, they were led. They get hooked up with subversive forces . . . I do believe in a Communist conspiracy in this country. Don’t you? . . . You see kids up on the Sunset Strip . . . smoking this stuff, and 75% or 80% of them have social disease, see?”

  Hope played Vietnam every year from 1964 through 1972. The stage shows consisted of a long Hope monologue, dancing girls, a popular singer of the day, a guest comic or current TV star and an orchestra. The television specials put together from these tours aired on NBC every Christmas and dominated the Nielsens. The stamina of Hope and his crew was rather remarkable. In 1969 he played to soldiers stationed in Guam, Italy, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. The Black cast member of Laugh-In, Te
resa Graves, joined his tour and sang “The Weight.”

  Ron Kovic, the dissenting soldier immortalized in Born on the Fourth of July, remembered, “When they filmed us, they tried to make us feel that we might be seen by our families back home—Hope exploited every soldier who ever fought in that war. As a kid I had seen Hope’s Korea shows on TV, but as I sat there in ’Nam, the romance I had felt about them was gone. Our [positive] response to him came out of fear and loneliness.” At one base Hope assured his audience, “President Nixon asked me to tell you he has a solid plan for ending the war.” A contingent of skeptical troops booed him.

  As the counterculture dominated discourse and more soldiers began to smoke weed, Hope amended his material. During his seventh tour of Vietnam he joked onstage, “I hear you are interested in gardening here. Growing your own grass. Before the show I saw a sergeant standing in a corner with a lampshade on his head waiting to be turned on. Where else can you spend eight years on grass and not get busted? Instead of taking grass away from the GIs they should give it to the negotiators in Paris.”

  As the monotony of the war continued, some bases rejected Hope for the first time. The chief of the Special Services said he wasn’t able to book Hope in some spots because of strong resistance from the contingent of “now generation GIs.” He said, “Older pros such as Bob Hope, Art Linkletter, George Jessel and others are unacceptable to the troops of the 18–25 group.”

  Many who supported the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s were now joining the growing chorus calling for withdrawal in the early 1970s. Hope, however, continued to insist that those opposed to the war were a “lunatic fringe that gets mixed up with outsiders and subversive forces. I can’t believe that American kids would [protest], they’d have to be doped up, or they have to have companions that are anti-everything. Ladies and gentlemen, when you hear politicians running on a peace platform, suspect them! History will record that [America] not only saved South Vietnam but all of Southeast Asia, and saved us from having a big fight on our shores.”

  Old men like George Jessel were among Hope’s only political allies in comedy. Jerry Lewis became an unlikely critic of the Vietnam War when his son Gary returned from the fighting. “He came back totally devoid of any feelings or emotions,” said Jerry. “He just doesn’t give a damn about anything anymore.” Lewis considered moving his family to Switzerland so no more of his children could be drafted.

  Jack Benny sponsored a luncheon for Richard Nixon at the Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles and grew close with Spiro Agnew. Benny referenced Vietnam only once: “I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I’m a registered Whig. President Fillmore, after all, kept us out of Vietnam.”

  Stan Freberg turned antiwar sentiment into a bit of comedic activism. The former CBS Radio comedian was hired to write three commercials endorsing the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment, which called for withdrawal from Vietnam. One featured an exchange between a toy seller and a customer:

  [gunfire]

  “And over here we have the 1971 Vietnam War toy.”

  “Is that the same war that’s on TV every night?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “You just wind it down. Watch.”

  [slower gunfire]

  “It’s still going.”

  “Oh yes, I didn’t say it stopped, it just winds down.”

  “But . . .” [gunfire]

  “Let’s step into the next room where it’s a little quieter.”

  “The implication in the term ‘winding down’ . . . [gunfire] Say, I can still hear the battle noise from the war toy.”

  “You’ll get used to it, the further away you are from it, you know.”

  “Isn’t there any way to stop it?”

  “There is.”

  [narration] The United States Senate is about to vote on the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam by the end of 1971 so that an end to the fighting and the return of all prisoners is allowed to become a reality. Send a telegram now in support of the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment or call your senator and congressman in Washington.

  President Richard Nixon was a common target for comedians, and that was no surprise. What was surprising was that the reverse was also true—comedians were a common target of the president. Any disparaging remark made him defensive and he used the tools of the presidency to fight back. Groucho Marx gave an interview to an underground newspaper called Flash and said, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon’s assassination.” The FBI reopened its Groucho file, still full of filings from the blacklist years, and branded him a national security risk.

  Groucho was a cantankerous elder statesman, appearing regularly on late night talk shows complaining about the president. “Townspeople said to hide their daughters when they knew actors were coming to town [during vaudeville]. Today actors are invited to the White House! But I don’t want to be invited there! Nixon! I hate that son of a bitch. I’ve hated him for more than thirty years.”

  David Steinberg said undercover Nixon agents targeted his stand-up gigs in the early 1970s. Steinberg was at the Plaza Hotel in New York when two FBI agents told him they had information about a death threat and were assigned to protect him. Steinberg claimed his shows were sabotaged for several months after the visit. Whenever he did political material, pro-Nixon hecklers catcalled. A few months later Steinberg saw those same concerned agents on television during the Watergate hearings. They were not FBI agents at all, but employees of the administration.

  Woody Allen made a PBS television special called Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story in 1971, a half-hour satire of Henry Kissinger. The mockumentary was a natural follow-up to Allen’s directorial debut, Take the Money and Run. It opened with a Kissinger-esque character played by Allen, complaining on the phone: “I want you to get an injunction against The Times. Yes, it’s a New York, Jewish, Communist, left-wing, homosexual newspaper. And that’s just the sports section.”

  President Nixon already believed PBS was against him and had sent word through Clay Whitehead of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy that criticism of the administration would result in funding cuts. PBS screened the Woody Allen special for its legal department, which found nothing objectionable. Still, station president Ethan Hitchcock wrote a memo: “Under no account must it be shown.”

  “It was not terribly incisive, but there was a big to-do over it at the time,” said Allen. “They would only put it on if I edited out certain remarks. Of course, by that time they had painted me into a corner where I couldn’t take anything out of it—it would look terrible in my biography years later! What could I do? I wouldn’t give an inch and finally they just dropped it. The stuff that’s in that thing was very mild.”

  Tom Smothers produced a low-budget motion picture in 1972 called Another Nice Mess. Directed by Bob Einstein, the film starred Rich Little as President Nixon and Herb Voland as Spiro Agnew, portraying them as if they were Laurel & Hardy. Steve Martin played a hippie protestor in one sequence—his film debut. Word about the production reached the White House. Watergate henchmen Chuck Colson and H. R. Haldeman warned White House counsel John Dean of the “derogatory film about the president being produced by the Smothers Brothers.” Dean sent undercover men to “assess its potential impact.”

  An insider who was sympathetic to the antiwar movement contacted Smothers to let him know “a drug bust was being set up.” Smothers was advised never to travel alone. He mailed a letter to the attorney general of California outlining his suspicion that he was being framed. Smothers was in an editing session of Another Nice Mess in Los Angeles when his Bay Area home was raided and the furniture upended. Nothing was found.

  Peter Lawford screened Another Nice Mess at a Democratic fund-raiser in Beverly Hills, Bob Einstein promoted it on The Dick Cavett Show and Rich Little plugged it on The Tonight Show, but the film was barel
y distributed. The Nixon administration had nothing to do with it. Tom Smothers buried it himself: “It was a terrible film.”

  Those considered underground or subversive would soon become the establishment—and there was no greater example of such an evolution than Lorne Michaels. Once a pot-smoking cokehead intent on destroying the old order, he became the most influential leader of the mainstream comedy establishment.

  In 1965 Michaels was a University of Toronto graduate directing shows at the Bohemian Embassy, Canada’s answer to Greenwich Village coffeehouses. It was a dark little room that hosted poetry readings and had one of the city’s first espresso machines. Michaels directed a show starring Don Cullen, a character actor best known for his work with the comedy team Wayne & Shuster. It featured sketches about Cold War paranoia and the perils of cigarette smoking. Michaels wrote them under his birth name, Lorne Lipowitz, and staged the entire production. He was looking for a collaborator when he phoned his schoolmate Hart Pomerantz. “Lorne Lipowitz came to me when I had just graduated law,” said Pomerantz. “He phoned me. ‘Do you want to be in show business? I want to be in it fulltime.’ I said, ‘I have to be a lawyer—and be in show business.’ The first thing I did [as a lawyer] was change his name to Lorne Michaels. He didn’t like Lipowitz. In those days you had to go to court and give reasons to the judge [to prove] you weren’t avoiding creditors. I went to the judge and said, ‘Your honor, my client’s name is Lipowitz and he wants to change it to Michaels and here are my reasons.’ He said, ‘I don’t need any reason.’ I said, ‘Thank you, Judge Lipshitz.’”

  They wrote sketches in their off-hours while Pomerantz practiced law and Michaels worked for Cinethon, an underground film festival that presented guests like Kenneth Anger and Shirley Clarke. In 1967 they made their first sale, to CBC Radio’s The Russ Thompson Show, and were hired as regulars, doing phony man-in-the-street segments. Michaels played straight man to Pomerantz’s different characters. Their routines were collected on an LP called The Comedy of Hart and Lorne and distributed to CBC Radio stations around the country.