The Smothers Brothers
Comedy/singing team the Smothers Brothers has been entertaining audiences on stage, record album, and, most famously, on television for more than 40 years. "Mom always liked you best!" stuttering, slow-witted comic dunce Tom Smothers on guitar would complain to his supercilious, smooth-talking, straight-man brother Dick on bass as they both crooned folk songs and engaged in comic banter, often with pointed political overtones. The Smothers Brothers' penchant for political satire resulted, in the late 1960s, in one of the most celebrated and infamous cases of television censorship as the brothers battled their network, CBS, over the antiwar and countercultural content of their top-rated variety series, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour —a precursor of later shows such as Saturday Night Live. Attempting to bring some of the political and social turmoil of the era into prime time, the Smothers Brothers discovered the limits set by American commercial television in the 1960s for controversial material in entertainment. Their variety show, with its ongoing battles against network censorship, become a flash point of debate about the role of popular entertainment in the process of social change.
Nothing much in the Smothers' background would indicate that they would become rebels against the system.
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