Tom Smothers, the guitar-playing, yo-yo-slinging ditz of the famed Smothers Brothers, died Wednesday at the age of 86. Beloved by baby boomers of the left-leaning variety, the act featuring Tom and his sibling, Dick, is almost completely unknown to millennials and today’s Gen Zers.
To contemporary comedic sensibilities, the whole Smothers Brothers “concept” may seem anomalous.
When I’ve mentioned the group to my comedy classes, I’ve often been met only with blank stares and furtive attempts to Google them. The Smothers Brothers are unknown to The Youth. Which (says this Gen X observer) might be understandable but certainly is unfortunate. The dramas that emerged around their act — perhaps even more than the goofy antiestablishment jokes that were their bread and butter — foreshadowed and remain relevant to today’s comedic controversies. Their careers show us what ought to happen in a functional Comedic Liberal Democracy.
To contemporary comedic sensibilities, the whole Smothers Brothers “concept” may seem anomalous. To begin with, performing comedic duos have largely gone the way of the rotary phone. The Smothers Brothers were perhaps the last of an era of wildly successful pairings, such as Laurel and Hardy, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello and the ever-unappreciated Nichols and May.
Performing in character (or “persona,” as we like to say) together onstage distinguishes their performance sharply from the few contemporary comedic couples. They include duos who inhabit multiple personas across sketches (e.g., Key and Peele), who play characters in scripted series (e.g., Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott) or who work together in the “politainment” genre (e.g., “SNL’s” Colin Jost and Michael Che).
Nowadays, solo acts rule. Who sits at the intersection of high comedy and heavy commerce in 2024? That would be one-person acts like Dave Chappelle, Hannah Gadsby, Kevin Hart, Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes. Profitable comedic…
Read the full article here