Smothers Brothers update classic act
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It's OK if you don't know. Lots of people don't: The Smothers Brothers are alive.
"I get a feeling that a lot of people aren't sure, and then they're surprised that we're not in wheelchairs or walking on crutches," Tom Smothers confirms, laughing.
(It's also OK if you don't know: Tom, 64, is the silly one. Dick, 61, is the scolding one with the mustache.)
Where are they now?
Well, right now, Tom is talking from the home he shares with a wife and two young children, in the middle of the brothers' Sonoma Valley vineyard, where they make their award-winning Remick Ridge wine. After 43 years performing together, the boys need a little space. Dick lives in Las Vegas and is moving to Florida.
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Apart from where they physically are, the legendary comedy duo performed 91 dates last year and come to Seattle's Paramount Theatre Saturday night. Dick also does corporate speaking. There's a cable-TV biography of them in the works, as well as a Showtime movie dramatization of their lives. And they're distilling the best moments from their 1960s variety show into video compilations aimed for late this year.
And while it's OK not to know any of that, it's definitely not OK to forget this: For three turbulent years until 1969, "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was a must-see, challenge-the-status-quo bona fide TV event that made history and launched careers.
Tom's philosophical about it. "We're kind of becoming a repository of the historical museum of show biz. I'm asked more often to do these things, some tape on Glen Campbell for `Biography,' a thing on John Lennon and the Bed-In for Peace. I passed on the Mama Cass one. ... God, if I'd have known I was going to be that important, I would have kept notes."
But watching the old shows makes him uncomfortable, because they were a product of their crazy time. Viewed out of context, Tom says, some of it doesn't hold up so well. Still, universities have studied the shows, and New York's Museum of Broadcasting held a retrospective.
So where are the brothers now in terms of their act?
"Our problem right now, because we like performing, is being contemporary and historical at the same time. And that's, I guess, what Tony Bennett managed to do," Tom says.
Bennett gets help from an impressive hairpiece. But Tom and Dick play less folk music than they originally did in their act, and there's the same bickering but less yelling. Tom's silent Yo-Yo Man character is still part of the act, too.
Doesn't he accidentally smack anyone with the thing at this point?
"Oh yeah: me," he says.
(By the way, it's also OK if you don't know that Tom's stupidity is a persona. Like many comics, he developed it as a defense mechanism when he was a boy. "It gave me a lot of position and power. I would be in control of situations by acting the idiot, make everybody uncomfortable and all of a sudden I was running the show.")
But the brothers' relationship - bickering and all - is for real. "We've been antagonists since we could talk," Tom says. "I can't believe it's been that long. Just like an old marriage. Lot of fighting, no sex."
In fact, four years ago, after many ups and downs and reaching a point where they didn't talk after shows, Tom and Dick went to high-priced corporate psychologists to work on their relationship. "We called them marriage counselors."
You don't have a relationship if you don't work on it, Tom says. And one result of the work is praise for Dick as the long-suffering straight man. With the Smothers Brothers - as with Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Abbott and Costello - no matter which one Mom liked best, the straight man makes the act. "You see those films without Abbott, it'd just be a guy screaming," Tom says.
Yes, the Smothers Brothers are still alive, and they're sustaining a tradition in a time when "straight man" means somebody who's not gay.
"We're the last comedy team," Tom says.
Mark Rahner can be reached at 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com.