THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR
getTV, 11:00 p.m. ET
This week’s ultra-rare rerun of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour is a presentation of the program’s third-season premiere in September 1968. Tom and Dick Smothers were reeling from, and reacting to, the police brutality that flared outside the Democratic National Convention that summer, as well as the June assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. To start the new season, and acknowledge all the national unrest, the brothers worked with guest star Harry Belafonte to adapt the lyrics of several calypso songs, led by “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” which he would sing in front of a backdrop of film of police clubbing protesters on the streets of Chicago, and similar protests inside the convention itself (“Let it be known,” Belafonte would sing, “freedom’s gone, and the country’s not our own.”) Powerful stuff – so powerful that the CBS censors removed the segment in its entirety. (If it’s reinserted and shown here tonight, as I suspect it will be, you’ll be seeing something that CBS audiences never saw 52 years ago.) The CBS censors also objected to several lines in a comedy sketch in which Belafonte and another guest, Mama Cass Elliot, helped Tom and Dick poke fun at their NBC competition, Bonanza, with a lengthy “Bonanzarosa” spoof. Deadpan series regular Pat Paulsen played patriarch “Ben Cartwrong,” Belafonte was youngest sibling “Little Jerk,” and Mama Cass played “Hass,” her version of behemoth Cartwright brother Hoss. The CBS censors were kept very busy cutting out or bleeping such lines as dialogue as “grab Hass” and “wise Hass” – but what remains is a very funny sketch indeed.