Mothers' Brothers

Like shooting bottles off a barnyard fence, the gunslingers on NBC's top-rated Bonanza have for several seasons systematically picked off every show offered in the opposing time slots. Five months ago, CBS rushed in a pair of suburban slickers, and to the industry's surprise, they knocked Bonanza out of the No. 1 slot and made the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour the most popular new TV show of the season.

They did it by shooting from the lip, dauntlessly laying down a crossfire of patter that is often more fizzle than sizzle. Sample exchange from this week's season-ending show:

Tom: Stay tuned for a trip-around-the-world contest.

Dick: Wait a minute--there's no trip-around-the-world contest.

Tom: I was kidding.

Dick: Then there's no contest?

Tom: Yes, there's a contest, but there isn't any world.

Holcey Hip. The peculiar appeal of the Smothers is that they pull off these bum mots with such a deceptive air of wide-eyed innocence that the cornier the material, the louder the laughs. A more apt name for them would be the Mothers' Brothers. "We attract the kind of fans that want to mother us," says Dick, 28. "We're so college-looking and clean-cut," says Tom, 30. "The American Legion likes us and so does the left wing." And so does every wing of the younger generation. The boys have the jug-eared look of Nebraska citybillies, or malt-shop cowboys. Even when they are mildly suggestive, they seem as harmless as two choirboys sneaking a smoke behind the organ. Their style might be described as hokey hip, wholesome enough to trade hayseed one-liners with Guest Jim Nabors (TV's Gomer Pyle), upbeat enough to book such shaggy rock groups as the Jefferson Airplane.

Dick is the straight man, Tom is the bumbling buffoon. Between skits, they sing fractured folk songs. In the middle of Michael, Row the Boat Ashore, for example, Tom will interrupt with a snigger: "Hey, Michael, you'd better get that boat back; you'll lose your deposit." Or, eyes rolling like lopsided marbles, stuttering as though his tongue were mired in sludge, he will launch a monologue that begins anywhere and goes nowhere. When Dick glowers disapprovingly, Tom bawls like a seven-year-old: "Mom always liked you best."

Sons of a West Point Army major who died on a Japanese P.O.W. ship, the brothers were raised in Redondo Beach, Calif. "Tommy was the biggest bunch of trouble," recalls Mother Smothers. "He used to get Dickie and Sherry, their younger sister, to take picnic baskets to the cemetery and eat off the tombstones." At San Jose State College, they were the rage of the Phi Kappa house, and eventually they graduated to a local college hangout, where they were paid off in peanuts and beer. Their twisted versions of folk classics ("Black is the colour of my love's true hair") neatly spoofed the ethnic folkniks, and within a few years the brothers were smothered with TV offers. On Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, Tom met Bette Davis, launched into a disjointed discourse in praise of her acting, then suddenly exclaimed with a sly leer, "Hey, do you mess around?" Bette howled, and has been their most devoted fan ever since.

Compulsive Kook. Offstage, the Smothers Brothers are like the two halves of a split personality. Dick is the stable, soft-spoken father of three who would like to retire and tinker with his fleet of seven cars. Tom is a walking jangle of exposed nerve ends. He has an ulcer and has divorced his wife. He arrives at the studio on a motorcycle toting a kiddie's lunch box filled with avocado sandwiches, which he munches during rehearsals to placate his ulcer. He is a compulsive kook, strolls into a nightclub and begins waiting on tables, tools around town in his 1940 Packard sedan wearing a chauffeur's hat while his date sits in the back seat.

One measure of the Smothers' success is that in August they will take their nightclub act to Las Vegas for the superstar fee of $35,000 a week. As Jack Paar once told them, "I don't know what it is you do, but nobody's going to steal it." The producers of Bonanza are at least going to try. This fall they are going to introduce a new youthful character into the show in an attempt to counteract the "freshness and vitality" of the brothers Smothers.

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