The Brothers' Troubles

Next to impersonations of Ed Sullivan, perhaps the most predictable feature of network television in recent years has been the outburst of yet another feud between the Smothers Brothers and the men in CBS's program-practices division. Otherwise known as censors, these men regularly delete what they consider to be the most offensive cracks from the Sunday evening Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. With equal regularity, the brothers threaten to quit. Last week, after a prolonged dispute over several parts of the March 9 program, CBS bounced the entire show and substituted a two-month-old rerun. The network claimed that the problem was not controversial content but the fact that the tape had not been presented in time for a Friday screening for affiliated stations.

Producer Tommy Smothers vowed that unless CBS eased up on censorship, he and Dickie would leave the network --only this time the boys sounded serious. Tommy maintains that CBS deliberately harassed him by requesting so many relaunderings of the show that it could not possibly have been completed on schedule; the censors, he claims, demanded that several lines be snipped as late as 2 p.m. on Friday, only 20 minutes before the closed-circuit broadcast. "We are not crying wolf," says Tommy, as usual speaking Dickie's mind as well as his own. "We have threatened to give up the show before, but we won concessions and decided to stick with it. But if the network doesn't budge this time, we're through."

Once formidable enough to blast Bonanza from its No. 1 Sunday perch, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour has recently drifted as low as 47th on the Neilsen charts. Though NBC's front-running Laugh-In continues to get out spoken and risque material past its own censors, the Smothers say that often they are required to snip even the mildest material. On the disputed program, for example, Folk Singer Joan Baez dedicated a song to her husband, a convicted draft resister, with the preface: "He is going to prison for three years. The reason is that he resisted selective service and the draft and militarism in general." The second sentence was cut. Also deleted were such soporific bits as Comic Jackie Mason's gag about children playing doctor. There really must be something to the game, Mason said, because "Did you ever hear of a kid playing accountant -- even if he wanted to become one?"

At week's end, CBS confirmed that it plans to go ahead with the Smothers show in the fall season. The network will most likely yield to some of Tom my's complaints, especially since Tommy insists that he would rather quit than fight the censors. "I'm speaking up be cause there's something greater than my feelings involved here. CBS opened the door for us to do this kind of show, and now it looks like they're trying to close it. If they are renewing us, it's not because they want us, but because if they don't, we might go to another net work and come back to haunt them." That may be, but even before the cen sors started snip-snipping, some viewers thought the Smothers Brothers' once excellent program was becoming a ghost of its former self.

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