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.TheSmothers Brothers preferred to invite musical guests who represented thecounterculture, groups such as The Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield,and Simon and Garfunkel, for example.As the show began its second season in the fall of 1967, CBS generated con-siderable publicity by inviting on the show the folksinger Pete Seeger, whoseantiestablishment songs had caused him to be boycotted from network radioand television since 1950.For the taping of the show Seeger performed hiscomposition Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a song about a World War IImilitary leader who led his patrol into a deep river and caused many of themen, including himself, to drown.Seeger intended the song as a parable ofwhat he considered the stubborn and misguided policies of President LyndonJohnson, who was sending American troops into disaster in Vietnam; the songended with the refrain, and the big fool says to push on. CBS Standards andPractices ordered the number cut from the show.Such direct censorshipcreated considerable controversy in industry circles, major publicity in thepress, and fierce battles between the Smothers Brothers and the network.InFebruary, as proof of the network s dedication to free speech, Seeger was in-vited back on the show, where he was allowed to sing an entire medley of anti-war songs, including the one that had been cut earlier.In David Marc s ac-count of the incident, however, one can sense how controversial such aperformance remained for many in Middle America:Though many reluctant CBS affiliates had been embarrassed into carrying thesegment by the publicity that the censorship incident had generated, thenetwork s Detroit affiliate WJBK, owned by the Storer Broadcasting Company,saw fit to turn off the sound during the last verse of Big Muddy on the night ofthe telecast.8one line short Tueth's v-viii-102 9/28/04 10:41 AM Page 9898 Laughter in the Living Room|Other musical guests created similar controversy.For the first show of theirthird season, the brothers planned to include a performance by Harry Bela-fonte (by then a major spokesperson for the civil rights and anti-war move-ments) of a song called Don t Stop the Carnival. As Belafonte sang the ca-lypso song, singing, Carnival s an American bacchanal, the screen showedimages of the previous summer s Democratic National Convention, with theviolent confrontations between the Chicago police and anti-war demonstra-tors outside the convention hall and the rounding up of journalists inside thehall.CBS, however, cut the five-minute segment.Hal Himmelstein describesthe bizarre outcome of the network s action:To fill the dead air created by the CBS cut, Tom and Dick attempted to insert astudio audience question and answer segment they had shot, but CBS rejectedthat plan and instead aired the show in its shortened version.Adding insult to in-jury, CBS, with the five-minute gap to fill, sold the time to Republican presiden-tial candidate Richard Nixon.9Later in the season, on March 2, 1969, the antiwar activist Joan Baez s per-formance on the show included a song dedicated to her husband, David Har-ris, who had recently been sentenced to three years in prison for draft evasion.This incident was recalled at the end of the show s run in a commentary in TVGuide, which asked: Shall a network be required to provide time for a JoanBaez to pay tribute to her draft-evading husband while hundreds of thousandsof viewers in the households of men fighting and dying in Vietnam look on inshocked resentment? 10 Even in an era when matters of major political andmoral consequence on a national scale were being examined, the image of thefamily gathered around the television hearth was once again invoked as the ap-propriate context for judging the content of television entertainment.Besides the music, the sketches on the show, from the very outset, werebuilt on the anti-establishment humor of the stand-up comics and avant-gardetheater of the times, with special criticism of the Vietnam War.A recurringsketch on the series, called Share a Little Tea with Goldie, featured a stonedhippie, played by the avant-garde comedian Leigh French, offering her com-ments about the joys and problems of marijuana and other recreational drugsand some off-color jokes as well.She typically employed terms with doublemeanings, so that the word roaches would have one meaning for the oldergeneration among the viewers and another for the younger viewers.In thesecond season one of the new breed of hip comedians, David Steinberg, pre-sented a mock sermonette with an irreverent version of the story of Moses andthe burning bush, which prompted the highest amount of negative viewermail in the show s history.One of the most popular features of the show was Tueth's v-viii-102 9/28/04 10:41 AM Page 99Looking Out the Picture Window 99|the weekly satirical editorial provided by the comedian Pat Paulsen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.TheSmothers Brothers preferred to invite musical guests who represented thecounterculture, groups such as The Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield,and Simon and Garfunkel, for example.As the show began its second season in the fall of 1967, CBS generated con-siderable publicity by inviting on the show the folksinger Pete Seeger, whoseantiestablishment songs had caused him to be boycotted from network radioand television since 1950.For the taping of the show Seeger performed hiscomposition Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a song about a World War IImilitary leader who led his patrol into a deep river and caused many of themen, including himself, to drown.Seeger intended the song as a parable ofwhat he considered the stubborn and misguided policies of President LyndonJohnson, who was sending American troops into disaster in Vietnam; the songended with the refrain, and the big fool says to push on. CBS Standards andPractices ordered the number cut from the show.Such direct censorshipcreated considerable controversy in industry circles, major publicity in thepress, and fierce battles between the Smothers Brothers and the network.InFebruary, as proof of the network s dedication to free speech, Seeger was in-vited back on the show, where he was allowed to sing an entire medley of anti-war songs, including the one that had been cut earlier.In David Marc s ac-count of the incident, however, one can sense how controversial such aperformance remained for many in Middle America:Though many reluctant CBS affiliates had been embarrassed into carrying thesegment by the publicity that the censorship incident had generated, thenetwork s Detroit affiliate WJBK, owned by the Storer Broadcasting Company,saw fit to turn off the sound during the last verse of Big Muddy on the night ofthe telecast.8one line short Tueth's v-viii-102 9/28/04 10:41 AM Page 9898 Laughter in the Living Room|Other musical guests created similar controversy.For the first show of theirthird season, the brothers planned to include a performance by Harry Bela-fonte (by then a major spokesperson for the civil rights and anti-war move-ments) of a song called Don t Stop the Carnival. As Belafonte sang the ca-lypso song, singing, Carnival s an American bacchanal, the screen showedimages of the previous summer s Democratic National Convention, with theviolent confrontations between the Chicago police and anti-war demonstra-tors outside the convention hall and the rounding up of journalists inside thehall.CBS, however, cut the five-minute segment.Hal Himmelstein describesthe bizarre outcome of the network s action:To fill the dead air created by the CBS cut, Tom and Dick attempted to insert astudio audience question and answer segment they had shot, but CBS rejectedthat plan and instead aired the show in its shortened version.Adding insult to in-jury, CBS, with the five-minute gap to fill, sold the time to Republican presiden-tial candidate Richard Nixon.9Later in the season, on March 2, 1969, the antiwar activist Joan Baez s per-formance on the show included a song dedicated to her husband, David Har-ris, who had recently been sentenced to three years in prison for draft evasion.This incident was recalled at the end of the show s run in a commentary in TVGuide, which asked: Shall a network be required to provide time for a JoanBaez to pay tribute to her draft-evading husband while hundreds of thousandsof viewers in the households of men fighting and dying in Vietnam look on inshocked resentment? 10 Even in an era when matters of major political andmoral consequence on a national scale were being examined, the image of thefamily gathered around the television hearth was once again invoked as the ap-propriate context for judging the content of television entertainment.Besides the music, the sketches on the show, from the very outset, werebuilt on the anti-establishment humor of the stand-up comics and avant-gardetheater of the times, with special criticism of the Vietnam War.A recurringsketch on the series, called Share a Little Tea with Goldie, featured a stonedhippie, played by the avant-garde comedian Leigh French, offering her com-ments about the joys and problems of marijuana and other recreational drugsand some off-color jokes as well.She typically employed terms with doublemeanings, so that the word roaches would have one meaning for the oldergeneration among the viewers and another for the younger viewers.In thesecond season one of the new breed of hip comedians, David Steinberg, pre-sented a mock sermonette with an irreverent version of the story of Moses andthe burning bush, which prompted the highest amount of negative viewermail in the show s history.One of the most popular features of the show was Tueth's v-viii-102 9/28/04 10:41 AM Page 99Looking Out the Picture Window 99|the weekly satirical editorial provided by the comedian Pat Paulsen [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]