Tom Smothers, Half of Music-Comedy Duo Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86

Tom Smothers died on Tuesday (December 26) at his residence, the National Comedy Center introduced. The comic and musician had been residing with most cancers. Smothers was 86 years outdated.

Thomas Bolyn “Tom” Smothers III was born in New York in 1937. Along with his household, together with youthful brother Dick, Smothers moved to California the place he graduated from Redondo Union Excessive College and attended San José State Faculty. At school, in 1959, Tom and Dick Smothers fashioned a folks music group referred to as Informal Quintet and commenced to carry out at San Francisco’s Purple Onion. They secured a kind of residency on the venue, performing for a formidable 36 weeks.

By 1961, Tom and Dick Smothers had been going by their trademark title, the Smothers Brothers, and obtained themselves booked at New York’s Blue Angel. Reviewing the “pair of tart-tongued singing comedians” for The New York Times, Robert Shelton wrote, “The attraction of the Smothers Brothers totals multiple Tom Smothers plus one Dick Smothers. It’s a results of a great deal of musical acumen and a recent kind of stinging satire, directed at a discipline vast open for it—folks music. The pair use a cruel number of musical and comedy units to smother the folk-song craze in wit.”

Shelton praised Tom Smothers, specifically, attributing the “bulk of the humor” to him and describing the older brother, then 24 years outdated, as “a high-cheekboned bright-eyed guitar-player with a wealth of brow and inventiveness.”

Within the early Sixties, the Smothers Brothers featured usually on tv packages like Jack Paar’s Tonight, The Judy Garland Present, Burke’s Regulation, and The Ed Sullivan Present. And, in 1965, the brothers debuted their very personal sitcom, The Smothers Brothers Present. The present made it lower than a 12 months and was succeeded by the extra profitable The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967. The range program featured musical visitors like George Harrison, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Janis Ian, Ray Charles, and others, and boasted up-and-coming comedy writers like Steve Martin, Bob Einstein, and Rob Reiner.

The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was canceled in 1969, and Tom Smothers has said he believed CBS ended this system as a consequence of stress from the newly elected president, Richard M. Nixon. “When Nixon mentioned, ‘I would like these guys off,’ they had been off,” Smothers mentioned in 2001, as The New York Times notes. “If [Vice President Hubert H.] Humphrey had been elected, we might have been on.”