What made “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” so unique, and even revolutionary?
Every now and then everything sort of flips over. The Smothers Brothers show was sort of ground zero in a public sense. New clothes, new philosophy, new music, new art — across the board. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be a part of that. It was exciting to us. I like to think of the Smothers Brothers show as kind of like a prism in that the whole counter-culture just went through the show and refracted out into the general public. CBS thought Tom and Dick would be like two nice, sort of wacky, fraternity college boys, but Tommy was waking up to all kinds of things. I wrote a lot of stuff for Tom and Dick and they were wide open to being arty too. Most television isn’t very arty. They have shows on about art, but in the mainstream, it’s not very abstract, let’s put it that way. And my connection is a weird one. People don’t realize I come from influences from the art world and a lot of my friends like Ed Ruscha were artists, and so I was always interested
