A fast-paced, informative reminder of the importance of speaking out.
A comprehensive history of the embattled, groundbreaking variety program The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
NPR TV critic Bianculli (Dictionary of Teleliteracy: Television’s 500 Biggest Hits, Misses, and Events, 1996, etc.) traces the development of the Smothers’s act, which began in 1967 and featured the stuttering, spacey Tom and his straight-laced brother, Dick, performing acoustic folk songs interspersed with zany asides and brotherly bickering. This family-friendly act would ironically serve as a springboard for some of the most daring commentary and satire to appear in a prime-time program up to that point—a distinction that secured the Smothers’s legacy as TV pioneers and, ultimately, cost them their platform and lead to a disastrous relationship with their network, CBS. The author effectively conveys the excitement generated by the late-’60s heyday of the Comedy Hour in its young fans, as its mandate to present fresh new musical acts, including the Who and Buffalo Springfield, and to comment on social issues stood in sharp relief to the staid fare typical of the day. A fascinating cast of characters, including the writer and musician Mason Williams, faux presidential candidate Pat Paulsen, hippy love child Leigh French and irreverent monologist David Steinberg, keeps the narrative hopping, and Bianculli captures the special essence of each performer. The heart of the story concerns Tom Smothers’s epic clash with the draconian standards and practices (read: censorship) department of CBS. The author details the infamous cutting of Pete Seeger’s anti-Vietnam ballad “Waist Deep in Big Muddy,” the fallout from Steinberg’s edgy religious material and censored appearances by Harry Belafonte and Elaine May, as well as Tom’s cheeky brinksmanship and legal battles with the corporate culture at the network. It’s striking to realize how mild much of the contested material seems today, which speaks to the climate of caution and fear that ruled mainstream TV entertainment in the ’60s. The Smothers Brothers lost their show in 1969, but won victories that continue to pay dividends to this day.
A fast-paced, informative reminder of the importance of speaking out.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0116-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor...
The stand-up comedian and actress opens up about her past and the perils of being a woman in comedy.
In her uncensored and often hilarious debut memoir, Haddish reveals pivotal events from her personal life that helped propel her toward the stage. “I got into the entertainment business so I could feel accepted,” she writes. “And loved. And safe.” After learning about the trials of her early years, readers will appreciate how trying to make a roomful of strangers laugh could prove easier than negotiating the minefield of the author’s home life. Though somewhat dismissive of her uncanny ability to rise above adversity, Haddish provides a colloquially written rags-to-riches story that is both impressive and harrowing. Abandoned by her father at age 3 and forced to live with her grandmother at 8, after her mother was in a devastating car accident that caused permanent brain damage, Haddish spent years taking care of her younger siblings or being abused while in foster care. She turned to humor as a defense mechanism, getting her comedic start as a teen working as an “energy producer” at bar mitzvahs around Los Angeles. Once her grandmother learned she would no longer receive financial support for caring for her granddaughter, she turned Haddish out, causing her to become homeless at 18. At 21, the author’s stepfather told her that not only was he responsible for the accident that had forever changed her mother, but that it had been meant to kill her and all her siblings so he could cash in on the life insurance. After learning this, Haddish says she started dating policemen. “It’s always good to have police friends,” she writes, “especially black police, because there aren’t a lot of them.” The author’s unrelenting positivity and openness about how insecurities about her own self-worth led to poor decisions later in life offer important lessons and hope for others seemingly trapped in toxic relationships.
Both entertaining and grippingly introspective, Haddish’s take-no-prisoners tale is a testament to self-will and how humor can save your life.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight...
“Vietnam, man. Bomb ’em and feed ’em, bomb ’em and feed ’em”—a chopper pilot summarized the war strategy for Herr.
And with Herr’s belated volume of unfiled dispatches from the front, the awareness grows that this war—like no other since WWI—continues to produce a rich lode of literature, part litany, part exorcism, part macabre nostalgia. Like his buddies Scan Flynn and Dana Stone—later MIA in Cambodia—Herr was a correspondent with a license to see more than just a single mud hole. Using the “Airmobility” of the helicopters, he hopscotched the country from Hue to Danang to the DMZ to Saigon (“the subtle city war inside the war” where corruption stank like musk oil). He was at Hue during the battle that reduced the old Imperial capital to rubble, at Khe Sanh when the grunts’ expectations of another Alamo were running high. Between mortar shells and body bags he reflected on the mysterious smiles of the blank-eyed soldiers, smiles that said “I’ll tell you why I’m smiling, but it will make you crazy.” And Herr, who is full of twisted, hidden ironies, is all wrapped up in the craziness of the war, enthralled by the limitless “variety of deaths and mutilations the war offered,” and by the awful “cheer-crazed” language of the official communiques which always reported spirits high, weather fine. He knew, and his buddies knew, that this kind of reportage was “psychotic vaudeville”—though not for a moment would he deny the harsh glamour of being a working war correspondent.
He came home eventually, to do the “Survivor Shuffle” and miss Vietnam acutely, and he writes with a fierce, tight insistence that never lets go.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1977
ISBN: 0679735259
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
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