Dangerously Funny by David Bianculli

Author:David Bianculli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: THE UNCENSORED STORY OF THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

“It had come from the scriptwriters first,” Belafonte recalls, “and then it had been put before me, seeking my vote as to whether I found anything about the sketch offensive—and, if I did approve of it, would I be willing to play in it? And I wholeheartedly approved of it and was willing to play in it.”

In the sketch, Pat Paulsen plays Ben Cartwrong, Belafonte plays Little Jerk, and Mama Cass is Hass. (Parodying, respectively, the patriarchal Ben Cartwright and his sons Little Joe and Hoss.) The spoof opens with a branding iron burning a map, as on the Western they’re lampooning—but instead of “Bonanza,” the branding iron reads “Censored.” And the plot, quickly unveiled, involves the kidnapping of a local family—the Nielsens—by a pair of outlaws (played by Tom and Dick) known as the Smut Smothers. They arrive with bandanas covering their mouths—bandanas that read “Censored.” The sketch includes several calculatingly naughty plays on the name Hass (as in “grab Hass” and “wise Hass”), one well-received Belafonte ad lib (when Tom strips Belafonte’s Little Jerk of his fake mustache, Belafonte raises his gun and says, “Put my hair back, white boy!”), and a twisted sight-gag climax in which former Los Angeles Rams football player Rosey Grier, dressed in drag, emerges from hiding—literally, comes out of the closet—as the long-missing Ma Cartwrong. Belafonte’s classic reaction, “Oooh, you a big mother!” somehow made it past the censors without complaint, as did the part where Rosey, as Ma, picks up “son” Little Jerk, hugs him, and plants a kiss on his forehead.

“Here comes this black woman, in a male form,” Belafonte says, laughing. “It was so funny. It was so really, viscerally funny.” Yet the kiss Rosey Grier planted on Belafonte’s forehead, the singer continues, offered “a lot to be said to the homophobic men all over the world. It was a wonderful, wonderful thing that show did.”

Equally wonderful, and no less daring, was the final capper to the skit, when Rosey, as Ma, kisses the forehead of Mama Cass’s Hass. (“Now they’ll never get the Nielsens back,” says a mustache-twirling Tom.) Take away the gender-bending comedy play-acting of Rosey Grier playing a woman and Mama Cass playing her son, and what you have, on national television, is a white woman being kissed, albeit on the forehead, by a black man. This is only five months after the Petula Clark–Harry Belafonte incident. Yet the CBS censors were so concerned about the “Hass” puns in the sketch, and so infuriated by Belafonte’s “Carnival” number, that the rest, for the most part, slipped on by.

The day the show was taped, the first interoffice CBS memo was sent, chastising the West Coast operation for allowing Comedy Hour representatives to screen and copy network news footage of the convention there. Then the real fighting began, with CBS standing firm on its rejection of the “Carnival” number and Tom standing equally firm on arguing for its inclusion. By September 25—four days before the season premiere was scheduled

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