Mom Liked Tommy Best.

My memory (which is probably about 60% reliable at this point) tells me that the cable network, TV Land, when it launched in the early 90s, ran the whole season of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and that’s where Jay and I studied their act and began to emulate it. Jay was Tommy, and I was Dick.

I don’t know if that was before or after we started getting compared to them in the press, but it shaped what we did in a huge way. They were the unrivaled masters of a particular mid-century genre of duo comedy, often but not always with singing: George and Gracie Allen, Sonny and Cher, etc., and Jay and I wanted to be everything they were: hilarious, musically legit, old-fashioned enough for your Southern grandmother, subversive enough for the East Village, sweet, political but unthreatening, always the most entertaining act on the bill. We studied how they made each other funny and we wanted to do that.

The Smothers Brothers were one of those culture-changing acts who most people don’t remember now or know who they were, which is sad, but you can see their influence in so much of what came after. Kind of like Y’all (or I like to think so anyway).