Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

April 5, 2010

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” by David Bianculli

Filed under: History — Randolph @ 3:55 pm

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour by David Bianculli
This is a good history of the Smothers Brothers. The majority of the book covers the story of their show and their fights with CBS. It does a good job of portraying the facts of the issue and does not pretend to portray the brothers (Tom) in the best of light. It clearly shows Tom going to far to create problems where compromise or moderation would have served his own goals better.

The book does a very good job of putting the events into their place in history. Clearly the Vietnam War is an important part of this, but it also draws on the general politics with LBJ and others, social movements, CBS, and the CBS battles with NBC and ABC.

The one disappointment was that some of the stories were repeated. They were in different contexts, but it seemed like whole paragraphs were copied and pasted. I would have preferred that a different perspective were provided, or different details to keep the information fresh.

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