COMEDY REVIEW : Unsmothered Brothers Retain Their Droll Edge

The Smothers Brothers of the ‘90s are not a whole lot different from the Smothers Brothers of the ‘60s. There’s something old, something new, nothing borrowed and nothing blue.

It’s an act a mother could love.

Dick played the bass and spent most of the night trying to finish a song. Tom played guitar and kept interrupting. Nothing new here. But the duo’s timing is so polished that it keeps the act from stalling or getting old.

Tom wants to dedicate the the inspirational “The Impossible Dream” to U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia because of the golf crisis in Kuwait. Dick gently corrects him, reminding him it’s a gulf crisis.

Bad pun, right? But then, after the perfect pause:

“I’d like to dedicate this song to all the golfers in the audience tonight,” Tom says before he continued the “Impossible Dream” sequence and brought in George Washington.

“Washington slept here. Washington slept there. And he became president. Today, that’s an ‘Impossible Dream.’ ”

Dick wants to know what message Tom gets from the song. Tom tells him about the cherry tree chopping incident, “Cherrygate.” Tom brings up Washington’s confession: “I cannot tell a lie, I did it.”

“Some historians,” Tommy chides, “believe he was the last president with memory.”

Playing before about 900 people Thursday night at the Civic Theatre downtown, a one-night stop in San Diego, the real-life brothers, now in their early 50s and decked out in blue tuxedoes, still use the banter that has made them elder statesmen of comedy. Tom (ever the doof) and Dick (ever the exasperated bass player) have, however, dropped the mom-always-liked-you-best routine.

They have also expanded over the last 10 years, bringing in a yo-yo and a piano.

The show’s finale is the yo-yo extravaganza, in which Dick plays the emcee while his older brother elevates himself to the exalted Mystical State of Yo.

Tom, hunched at the shoulders and now wearing baggy pants and yellow suspenders, returns to the stage shucking and jiving, bobbing and weaving. The high priest of yo-yo is cool. He’s hip.

He walks the dog, rocks the baby, shoots the moon and even launches his yo-yo into space, using his right pants pocket as a landing pad. All the while, Dick provides running commentary. Tom is actually quite good. In fact, it is more of a yo-yo demonstration than a comedy routine, but when he almost bobbles a finish, Dick cracks: “That looked more like a save-your-ass trick.”

The act also incorporates a musical trio these day. Piano player Michael Preddy was drafted in 1981 to give the musical portion of the show some organization. Preddy also participated in a few routines, including one in which he matches Tom note for note (including the sour ones) in a truncated version of “Dueling Banjos” after Tom has ruined yet another song and waved Dick and his bass out of the spotlight.

The political part of the show is relatively downplayed and can’t really be considered biting satire.

“Why do you want to start (the show) with a lie?” Dick asks. “National policy,” Tom responds.

If there is a complaint about the show, which is now in its 32nd year, it would be that the act is too polished and too scripted. Comedy needs a splash of spontaneity.

But the act is a refreshing one in its avoidance of sex jokes, off-color language and gutter humor. The brothers managed to wrap their music around good humor for an entertaining 55-minute set without dipping into the gutter. They had only one close encounter with blue humor, and it was fleeting, a play on Dick’s name.

It’s hard to believe that these are the same guys whose 60-minute comedy hour was booted off the air by CBS censors in 1969. Too political, the network said. Compared to comedy’s current state of the art, the Smothers and their material are tame.

But can the boys compete with the current crop of shock comics and biting social satirists?

Yo.