Ernest Chambers, who as a showrunner for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” a groundbreaking variety show on CBS, battled network censors over the duo’s forthrightness and irreverence about politics, the Vietnam War, drugs and civil rights, died on May 28 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 97.
His daughter Kathryn Mollica confirmed the death.
By the time he joined “The Smothers Brothers” in 1967, Mr. Chambers had written for variety shows hosted by Bob Newhart and Danny Kaye and sitcoms like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “My Three Sons.” While working for Mr. Kaye, he met Saul Ilson, a fellow writer. When Mr. Ilson left to become a producer, he asked Mr. Chambers to be his partner.
“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” — hosted by Tom and Dick Smothers, who blended folk music with comedy — was unlike any other show in its genre, with its countercultural vibe, subversive humor and willingness to rankle censors, some viewers, conservative groups and President Lyndon B. Johnson.
“The show proved you could do topical satire,” Mr. Chambers told The Hollywood Reporter for a 2017 oral history of “The Smothers Brothers,” “which has led to great shows today like ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘South Park.’”
As the producers, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Ilson served as buffers between Tom and Dick Smothers and the censors and network executives who tried to tamp down the groundbreaking show’s political and sexual content.
Censors, for example, cut a sketch in which Tom Smothers and Elaine May played, yes, network censors excited by a porn movie. Also cut was a medley of calypso songs by Harry Belafonte with their lyrics rewritten to illustrate the discord in America. In a sketch about Romeo and Juliet, a line in which Nanette Fabray asked Tom Smothers, “Did you get that girl in trouble?” was bleeped on air.
To avoid the censors’ scissors for naming a hippie character Mary Jane Roach, a clear reference to marijuana, the name was changed to Goldie O’Keefe — since “goldie” and “kief,” while also nicknames for weed, were a bit less obvious. Mr. Chambers said he assured censors that the actress Leigh French, who played Goldie in a recurring sketch called “Share a Little Tea With Goldie,” was not referring to getting high when she greeted viewers with “Hi!”
Mr. Ilson said in an interview that they sometimes tried to distract the censors through misdirection, adding in lines they knew were overkill to preserve the ones they really wanted. “We once had a line that we wanted into the show,” he said, “and Ernie said to the brothers, ‘Let’s put in a line that will offend them even more.’”
One of those intentionally over-the-line lines, he said, referred to Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, as a “known heterosexual.” It was cut, and the line they actually wanted to keep went unnoticed.
Tired of locking horns with the network, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Ilson left the show in 1968 after its second season. CBS canceled it after the third season.
Ernest Albert Chambers Jr. was born on Dec. 28, 1928, in Philadelphia, and grew up in Atlantic City, N.J. His father, who changed his surname from Chambaz when he emigrated from Switzerland, owned a candy shop that burned down when Ernest was 13. His mother, Eleanor (Connell) Chambers, an Irish immigrant, ran the home and worked in the store.
After high school, Mr. Chambers served in the Army, then entered Columbia University. In 1951, he sold his first script, to a radio medical drama called “Dr. Christian,” and later edited Jester of Columbia, the campus’s humor magazine. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1953.
While working for years as an advertising copywriter, he wrote sketches for comedy revues and jokes for standup comics. In 1961, he was hired to write material for “Show Girl,” Carol Channing’s Broadway revue, and then joined the writing staff of “The Bob Newhart Show.” Though it lasted one season, Mr. Chambers was fired after a month when he disagreed with the producer over a rewrite of one of his sketches.
He recovered, writing for a 1962 special starring Mr. Kaye and Lucille Ball, and went on to decades of work as a television writer and producer. He was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards, including three for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.”
Mr. Chambers is survived by his wife, Veronica (Dee) Chambers, whom he married in 1971; their daughter, Ms. Mollica, and son, Christopher, a film director; Alison Chambers, his daughter from his marriage to Arline Rosenberg, which ended in divorce; and five grandchildren. His son Brian, an executive at 20th Century Fox Television, died in 2011.
During the run of the “Smothers Brothers” show, a sketch depicted President Johnson — played by Jim Backus, then a star of “Gilligan’s Island” — as concerned that the Soviet Union was 10 years ahead of the United States in barbecue sauce, an allusion to the missile gap between the two countries. Outraged, President Johnson called William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, one night around 2 a.m. Mr. Paley then summoned Mr. Chambers and Mr. Ilson from Los Angeles to his Manhattan office.
Mr. Paley asked the producers to scale back the show’s mockery of the president and, in return, asked if could do anything for them in return, Mr. Ilson recalled. As it happened, Mr. Ilson and Mr. Chambers wanted to book the folk singer Pete Seeger, who had been blacklisted by the commercial broadcast networks since the early 1950s. Mr. Paley agreed.
Mr. Chambers told The New York Times that Mr. Seeger’s appearance would be “the most significant thing we’ll do all year.”
When Mr. Seeger appeared on the show in the fall of 1967, he sang a few songs, including a new one, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” which was set during World War II but was an allegory for the increasing American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Because of some of the lyrics — including “But every time I read the papers / That old feeling comes on / We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on” — censors demanded that the song be cut from the taped broadcast. But Mr. Seeger returned to sing the full ballad on an episode a few months later.
Reflecting on that pre-cable era in network television, Mr. Chambers wrote in his memoir, “Today, when obscene is a synonym for funny, it is hard to imagine what you could not do or say on television half a century ago.”
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