Let me start by saying I don't particularly care for "American Idol." Maybe it's the night I spent in an emergency room during the season two finale when there was no shortage of nurses rushing in to see if Clay or Ruben had won but not a one available to give me something for a torn back muscle, or maybe it's just that I'd rather see some of those music-industry dollars going to promote original artists rather than generic, would-be divas. I am, however, a fan of Adam Lambert ever since reading about his performance at the American Music Awards last year, where the openly gay "Idol" runner-up apparently kissed his male keyboardist on the mouth and dry-humped a couple of dancers on national TV. Suddenly Lambert found himself persona non grata on the ABC network and fielding scads of hate-mail and tabloid questions, to which he responded with a very cool "So what?" Was Lambert's performance in questionable taste? Sure, but it also served to point out one of the great hypocrisies of our present culture, that while we may have come far enough to accept uncloseted gay men as pop stars, reality-show mainstays and funny sidekicks on sitcoms, we start to have a problem when they stop being harmlessly flamboyant and do something, well, gay.

It's been a long time since we've had a good First Amendment flap over TV. Groups like the Parents' Television Council and the American Family Association still watchdog the airwaves for any content that may smack of the 21st century, and a politician can still make some hay pretending to care about our children's moral hygiene, but the fact is that we haven't seen anything really subversive on television for a long time. Not in the sense of dirty words or sex or violence or Dennis Franz's bare ass, but subversive in the sense of presenting a shocking but true fact about ourselves that we'd really rather not discuss, in such a way that it's hard to ignore.

The best vehicle for this was always comedy. "Saturday Night Live" in its heyday. The sitcoms of Norman Lear. Richard Pryor. "M*A*S*H." "The Simpsons." Dave Chappelle, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert do their fair share of cutting social commentary, but it's from within the privately held realm of cable TV, out of the reach of FCC censure. Over the coaxial cable one is relatively free to say what one likes, but back in the days when TV whizzed exclusively through the air, there was a real risk (and subsequently a real thrill) in espousing an antiestablishment view of any kind, and the worst offenders were the clean-cut, folksinging comedy duo of Tom and Dick Smothers.

From 1967 to 1969, the Smothers Brothers starred on one of the most widely viewed programs on TV, a CBS comedy-variety program popular enough to compete with NBC's juggernaut "Bonanza." Out of what the network hoped would be a goodtime hour of inoffensive music and tepid comedy bits, the Smotherses crafted a program devoted to opposing Vietnam, challenging the status quo on race and drugs and politics, and pissing off the network censors at every opportunity. Tom Smothers, onstage the goofball opposite brother Dick's straight man, was a crusader behind the scenes, fighting to bring ever more controversial, envelope-pushing material onto the show and daring his network masters to cross him. Tom's war escalated until it reached all the way to the White House, and that war is the subject of NPR correspondent David Bianculli's terrific book Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

The show started innocuously enough, following the venerable Ed Sullivan and comprising a nice mix of old-time stars (Jack Benny, Kate Smith, Bette Davis) to attract the parents and contemporary music (Donovan, Jefferson Airplane, The Who) to draw the kids, tied together with the requisite skits and the Brothers' brand of vaudeville-style ribbing. In the era of escalation in Vietnam, the crashing of LBJ's presidency and the return of Richard Nixon, and national hand-wringing about "these kids today," however, TV networks were on pins and needles about how their shows would play in middle America, and their censors had itchy bleeping fingers. After the Smotherses and their staff discovered bits missing from their shows, Tom Smothers took it personally. His writers (including at one point Rob Reiner and Steve Martin) began cranking out thinly veiled references to sex and drugs along with more blatant criticisms of the war, racial inequality and the candidates jockeying to fill LBJ's shoes. The brilliantly deadpan comic Pat Paulsen staged a mock run for the White House, while cast member Leigh French turned a one-off hippie-chick character into a weekly exercise in seeing how many pot references she could spread across America.

CBS executives, many of whom were politically connected, began to weigh in on the little comedy show that dared to push their buttons but was too big in the ratings to simply cancel. At one point, five minutes of Smothers airtime was simply chopped out of the show and the space filled with a campaign ad for Nixon. After comedian David Steinberg delivered a "sermonette" poking fun at the story of Moses (which is absolutely toothless by today's standards), CBS began piling restrictions—advance screenings, impossible editing deadlines, legal loopholes—onto the show to rein it, and especially Tom Smothers, in until finally the network had had enough and killed its cash cow in its prime. "Fired," Tom always pointed out, "not canceled."

Bianculli's book is an engaging chronicle of the show and its time, and is drawn from exhaustive interviews, not only with the Smotherses and their crowd but with people on the network side, who turn out to be gracious and candid, many of them revealing their admiration for the show and that pain-in-the-ass Tommy Smothers. The result is an even-handed account of an important moment in our cultural history, about a little TV show that presented some of the most groundbreaking material the medium has ever produced, and the price it paid for having something to say.

John G. Nettles