From 1969 until 1975, Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen were Tim and Tom, the first black and white comedy team in the history of show business—and the last. After starting out in Chicago, they worked all over the country, north and south, east and west, and in every conceivable venue—from Playboy Clubs to prisons, on the all-black “Chitlin’ Circuit,” in posh nightclubs and small dives. The act failed, but they succeeded and next year they celebrate their 40th year in show business. Their story is told in the new book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White.
Tim Reid & Tom Dreesen - Tim & Tom - Black & White Comedy Duo
We must have been crazy!
That’s the only answer that makes any sense when people ask us what on earth we were thinking when, after surviving childhoods that would have taxed Charles Dickens’ imagination, we turned our backs on good jobs with promising futures to seek a career in show business.
Not just any career, either. We did something no entertainers had ever done before: We formed a black and white comedy team. And just to show you how naïve we really were, we picked the late 1960s and early 1970s to do it.
Do you remember what was going on in the country then? We do. Race riots, anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, the drug revolution, the sexual revolution, you name it. And we picked then to put a black man and a white man on a stage joking about race on an equal basis? What were we thinking?
When we sat down recently to write a book about our experience, it all came flooding back. The laughs, the excitement and the certain knowledge that we were going to be the biggest thing that ever hit show business. And the frustration, the heartache and the danger, too. It was the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
Looking back, we doubt that any other comedy team ever paid the dues we did. The fourth night we appeared on a stage, for instance, a guy in the audience put a lit cigarette out in Tim’s face, and, when Tom came to his defense, nearly beat him half to death. And at a performance on a college campus, somebody hit Tom in the face with an ice ball.
Those weren’t the only times we were attacked, either, on stage and off. We arrived in New Orleans the day George Wallace was shot and as we checked into the Jefferson Davis Hotel, which had a Confederate flag hanging behind the front desk, all Tim could think was, “Please, let it be a white man.” That night a guy in the audience started heckling us and when Tom teased him, he ran up on the stage and attacked us. It took four security guards to drag him downstairs and when they finally did, he fought his way back up again. Some people actually thought he was part of the act!
And though many audiences loved our fresh take on race, others couldn’t figure out where we were coming from. When there were only a few blacks in a predominantly white audience, for instance, we’d tell a joke and the white people would look around to see if the black people were laughing. If they were, then they would laugh, too.
But what was most frustrating to us was the fact that the industry itself never understood what we were doing and accepted us. This was in a time when black actors entertainers were beginning to make real inroads. Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson and Diahann Carroll all got their own television shows during the time we were working as Tim and Tom. But whether it was managers, agents, club owners or television producers, we found it
hard to get past the resistance to a black and white comedy team. It was as if an integrated act represented one more taboo.
So finally, after five years of struggling, we split up. Tom, who continued to think success was just around the corner, wanted to keep the act together, but Tim’s frustrations grew. The fact that we weren’t making any real money, and that we both had families to support, made him walk away.
More hard times were ahead—at one point Tom was sleeping in an abandoned car in an alley off Sunset Boulevard and Tim became a virtual recluse in a tiny apartment in West Hollywood—but finally we made it. Tom got his big break when he cracked up Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and he’s been working as a stand-up comedian ever since, including 14 years as Frank Sinatra’s opening act. Tim became a star playing Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati and went on to act in many sit-coms and movies and to produce and direct movies and TV shows at his own production studio in Virginia.
Why did we stay with it so long? Why didn’t we admit defeat and return to the business world where Tim had been the first black marketing representative hired by DuPont and Tom had been a successful insurance salesman? Our upbringings might have had something to do with it. If we had been middle-class kids used a certain standard of living, we might have given up any number of times. But having been raised in dire poverty—Tim moving from home to home, and even to his aunt’s whorehouse, in Virginia; Tom living in a cold-water flat in Harvey, Illinois, with his alcoholic parents and seven brothers and sisters—we were used to doing without and kept striving.
As we look back, we realize that we never really had a chance to succeed as Tim and Tom—and isn’t it interesting that there hasn’t been a black and white comedy team since? (unless you count McCain and Obama)—but we never would have made it if we hadn’t started out as Tim and Tom. Remember that scene in The Defiant Ones, where even after they broke the chain linking Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis together it was still there? That’s us.
Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen are, with Ron Rapoport, the authors of the new book, Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White.
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Tom Dreesen
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