Related Articles
Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.
His wife, Rita Blye, confirmed the death. She said he had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Blye was a writer and singer on variety shows in Canada when he received a surprise call in 1967 from Tom Smothers asking him to join the writing staff of the series that he and his brother, Dick, would be hosting on CBS.
“I couldn’t believe it was Tom Smothers,” Mr. Blye said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2019. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers.”
“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was unlike any other variety show. The brothers were renowned as a comical folk-singing duo: Tom played the naïve, guitar-playing buffoon, and Dick, who played the double bass, was the wise straight man. They had creative control of the series, which emboldened them and their writers to be more outspoken as they addressed politics, the Vietnam War, religion and civil rights — and their forthrightness during a divisive era increasingly angered some viewers, CBS censors, some of the network’s affiliates and conservative groups.
Mr. Blye and his writing partner, Mason Williams — best known for writing and performing the hit guitar instrumental “Classical Gas” — worked on the deadpan editorials delivered regularly by Pat Paulsen, a mournful-looking cast member who used the show as a platform to run for president in 1968 as the candidate of the S.T.A.G. (Straight Talking American Government) Party.
“These were double talk, they didn’t make sense,” Mr. Blye told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “Pat closed with the line that if viewers wanted copies of the editorial, they could have them by sending in stamped, self-addressed envelopes. We got thousands and thousands of those envelopes.”
Mr. Blye, who became a producer during the show’s third and final season, encouraged the comedian David Steinberg, a friend from Winnipeg, Manitoba, where they both grew up, to deliver comic sermons. In his second one, he told the biblical story of Jonah, with humorous riffs.
The sermon was part of the April 13, 1969, episode, which never aired and led to the show’s cancellation. CBS had been insisting that Tom Smothers send it and its affiliates a tape of each week’s show in advance, in a timely fashion, for their review. When the tape of their final show did not arrive on time, CBS told the brothers that they had broken their contract. Tom Smothers later said that CBS used the sermon as an excuse to fire them.
Two months after the cancellation, Mr. Blye and the rest of the show’s writing staff — which included Mr. Einstein and Steve Martin — won an Emmy Award.
“Allan was measured, mature and fresh, and he wasn’t following a common road to success,” Dick Smothers said in an interview. “He wasn’t formula. When I talked to him, he made sense.”
In a post on the social media site Threads, Mr. Martin praised Mr. Blye as “my earliest mentor” and a “comic delight.”
Alvin Allan Blye was born on July 19, 1937, in Winnipeg. His father, David, a Romanian immigrant, worked in his wife’s family’s dry cleaning business; his mother, Goldie (Portnoy) Blye, who was from Russia, managed the home.
Alvin grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in which Yiddish was his first language; he was a child soloist in his temple’s choir and sang on radio and in Yiddish theater. He became a cantor in his 20s and continued to be one at synagogues in Toronto and Los Angeles.
In the early 1960s, Mr. Blye performed on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation variety shows as well as on “MisteRogers,” the predecessor to Fred Rogers’s children’s show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” He played Captain Blye, who went on assignments like “Go find me love” for the genial host. He stayed in the cast for a little while after the show’s production moved to Pittsburgh in 1966.
While still working for the Smothers Brothers, Mr. Blye formed a partnership with Chris Bearde. Together they wrote and developed the format for “Singer Presents … Elvis,” Elvis Presley’s acclaimed 1968 comeback special. Steve Binder, the show’s producer, said it was Mr. Blye’s idea to have dozens of men, who resembled Presley in shadow, stand behind him on risers and imitate him on his opening number, “Trouble/Guitar Man.”
With Mr. Bearde, Mr. Blye was also a writer and producer for “The Andy Williams Show” (1969-71), “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” (1971-74) and “The Sonny Comedy Revue” (1974), Sonny Bono’s short-lived solo venture after he and Cher divorced. He was executive producer of the sitcom “That’s My Mama” (1974-75), a sitcom revolving around a middle-class Black family in Washington.
Mr. Einstein’s Super Dave character first emerged in 1976 on the short-lived variety show “Van Dyke and Company,” which starred Dick Van Dyke and was produced and written by Mr. Blye and Mr. Einstein.
“We wrote it as a sketch, then started auditioning people for the part,” Mr. Blye told The New York Times in 1995. “On the second or third day, I turned to Bob and said, ‘I don’t know anyone who could do this better than you.’”
Super Dave was puffed up with misplaced confidence as he plunged himself into one death-defying stunt after another. Although modeled on the real-life daredevil Evel Knievel, Super Dave was more like the ill-fated Wile E. Coyote, who would snap back from being crushed by a boulder or falling off a cliff in the Road Runner cartoons.
“People loved the character getting mauled,” Mr. Blye told the Television Academy.
Super Dave showed up on several TV series and specials overseen by Mr. Blye and Mr. Einstein, including “Bizarre” (1979-86), a sketch comedy series on Showtime that was hosted by the comedian John Byner, and his own talk show, “Super Dave,” also on Showtime, from 1987 to 1991.
At the end of a failed stunt in the first episode of “Super Dave,” Mr. Einstein said, “My life just flashed before my eyes, and there wasn’t another episode in it.”
Mr. Blye’s first marriage, to Shirley Brotman, ended in divorce. He married Rita Rogers (no relation to Fred Rogers) in 1989. In addition to her, he is survived by two sons, Jeff and Rob, and a daughter, Debra Blye, from his first marriage; a daughter, Kate Blye, and two other sons, Sam and Charlie, from his second marriage; three grandchildren; and his brother, Garry, a talent manager and producer.
Looking back in the Television Academy interview at his work for the CBC, Mr. Blye said that working with Mr. Rogers had “touched something close to my heart.” He recalled being introduced to him in about 1961 in an otherwise empty CBC studio in Toronto, where he was appearing on “Parade,” a variety show. When Mr. Blye approached him, he said, Mr. Rogers’s hands were occupied by two of his puppets, Henrietta Pussycat and King Friday XIII.
“I never talked to him, I talked to both of his puppets, and the puppets had their dialects and it was great,” Mr. Blye said. “I talked to them for about 15 minutes and someone came to me and said, ‘Blye, they’re ready for you to rehearse.’”
Mr. Rogers waited for him after the rehearsal.
“He said, ‘I’m doing a show here myself. How would you like to appear on a portion of it called “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe”?’ ‘Sounds great. I’d love that.’ So he booked me and I did 300 shows for him.”
<
