Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour: Documentary Analysis

In Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, an appeal to pathos and factual evidence are utilized to achieve Maureen Muldaur’s purpose of displaying how the Smothers Brothers were a groundbreaking aspect of American society and didn’t need to be as strongly censored. Throughout the documentary, Muldaur films key parts of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour that are very funny and emotional, like songs they sung about sons being drafted into war and gun laws. Connecting the issues of the time, especially with the sheer amount of them going on, to their show aides the appeal to pathos. The audience is already thinking about these issues, and adding humor to them on the show creates an emotional attachment to the Brothers’ show. Maureen Muldaur
The video utilizes pieces of evidence like statistics to show the huge ratings that the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour had; how it even beat the Bonanza time slot for ratings, something that was unheard of until that show. Within the documentary, there were also interviews with influential workers and people surrounding the show, giving testimony to how important Smothers was and how it shouldn’t have been as strongly censored. If it made all this emotional impact and there were all these people assimilated into Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, why did it need to be censored by America so much? Maureen Muldaur felt this way, and she displays it in her documentary with an appeal to pathos and factual evidence to achieve this purpose.

Maureen Muldaur, in her documentary Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, has a main claim that censorship was not necessary to the extent that it was used on the Smothers’ show. Throughout the documentary, her sub-claims become more apparent, one of them being that the emotional attachment the