Posted Date: October 15, 2008

TIM & TOM: Book Details Bi-racial Comedy Duo

By Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide

     Norfolk native Tim Reid is known for his acting, directing, and generosity in raising money for students attending NSU and other schools. He’s also known for his movie production studio he opened in Virginia.
       Now Mr. Reid is being recognized for something that has little note in the history of American entertainment lore, but is the source of a new book he has penned with comedian Tom Dreesen.
       During the late 60s and early 1970s, the two men worked on stage as the first, and it seems, the last interracial comedy team.
       Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen have been touring the country promoting their new book, “Tim and Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White” published by the University of Chicago Press.
       “We were ahead of our time,” said Tim Reid, during an interview with the New Journal and Guide. “But the   entertainment industry, Black and White, was not ready for us, as a Black and White man,  using comedy to comment on the world and the various issues  which shaped it at that time.”
       Dreesen, who was also interviewed for this article, and  Reid were an interracial comedic duo for eight years, starting in 1968.   This novel tandem worked at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and  racial tensions spurred by  Blacks and other groups marched for socioeconomic advancement. Lyndon Johnson, and then Richard Nixon, were fighting  an unpopular war. There were  the deaths of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,  and Robert Kennedy; the birth of Black power; and the drug and social counter culture.
       “America, you’d think, should have been  ready for us,” said Dreesen.  “We represented what part of the 60s turmoil was over which was inclusion and joining of races.
But we became frustrated because the entertainment industry...rejected us as mixing two worlds at that time in history.”
       Both blame political correctness and the inability of the entertainment industry to accept, then and even in 2008, the issue of race being the foundation of commentary about today’s human events by comics.
       Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor could create mirth as an interracial team in the movies Stir Crazy and Silver Bullet. But they would have found it hard surviving in stand up comedy, as the  Dreesen-Reid experience exemplifies. 
       “It would be even harder today because of political correctness,” said Dreesen. “Political commentators can sit and talk about race all day. But two comedians,  especially in an interracial team, could not do it because the industry fears that we would be insensitive.  Race is still the 500-pound gorilla  in the room even today.”
       Reid said that the two men faced challenges when performing in clubs which catered to all-Black or White audiences in urban centers like Chicago or in smaller venues.
Although Jim Crow was melting, the two men faced barriers associated with hotel and restaurant accommodations. They faced mostly Black or White audiences, where the reception was not so friendly. Black crowds were more welcoming “once they got used to us being together and our routine.”
       “It was even rougher in White clubs,” recalled Reid. “I recall us getting beaten up on stage. I recall one White man trying to put a cigar out in my face and Tom getting beaten.  At time, we had to sneak out of many all-White cities where we were performing. There were some people who were unhappy with the subject matter and the White and Black men who were doing it together, at that time in our history onstage.” THERE IS MORE TO THE STORY BUT WE CAN'T GIVE YOU ALL OF IT, CALL US TODAY @ 757-543-6531 AND SUBSCRIBE WITH THE NEW JOURNAL AND GUIDE.

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