Which is easier for Americans to do: agree on a black candidate for president or agree that a racial joke is funny?
The comics met at a Jaycees meeting in Harvey in 1968—Dreesen was selling life insurance then and Reid was a salesman for DuPont. They began by taking a drug-prevention program into local schools, where an eighth-grade girl told them they were so funny they ought to be a comedy team. By the next year they were. Working out of Chicago, they earned frequent mentions in Irv Kupcinet’s Sun-Times column but little else. “They never made enough money to make a living,” says Rapoport. “They struggled like sons of bitches for five years and never stopped wondering if they’d made a terrible mistake.” Reid would soon make it on his own as Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati, and Dreesen would become an “overnight” star by triumphing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. But the show wouldn’t give Tim & Tom a tumble.
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They performed in both white and black clubs. Sitting in a Detroit hotel room, Dreesen came up with a line he thought he might use the next time Reid got heckled by a white audience: “Hey, go get your own. He’s mine. After all, you know how hard they are to train.” Reid told him the line was unacceptable. But that night, in a black club, someone yelled, “Hey white boy, what are you doing here?” and Reid stepped in. “Hey brother, go get your own. He’s mine, and you know how hard they are to train.” The crowd screamed, and Dreesen was thinking, What the hell? “But Tim was right,” says Rapoport. “The line worked that way. It would not have worked the other way.”
But what if the entire city complains?
“And the swaggering attitude of Zell and Abrams is just not going over well here.”
And he deserved that status, Rapoport thinks. “He was a very good writer. He backed up all of his opinions with reasons. He didn’t just vent. He told you why. He did the one thing a columnist has to do. He made you have to read him.
