Jonathan Winters & The Smothers Brothers

Jonathan Winters was an utter original, a wildly improvisational comic whose work careened from childlike prankishness to bitter satire and from bizarre sound effects to straight-faced moralizing -- often all within the same bit. Mercurial and manic, Winters veered from character to character and premise to premise at breakneck speed, yet with balletic grace; for all of the seeming chaos inherent in his comedy, his aesthetic remained remarkably consistent and pure, his stream-of-consciousness narratives and radical concepts all refracted through the same singularly bent world-...