Urban Thought Collective

Pioneering actor/director Tim Reid looks back.
Presented by Electronic Urban Report.

Actor/director Tim Reid is best known for his roles on a hit TV series that have spanned three decades.

His launch on the small screen became his biggest name-maker when he starred as DJ “Venus Flytrap” on the hit CBS sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which premiered in 1978.

Later, Reid was introduced to a new generation of TV viewers when he starred on the shows “Sister Sister” and “That 70s Show.”

Though Reid’s claim to fame has been television roles, the actor started out as a controversial comedian as one half of the comedy duo Tim & Tom. In the late 1960s and early 70s, Reid buddied with Tom Dreesen and became the nation’s first black and white comedy team. And now the comic-turned-actor-turned-director is an author with his new book “Tim & Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White.” The book takes a look at the widely popular interracial comedy pair in era of racially charged civil unrest.

“Tom was the first white friend that I had in the world,” Reid said of the bumble beginnings of the historic duo. “I was raised and born in a segregated community. I went to all segregated schools in Virginia. I never worked for a white person until I got into college. Tom was the first white person I actually knew up close and personal. So we began to integrate that kind of context into our act and we realized that a lot of Americans had not had that kind of relationship. As a matter of fact, we’re going back there. Most black and white people, they live in segregated communities – not by law, not by jurisdiction; but blacks and whites are still pretty much segregated in America, as a large group.”

Reid fondly described the first night he and Dreesen hit the stage, when he talked with EUR’s Lee Bailey.

“It was quite an experience,” he said. “We were so afraid, so nervous. We had rehearsed in my kitchen for so long. So we went to this club in Chicago Ridge, Illinois and convinced this man we were a comedy team. A black and white comedy team in the ‘60s; the man said, ‘Let me see this.’ We did what was about to be a 15-minute act in about seven minutes. We were talking so fast; so nervous. But we heard somebody laugh and we thought, ‘We gotta do this.’ And that’s how we started.”

That’s the whole of it. There was no formal training; no comedy networked introductions. Reid recalled that the two were simply comedy novices that found themselves to be rather funny.

“We knew nothing about show business. We knew nothing about comedy,” Reid confessed. “We learned by doing. We were both…

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