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      *Actor/director Tim Reid is best known for his roles on 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 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 salesmen so we knew how to sell. We took those things and our own innate built-in humor factors and started writing material and listening to comedy. I went out and bought every comedy album I could find. To this day I probably have one of the largest comedy collections that anybody could put their hands on. You name it, I bought it and we listened to it. We went out to comedy clubs. Most comics were from Chicago at that time. You name them, they were coming through Chicago. We would wait behind there dressing room and wait and grab ‘em and talk to them.”

      Reid said that the duo had chopped it up with such legendary comedians as Dick Gregory and Jackie Vernon. But it wasn’t only comedians that the two found themselves working around.

       “There were no comedy clubs then, they were just clubs.  We worked with some of the greatest talents ever known from Muddy Waters to Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn; we worked with them all,” he said. “We had some incredible times working clubs like the Playboy Club, like the Club Harlem in Atlantic City, like the 20 Grand Club in Detroit, like Mr. Kelly’s in Chicago. We caught the end of show business as it used to be.”

     The Tim & Tom act lasted for five years and their humor and progressive take on the race and society is still celebrated today. Reid and Dreesen's book uncovers the behind-the-scenes stories of both men and the story of race and culture in America as the first interracial comedy team in the history of show business.

      “You have to remember where we were – five years removed from the civil rights era No matter where we were, race was an issue. It didn’t matter. When we walked on stage, it became racial, but we knew that. That was the act was about,” Reid said.

      While the two pioneers became a success, their path to stardom wasn’t without incident. Reid described an altercation that happened very early in the duo’s career, where a white man assaulted him at a club where they were performing.

      “A guy took a cigarette and ground it into my face and a fight broke out. It was a huge, huge Italian dude,” Reid recalled. “He almost killed us both, but we got out of there. He took issue with the fact that there was a black man in this white club and didn’t like it and put a cigarette out in my face to show me I was in the wrong place.”

      However, the two were not only determined to get their act back on the stage, but were looking forward to $35 paycheck there were to split for the  two-night gig.

     “We went back the next night and we told some friends of ours that were working in protection. I’m telling you there were so many guns in that club that night that if a car had backfired, there would have been ten people killed,” he said.

      Tom and Tim fought racism with comedy, tackling issues the nation was to nervous to deal with.

      “Today we would be [considered] politically incorrect,” Reid said. “Back then, we were unique. The first few minutes of our act people just sat there and looked at us in wonderment thinking, ‘What are they going to say? Is this going to be something I don’t want to be a part of?’ And it took them a few seconds.”

      Reid said that the two, who stayed together for about 5 ½ years, worked all over the US and he explained that there was no real difference, at that time, of how they were received in the North vs. the South vs. the East vs. the West. However, the two did come to realize they could gauge their audiences.

      “We worked integrated audiences, we worked Black audiences, white audiences, from Polish audiences to completely black militant – that if there was a situation to where there were five or six black people in a room of a hundred or so white people, the white people would not laugh until they looked at the black group and if they laughed, [the white people] would laugh. So our timing was based on us delivering something and then we would all look at the black people and see if they laughed and then everybody would join in and we would carry on.”

      Carrying on the history of comedy, “Tim & Tom: An American Comedy in Black and White” is in stores now.

      For more info, check out the Tim & Tom blog: http://timandtomtheblog.blogspot.com/.

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