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Health & Fitness

What Would Presidential Candidate Pat Paulsen Do About Guns?

Pat Paulsen was a presidential candidate on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. What would he do about gun violence? Mason Williams, the show's head writer, and Nicholas Johnson have some ideas.

Pat Paulsen was a presidential candidate on the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." Want to know what he would do about gun violence? Mason Williams, the Smothers show head writer, and Nicholas Johnson have some ideas.

The "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was one of the most creative and controversial TV shows during the 1960s. Tom ("the Yo-yo Man") and Dick Smothers have occasionally appeared in Iowa during the years since.

The head writer for the show, Emmy-award-winning Mason Williams, whose "Classical Gas" composition has received as much air play as any American song ever, created many of the ideas, and wrote much of the material, for Pat Paulsen's presidential campaign (such as his climbing the highest mountain in Kansas with the governor).

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He and I got to wondering the other day what the presidential candidate Paulsen (who died in 1997) would have to say about gun violence. So Mason Williams, channelling him from the great beyond, decided to find out. What was he told?

Here's the answer, along with some ideas of our own.

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