In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) there is a character called Uncle Toby who had been hit on the head by a flying stone at the Siege of Namur–and never stopped talking about it. Nearly three centuries later, two specimens are sitting on my desk which can only be described as Uncle Toby’s in modern garments. One is a DVD of a television documentary, now being broadcast on PBS, about Daniel Ellsberg: The Most Dangerous Man in America. The other is a history of a television program entitled Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, published by Touchstone Books.

Readers of a certain age will need no introduction to these subjects. Daniel Ellsberg was a Pentagon analyst in the 1960s who, in 1971, leaked a classified Defense Department assessment of the Vietnam war which became known as the Pentagon Papers. Because the the papers were secret, and Ellsberg’s actions constituted a crime, he became an overnight hero of the antiwar movement, even a well-publicized fugitive, and the Washington Post and New York Times won famous judicial victories over the efforts of the Nixon administration to prevent the papers’ publication.