From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show at KCRW.com.

I'm thrilled to have the authors and stars of the new book, Tim and Tom,

an American comedy in black and white, Tim Reed and Tom Driesen, who were America's first

interracial comedy team. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. Thank you. We like to say we were America's

first black and white comedy team because when you say interracial, then people say, well,

Cheats and Chong were interracial, but we were America's first black and white comedy team.

But I always say the most significant thing is,

not that we were America's first black and white comedy team,

but we were the last.

And that was 35 years ago.

See, the thing, as I was trying to think about,

is you guys are coming up,

it was kind of almost the end of comedy teams anyway. Yeah. But nobody had really done a comedy team that was doing social comedy.

I mean, you either had like single guys, you had groups of people, but you didn't have a duo.

No, especially doing racial humor because, again, putting it in context.

So we're talking about that we meant in 68, me right out of college from North State University. I was hired by DuPont, first

black hired by DuPont from a black college and sent to Chicago. And the reason they chose

Chicago is because racially they didn't want to send me to Detroit because they thought there'd be

some difficulty. None of the southern divisions. And they said, well, if we send them to California,

he'll go in the show business. So they said that? Yeah. So they sent me to Chicago.

That's where you guys met. It's interesting because in the book, as you guys are talking about

...