Cheech & Chong

Start with: Up in Smoke (1978), then the album Los Cochinos The act that turned the counterculture into a two-man road show. Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong met in Vancouver and found their audience on comedy records, playing sketches like radio plays with a buzz on. There is no real straight man here; the joke is two equally blissed-out guys feeding each other bad ideas at half speed. In Up in Smoke, Marin's Pedro picks up Chong's hitchhiking drummer Man, and the pair end up driving a van built out of marijuana from Mexico to Los Angeles. Lou Adler's film was made cheaply and earned more than $100 million worldwide. Los Cochinos brought the duo their only Grammy, for best comedy recording.