Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy: Nothing in Moderation

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Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy

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Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy Nothing in Moderation

By Andrew Horton

univ ersit y of t exas pr e ss

Austin

Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713–7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Horton, Andrew. Ernie Kovacs & early tv comedy : nothing in moderation / Andrew Horton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-72194-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Kovacs, Ernie, 1919–1962—Biography. 2. Comedians—United States— Biography. 3. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. 4. Television comedies—United States. I. Title. II. Title: Ernie Kovacs and early tv comedy. pn2287.k7h67 2010 791.4502'8092—dc22 [b] 2009035512

To those friends, family members, colleagues, and even strangers who have made us laugh without moderation through the years, this work is playfully and lovingly dedicated.


Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Nothing in Moderation xi

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An Overview of the Postwar Era and the Ernie Kovacs Shows in the Context of American Television Comedy 1

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The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows: Comic Surrealism, Verbal and Visual 13

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Silents Please! Ernie, California, and Working with Music, Sound, and Surrealistic Visuals on His Specials 51

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Ernie in the Movies: From Comic Director to Supporting Character Actor 73

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The Kovacs Legacy: “I Don’t Know. I Just Do It!” 99 Appendix: Summary of Ernie Kovacs’ Personal Life

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Notes 107 Works Cited 111 Index 115

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Acknowledgments

First, I am grateful to the late Edie Adams, who was so very helpful during interviews at her Los Angeles home and at the Buster Keaton Festival in Iola, Kansas, in 2004. The festival celebrated Ernie and Buster, who knew each other well. Second, a large and hearty thank you to my editor at the University of Texas Press, James Burr, without whose enthusiastic encouragement this project would not have reached this happy final stage. I am also extremely appreciative of all Victoria Davis, manuscript editor, and Sally Furgeson, copyeditor, have done to make this a stronger project. My family, including my wife Odette, sons Phil and Sam, and daughter Caroline, have all been subjected to and actually have enjoyed the hours of Ernie Kovacs that we shared mornings, afternoons, and evenings through the years. Thank you, dear family, for your support and laughter! I am most appreciative of the staff at the Paley Center for Media in New York and the staff at the ucla Archives for their professional services during my research journeys. The University of Oklahoma also deserves credit for providing research grants and opportunities through Dean Paul Bell and the College of Arts and Sciences. My thanks to Jeanne H. Smith of Oklahoma City, who created my endowed chair at the university and has always maintained a sense of humor even in the toughest of times. Finally, to my friends and colleagues across the world who also appreciate Kovacs’ offbeat cigar-smoking humor that has influenced so many.

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Introduction: Nothing in Moderation I know what television is not. It is not photographed radio or vaudeville. ernie kovacs

Kovacs can’t be boxed into comedy’s usual confines, least of all the cramped container that is network TV. gerald nachman, seriously funny

Question: what do Monty Python, David Letterman, much of Saturday Night Live (especially in its early years), Larry David (especially in Curb Your Enthusiasm on which he works without a script), Flight of the Conchords, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, The Uncle Floyd Show, Captain Kangaroo, and even Sesame Street, to offer but a short list, have in common? One answer is quite simple: they all reflect—whether knowingly or not—the imaginative and wildly creative comic jokes, ludic characterizations, hilarious insights, and zany experiments handed down by Ernie Kovacs (1919–1962) from his years in television and late 1950s Hollywood cinema. “Nothing in moderation” was not only Kovacs’ wholehearted approach to comedy and to life but is also the line on his tombstone in Los Angeles’ Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Ernie Kovacs was one of the most original and imaginative early television comedians in the United States. Throughout the 1950s until his death in 1962, he never ceased to create laughter visually, verbally, musically, as well as through the manipulation of sounds, on that ever-changing new medium, television. He made clear that he understood a lot about this new form of entertainment entering American homes everywhere beginning in the early 1950s when he

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said, “This TV medium has never been fully explored. It’s completely different from movies and the stage. It has to be developed on its own” (Rico xiii).

Kovacs’ Comedy: An Introduction Consider three Kovacs’ moments. In the first, Ernie, his handsome Hungarian-American face beaming, thick moustache in place, and a cigar, as always, in hand, sits on a tree branch in the studio, talking to the camera and thus to us, the audience, while he saws through the branch. We, of course, are waiting for him to cut all the way through and fall (an expected suspense), but to our surprise, when Ernie finishes cutting through the branch, the tree falls down, and he and the branch remain secure in studio space. In her extremely thorough biography of Kovacs, Diana Rico captures this aspect of his comic art: “Whether visual, verbal or a combination of sight and sound, a Kovacs joke always subverted expectation” (ix). In short, surprise overtakes suspense in Kovacsland, and the result is laughter. In a second Kovacs moment, Ernie is billed as a world chess champion who, blindfolded, takes on eight seated challengers. We expect him to trip and fall on one of the challengers or tables (anticipation, once more), but again to our surprise, he plays a move at each of the eight tables on each chessboard; turns and looks at us (the camera), even though he is blindfolded; and then walks off as all eight tables collapse. Kovacs, commented Ken McCormick, the editor of Ernie’s 1956 novel Zoomar, “not only lived tv but the whole media. The whole world was just like one big apple in front of a boy who was hungry” (Walley, Nothing in Moderation 125). A third Kovacs moment for our introduction features the bespectacled poet, Percy Dovetonsils. Ernie played this character for years with a lisp, an inimitable twist of his lips, and a shaking of his head after sipping his ever-present martini. In this scene, Percy opens his large poetry notebook and begins to read “Ode to a Housefly”: Oh, hail to thee, tiny insect so small, Swimming around in my bourbon highball.

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Back stroking, breast stroking, movement of wing. Now up on the ice cube, poor cold little thing.

He continues on for another four verses as the sound of laughter from the live audience fills the studio. Kovacs was a master at creating oddball and satiric characters, and Percy Dovetonsils was perhaps his most memorable. As David Walley notes, “Born with a cigar in his mouth and possibly a deck of cards in his hands, Kovacs’ sardonic wit regularly lanced the banal” (Nothing in Moderation 10).

Percy Dovetonsils, Kovacs’ comic poet laureate. The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs/nbc 1952–1956). nbc/Photofest © nbc

Nothing in Moderation

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A Carnival of Creativity

Television is called a medium because it is seldom rare or well done. ernie kovacs

There was never anyone exactly like Ernie Kovacs in television comedy before he came on the scene in 1950 and certainly not after he left about a decade later. Like other early tv comics such as Sid Caesar, Kovacs had both the privileges and the headaches of joining this new American entertainment medium as it was just beginning to become “national” and extremely popular. There were no set industry rules, thus a free spirit such as Kovacs was fortunate to find sponsors who allowed his “carnival” of creativity and humor to flourish. Most shows didn’t last long in the early days of television. But Ernie Kovacs left a memorable legacy that includes not just one show but also, as we will discuss in more detail in this study: A series of shows on local Philadelphia tv (1950–1952) Then in New York: Kovacs Unlimited (cbs affiliate), 1952–1954 The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs prime time), 1952–1953 The Ernie Kovacs Show (DuMont affiliate), late night, 1954–1955 The Ernie Kovacs Show (nbc), daytime variety, 1955–1956 Tonight (nbc), late night comedy/variety, 1956–1957 A number of quiz shows, such as Take A Guess; One Minute, Please; Time Will Tell; and What’s My Line? Finally, in Los Angeles: infrequent appearances and “specials,” such as several monthly Ernie Kovacs Shows for abc shot in 1961 and 1962, the year he died.

Half a master of improv and half dependent on his own tireless writing and preparation as well as on the work of a dedicated group of writers and studio assistants, Kovacs made millions laugh on radio as well as on television with his own brand of zany, irreverent, and surprising humor.

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The Nairobi Trio in full action. The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs/nbc 1952–1956). Photofest

The Comic and the Comedian: Remembering Ernie Kovacs was an indelible part of my own childhood. When I was growing up in the 1950s, no one made me laugh louder and more frequently than Ernie Kovacs. The sheer nutty brilliance of the man, his wife Edie Adams, and his comic co-conspirators—including writers Rex Lardner, Deke Heyward, and Mike Marmer and actors Barbara Loden, Peter Hanley, and Trigger Lund—has come back to make me laugh again and again through the years, often at unexpected moments. Let’s be more specific. As a child allowed to watch several hours of television a day, I became hooked not so much on I Love Lucy or even Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, but on Ernie Kovacs’ various shows from this period. I was too young to analyze what it was that I enjoyed so much about his humor, but in retrospect, I realize that Kovacs was much further “out there” as a comedian than anyone else, including my other favorites, Sid Caesar and Steve Allen. I constantly entertained family and friends by acting out the Nairobi Trio, those three apes who always mischievously pulled stunts on Nothing in Moderation

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each other, particularly angering the middle ape, as the same tune, “Solfeggio,” played every time. I would hum the song and pretend to play the xylophone, turning like some kind of a robot and zapping the “ape” (be “she” my sister, mother, grandmother, or “he” my father, grandfather, or a friend) over the head with my imaginary hammers (often substituting other objects). It is not surprising then that other film and television scholars of my age share similar childhood memories. David Bordwell speaks of how impressed he was as a child by a sequence featuring Eugene, the “silent” character who was seated at a table that: appeared to be horizontal, but revealed itself to be treacherous. For whenever Mr. Kovacs [Eugene] set something on top of it, it rolled or slid out of control [thanks to a canted camera and tipped set]. This is the sort of thing no fifteen-year-old ever forgets: practical magic!

John Belton also shared much childhood laughter over Ernie’s carnivalesque appearances and comments that: I haven’t seen Kovacs since I was a kid. I have a vague sense that he and Jonathan Winters took comedy off into avant-garde directions while still getting mainstream laughs. And the variety format certainly worked for him.

Milton Berle put it this way: “A comic says funny things but a comedian says things funny.” As we will explore in the following chapters, Kovacs was a comic at times, but much more than that, he was a born comedian because it was the way he made you laugh that counted. The laughter could be because of his strange costumes— take Percy Dovetonsils or the Nairobi apes, for example—or his mixing of visual humor with verbal wit. But it could also simply be his habit of looking at you (that is, the camera) as if he were talking to you directly as he smoked his ever-present cigar. More to the point, a comic tells jokes, but a comedian is a character, that is, he or she is someone we feel has a “center” from which all this humor and laughter emerges. And it is now clearer than ever

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that Kovacs was one of the most original comedians in American television history, a character who was, as all who knew him agree, basically the same on camera as off (Walley, Nothing in Moderation 22). As we begin this study of one of America’s rare comic talents, I must acknowledge the difficulty of finding any complete set of his work available on dvd or video, except for the items mentioned in the Works Cited section. Alas, much of his early production was recorded on kinescopes and was subsequently lost. I have tried to draw many examples from available sources that readers can find to purchase, but by necessity, especially for the early Philadelphia shows and some of the New York shows as well, I have drawn upon my research and viewings of the tapes that can only be seen at the Paley Center for Media in New York (formally the Museum of Television & Radio in New York and Beverly Hills, www.paleycenter. org) or the ucla Film and Television Archive (www.cinema.ucla. edu). There is a hope that new material will be released on dvd and video before too long. But we will never have the “complete sets” and seasons we find in media shops or on the Internet of television shows from Seinfeld and Friends to I Love Lucy and M*A*S*H. Finally, I wish to note that I spend almost no time in these pages on Ernie’s biography since that is not the subject of my study. The Works Cited section does cover books that do justice to a summary of the complexity of Kovacs’ life, especially Diana Rico’s thoroughly researched book, Kovacsland. I do, however, acknowledge the importance of understanding that he was born of Hungarian parents, Andrew John Kovacs, a businessman, and Mary Chebonick, in Trenton, New Jersey. Without going into a history of Hungarian humor, I will note that Ernie’s love of the ethnic characters he created throughout his life was clearly in part a reflection of his richly ethnic background. No one since Ernie’s time has been exactly like this comic force of creativity, but I mention several comedians in the pages that follow who have certainly prospered from inheriting Kovacs’ carnivalesque spirit. Terry Gilliam, the American member of Monty Python, is one such heir. As fellow Python member Michael Palin describes Gilliam’s work:

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It’s the most wild and exciting part of Python, I think, the Gilliam edge. If Python was made up of six Gilliams, there would be this total explosion of creativity and bits of Python splattered all over the walls (Ashbrook 9).

How easily “Kovacs” could be substituted here should be easy to imagine! “Nothing in moderation” is on Ernie’s tombstone, and these three words well summarize his approach to comedy, television, and life. It is also worth noting some of the hundreds who showed up for his funeral. The bevy of friends and admirers included Billy Wilder, Groucho Marx, George Burns, Edward G. Robinson, Jack Benny, Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Jayne Mansfield, Buster Keaton, William Wyler, James Stewart, Danny Thomas, Donna Reed, Milton Berle, Kirk Douglas, and Sam Goldwyn (Rico 301). Such a list goes beyond an appreciation of humor and touches on what Kovacs meant to them as a friend, mentor, and human being. As Diana Rico notes, “Ernie made those around him feel special” (284).

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1 } An Overview of the Postwar Era and the Ernie Kovacs Shows in the Context of American Television Comedy We need laughter more than we need a sheriff. larry gelbart, laughing matters

American Culture After World War II: From Radio to Television in the Cold War To speak of the Ernie Kovacs shows as being on the cutting edge of early American television comedy is to evoke the larger picture of the United States after World War II. Americans were attempting to come back to “normal” at a time of changing technologies, especially, the change from a “radio culture” to a “television culture.” Clearly in the center of this evolution, Kovacs worked in radio from 1941, during World War II, until 1950. “Radio altered the very substance and form of American culture” (Rico 44), and during its development, Hollywood stars did their time “on the air.” Many popular shows, ranging from The Burns and Allen Show to The Mercury Theater of the Air, were aired along with newscasts such as the frequent war reports of Edward R. Murrow. The point of radio was, of course, that it was in the home and thus became part of everyday life for practically everyone, whether they lived in a city, in the countryside, or in the new phenomenon, suburbs. Add to this the fact that by not seeing what one heard, listeners were asked to exercise their imaginations. Thus, to hear an interview with Winston Churchill from London was to imagine the pageantry and drama of the times. Born in 1919 to Hungarian immigrant parents living in Trenton, New Jersey, Ernie Kovacs grew up with many influences, but cer-

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tainly radio was an important one. By 1941, he was working in radio at wttm, playing music and talking about what was happening in and around Trenton. Of course, he was also learning that to add jokes and humor was an enjoyable and popular way to fill time. That he understood almost intuitively the casual quality of being in everyone’s home and the fun of breaking stereotypes was clear to all who listened. He playfully began to do “remote” reports, for instance, from all over the city pretending to be anywhere he wanted to make up (Rico 49). Surveys reveal that comedy shows broadcast between 1930 and 1950 were predominately the most listened-to programs on American radio (Neale and Krutnik 210). Thus, as television began to become more than a curiosity after wwii, many of those who had made careers in radio were ready to move on to the new medium, taking with them much of the same material but adapting their acts to include visuals and make the most of them. Furthermore, if radio brought with it the immediacy of “being on location,” as in Edward R. Murrow’s war reports, television also embraced news “while it happened,” as well as entertainment of many flavors. More specifically, it’s important to place television’s entry into American homes in the postwar period, which included the beginning of the Cold War and an increasing fear of Communism leading to the McCarthy hearings broadcast live from Washington in the 1950s. Recent surveys show that most American homes have two or more televisions, not to mention video and dvd players, computers, and a multitude of video games. In fact, 66 percent of American homes have three or more televisions (tv-Free America Survey). Little wonder, therefore, that we speak of home “media centers” because of the multi-faceted activity of families watching television and movies, playing video games, and cruising the Internet, perhaps while also talking or text messaging on their cell phones. But in the early 1950s, television was claiming a special place in American homes as Lynn Spigel explains: The introduction of the machine [television] into the home meant that family members needed to come to terms with the presence of a communication medium that might transform older modes of family interaction (36).

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And because the population move in the United States was toward the suburbs, the transformation of family interactions was in part also defined by the concept of having a home with surrounding land, away from the center of the town or the city. By the end of the 1950s, Americans had purchased more than 70 million television sets and produced more than 40 million babies (When Television Was Young). Thus, the baby boomers and the television boom go hand in hand. If only one in ten Americans had a “tube” in their home in 1950, by the time 1959 ended, nine out of ten American homes owned sets. Ernie Kovacs’ television career spanned this amazing shift in American popular culture and entertainment. Add to all of the above the fact that, like radio, television broadcasting swiftly moved from a few hours a day to many and then, by the end of the 1950s, to full-day and late-night broadcasting. Thus, unlike the theater or cinema, a prime challenge was to “fill time” without becoming so repetitive that audiences would tune out. Milton Berle, whose tv career lasted more than thirty years, acknowledged this situation in his autobiography: “Television was such a young industry. But over-saturation comes quick through the tube. . . . The public grows tired. It can crave you, then suck you dry and spit you out” (2). In short, how do you make millions of people laugh day after day, through the months, over the years? That’s the question and the challenge, and during that formative decade in American television, Ernie Kovacs managed to succeed in this daunting situation in imaginative ways that still amaze audiences today. Gene Perret, who was Bob Hope’s head comedy writer, comments in his book Comedy Writing Step By Step, a guide to trying to be funny: “Comedy is such a subjective art that no one can or should have all the answers” (49). He then notes that there used to be a sign hanging in the producers’ office of The Carol Burnett Show reading, “There are few good judges of comedy. And they don’t agree!” (49)

Changes in American Humor and Comedy with the Rise of Television A lot has been made of how much of Hollywood’s comedy developed from vaudeville performances and performers, including The Postwar Era and the Ernie Kovacs Shows

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comics and comedians ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to W. C. Fields, Mae West, and the Marx Brothers (Horton, Comedy/Cinema/Theory 10). Similarly, those involved with early television comedy from the beginning came both from radio and from the stage and/or nightclub “stand-up” circuits across the country. We will discuss the different approaches to television comedy. But first, we should note that while American humor in print, on the stage, and on the cinema screens had often been quite satirical and political—from Mark Twain’s humorous barbs down through Will Rogers’ famous line “All I know is what I read in the papers,” and even to Frank Capra’s comic but triumphant support of American democratic government in films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)—many comedians working in the early years of television, including Ernie Kovacs, avoided outright political humor. Postwar Americans, living through the Cold War and the antiCommunist purge, turned to the comic muse more for an escape from social and political reality than for commentary on it. Ernie Kovacs was, therefore, very much in line with the “comedy for comedy’s sake” mode of American humor throughout the 1950s. Edie Adams, Kovacs’ wife from 1954 until his death in 1962 and co-performer in almost all his shows as singer and comic participant in skits and sketches, stated that Ernie was adamant about not including current political references of any sort in his on-camera material. However, as we will see in subsequent chapters, Kovacs could, with his quite surrealistic humor, make fun of and thus undermine many American social norms and practices. For Americans caught between the memories of horrors from a war just ended with fears of a future that included nuclear weapons and the threat of expanding Communism, laughter became in the 1950s not just entertainment but also a form of survival. In such a period, as David Marc comments, “Humor, not tragic empathy, offers would-be survivors the possibility of catharsis” (11). Just how different this mood and this climate were then from our twenty-first century sense of television comedy can be seen, according to Russell L. Peterson, in shows and acts such as those of Jon Stewart; Stephen Colbert, who “roasted” President George W.

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Bush at a White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner; David Letterman; and Jay Leno, to mention a few (27). Once national television became a part of the American home, comedy almost immediately split into two distinct forms: stand-up (“variety”) and sitcoms. As David Marc observes: [A]esthetically at odds, these two genres of mass humor form a Janus face of American culture. Stand-up is a surviving bastion of individual expression, and the sitcom, by contrast, is the technology of the assembly line brought to art (12).

Finally, we should note that tv comedy shows had much to do with actually selling television sets. After all, those familiar with The Milton Berle show know that “Uncle Miltie” truthfully and proudly claimed to have sold millions of sets to American homes (Milton Berle: Mr. Television).

sitcoms: celebrating the american family “at home” Let us consider the sitcom phenomenon first before turning to Kovacs’ variety show form of comedy. Executives and creative producers caught on quickly that since television reached inside homes, shows that celebrated the home and American families, told with good humor, would “fill a need.” Thus, The Honeymooners (1955–1956, 39 episodes) and I Love Lucy (1951–1957, 180 episodes) ruled in the 1950s, followed by a wide variety of shows, such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952–1966, 435 episodes); The Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968, 249 episodes); The Dick Van Dyke Show (1960–1966, 158 episodes); The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971, 274 episodes); and All in the Family (1968–1979, 202 episodes). But even what we think of as “sitcom” on television can be traced back to radio shows. Amos ’N’ Andy, The Goldbergs, and The Life of Riley entertained millions for years on the air before moving to the television screen (Waldron 3). In fact, before there was I Love Lucy on television, Lucille Ball and husband Desi Arnaz had a radio show, My Favorite Husband (Andrews 1). As we will soon see in more detail, sitcoms are quite the oppo-

The Postwar Era and the Ernie Kovacs Shows

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site of what Ernie Kovacs’ shows were all about. Yet, what is a clear definition of sitcoms? Comic writer Sol Saks puts it simply: sitcom is character comedy that traces “interesting characters’ reactions to normal situations as opposed to soap operas where exotic characters are put into unusual situations” (99). There is more to the “formula,” however, for sitcoms embrace the following characteristics: familiarity (we know which characters will be on from week to week), identification (because most of the characters are family members, for instance, we can identify with family problems), and “redemption of popular beliefs” (Marc 24), in the sense that all problems find something of a happy ending by episode’s conclusion.

That even a show that “pushed the boundaries” such as All in the Family succeeded—with main character Archie Bunker being something of a loud-mouthed working-class racist—suggests that the genre had enough room for originality and experimentation and not just repetition of conservative family values. Certainly, more recent shows such as Friends, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Flight of the Conchords illustrate the great variety of sitcoms over the years. After all, as the actor Michael J. Fox has commented about Seinfeld, “it raised the bar on what writers could do” (Wild 3)—for what sitcom before Seinfeld would dare talk about such “forbidden” subjects as “soup nazis” and masturbation? In the same vein, Kovacs constantly broke the “rules,” for he accepted no rules and showed no sense of moderation. Ernie Kovacs made his mark on early American television with a much less regulated form of comedy that was related to stand-up and variety show humor but included his distinctly personal “Kovacian” characteristics as well.

stand-up on american television “Stand-up” refers originally, of course, to those comedians and comics who could entertain live audiences in clubs and theaters across the country. The traveling vaudeville shows featured those

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who, like W. C. Fields, could tell the same jokes and stories night after night but always in a different town, illustrating Milton Berle’s dictum that “[t]here aren’t old jokes, just older” (Milton Berle: Mr. Television). Yet, for the most part, when we refer to “stand-up,” we are speaking of those who, like Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and many others, began by working live audiences in clubs and restaurants, either in New York or in the Borscht Belt clubs or the many Catskill Mountain resorts where New Yorkers escaped during the summer. What was key to their success was knowing how to perform in front of a live audience and adjust/adapt material for that particular audience that very evening. As David Marc comments: The stand-up comedian addresses an audience as a naked self, eschewing the luxury of a clear-cut distinction between art and life. . . . When performing stand-up comedy, Steve Martin is Steve Martin is Steve Martin (13).

For the stand-up, therefore, the direct relationship with and to the audience is what the performer must “milk” and build on, and, in this sense, the stand-up shares a relationship with “news reporters, game-show hosts and commercial pitch people who daily address the viewer-citizenry as the voices of information, authority, power and connection” (Marc 17). Television scholar Lynn Spigel goes further to help us understand the difference between sitcoms that drew on a “theatrical” experience and variety stand-up shows that reflected back to vaudeville days. As she notes: The differences between theatrical realism and the vaudeville aesthetic were not just stylistic, but cultural as well. The legitimate theater promised genteel respectability with a polite, quiet audience who sat in sublime contemplation of the story. While twentiethcentury vaudeville also presented itself as respectable family entertainment, the theaters were attended by all rungs on the social ladder—including working-class people, immigrants, and social elites who enjoyed “slumming with commoners” (114).


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Kovacs’ “stand-up” training was actually his “sit-down” radio work, but the principles were the same: hours to fill directly addressing a public live, “out there,” and doing so as “himself,” rather than as a character in a play or film. The same can be said, of course, of shows such as David Letterman’s, in which he “plays” himself, relating directly to guests and the television audience while “sitting down,” rather than technically being a “stand-up” joker. Once more, that special audience-performer relationship as Kovacs developed it on television, revolved around his long stares into and direct address to the camera as he talked to “us,” acknowledging our presence, wherever we were. In addition, on many of his shows, he frequently wandered into and out of the studio audience, interfacing with them constantly and thus turning stand-up into a carnivalesque “intermingling” approach to comedy. In terms of structure and organization, shows on television centering on stand-up have always allowed for a lot more informality since they are not plot- or story-driven. In fact, most of the shows of the 1950s that we consider stand-up were actually more accurately known as “variety shows,” mixing stand-up moments with ongoing sitcom skits, as well as offering live music, dance numbers, and special guests. Thus, a long-running show such as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958) played out as a sitcom with the same house and settings, but the actors often broke up the flow of the narrative with stand-up sequences. Similarly, Jackie Gleason, Danny Thomas, and others—even Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan—mixed these two areas of television comedy within the same shows.

sid caesar’s shows Let us be more specific by mentioning Sid Caesar’s shows as an example of variety or stand-up comedy, including his Your Show of Shows, which ran on nbc in half-hour format from 1950 to 1954 (65 episodes) after beginning in a live ninety-minute format in 1950, and Caesar’s Hour, which ran on nbc from 1954 to 1957. Caesar assembled a remarkable writing team for these shows, including Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, and Carl Reiner. He therefore had the best comic brains in America working for him every week to create sitcom-like skits, including popular scenes—especially the suburban couple Charlie and Doris 8

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Hickenlooper—played with his female lead, Imogene Coca (Marc 23). What was it like for these writers? Larry Gelbart puts it simply: “It was very much like going to work every day of the week inside a Marx Brothers movie” (Gelbart 20). Does this all sound vaguely like a popular stand-up show that followed years later? As many critics have pointed out, “[t]he parallels with Saturday Night Live are impossible to miss”(Castleman and Podrazik 561), including a talented writing staff and an ensemble comic acting team. snl owes much to Ernie Kovacs as well in terms of pure surrealistic humor that pushes beyond all conventions of visual and verbal humor. What was all of this popularity like for Sid Caesar himself? Early in the 1950s he comments in his autobiography: I was not yet thirty years old and was making a million dollars a year. For nine seasons, thirty-nine weeks a season, nearly everyone in the United States with a tv set would stay home on a Saturday night to watch our live performances (4).

This one statement touches on many of the topics we will be considering with Ernie Kovacs: comedy, television, and the American public went hand in hand throughout the era that he was making his mark on this new medium. In contrast to Caesar’s set-up and that of other variety shows, such as that of Milton Berle, Kovacs was assigned writers and did do some work with a few of them. But unlike almost everyone else in the industry, Kovacs came up with his own material nine times out of ten, with only minimal help from the official writers. Caesar was able to make skits that often ran ten minutes or more, something that Kovacs, with his half-planned, half-“winging it” approach, would not dare do. Like Caesar, though, Kovacs did material that was sometimes satirical of movies, music, pop culture, and even classics. Their shows appealed to adults even more than youngsters, who already had their shows on television ranging from The Pinky Lee Show and cartoons to more educational shows such as Captain Kangaroo. As Ted Sennett notes, adults were pleasantly surprised to “view takeoffs of The Blue Angel, Rififi and the films of Anna Magnani” (52) on Caesar’s shows. The Postwar Era and the Ernie Kovacs Shows

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Both Caesar and Kovacs, each from an ethnic background, had distinct talents for dialects and ethnic satires. Whether speaking stage Italian, German, Spanish, or French, Caesar winked to the variety of Americans who were sitting in their living rooms and enjoying his satire that did not put down their people. Of course, that so many of our comedians themselves come from either East European or Russian Jewish traditions or other ethnic groups—Hungarian in Kovacs’ case—is a given in American comedy and humor. If one of the most memorable comic films of the 1950s is Some Like It Hot (1959), we must remember that director and co-screenwriter Billy Wilder—who became one of Ernie Kovacs’ best friends and helped carry his coffin at the funeral—was an Austrian Jew. More so than sitcoms, stand-up variety shows, such as those of Sid Caesar, celebrated ethnic diversity. Stand-up variety, of course, embraced musical acts as well as comic acts, much as vaudeville did in previous times, and Caesar also was at home with a lot of physical slapstick humor. In fact, “[a]t heart, Caesar was himself a silent film comedian working in an alien form, less skillful in sketches that required repartee,” observes Gerald Nachman (103). Kovacs, in contrast, was at home in both silent as well as verbal comedy, and later in his career, he was determined to make a silent feature comedy, a loving nod to his friend Buster Keaton and the silent tradition.

The ’50s Revisited: A Period Pointing Toward Social Change Many social historians have depicted the 1950s as a rather drab and boring time of quiet suburban life with television as simply a non-revolutionary form of cheap, almost nonstop entertainment. But Gerald Nachman is quite correct in his identification of the 1950s as an exciting time of experimentation and ferment in America: “The 1950s far from being asleep, helped light the way for many of the cultural revolutions that followed” (5). Think of just some of the ’50s icons who, each in his or her own way, lit a path for cultural or social change: James Dean, Marlon Brando, J. D. Salinger, Mort Sahl, Jules Feiffer, Rod Serling, Charlie Parker, Paddy Chayefsky, Tennessee Williams, Hugh Hefner, Truman Capote, Elvis Presley, Pete Seeger, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. 10

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Nachman goes on to say that each of the major comedians of the period was also a harbinger of changes to come, ranging from Dick Gregory to Bob Newhart, and including Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Phyllis Diller, Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Stan Freberg, Jonathan Winters, and Mort Sahl (5). It is my design in this text to suggest that Ernie Kovacs was and still is very much a part of this “revolutionary” group that has influenced many who have followed. As a comedian who was not afraid to try anything on live television or to experiment on recorded kinescope and video, he suggested through his shows what we are still exploring through our constantly changing new media: that comedy and the broadcast or recorded and televised image have almost unlimited possibilities for creating . . . laughter! We also suggest that Kovacs’ comedy, although not aligned with any specific political or social party or cause, can be seen as in general making fun of much of bourgeois American culture, society, and practices. Milton Berle, known as “Mr. Television” throughout most of this period, had more viewers than Kovacs, but as the documentary When Television Was Young makes clear, Berle was more like “vaudeville filmed” than anything original for the new medium. As we will explore, Kovacs was, as Gerald Nachman has pointed out, “a satirical cosmos unto himself ” (201). Even Robin Williams has recognized how different Kovacs was and remains: “It was kind of Dada comedy. Berle was doing his stuff, Sid Caesar was doing great movie parodies, but Kovacs was doing stuff you’d never seen before” (Nachman 201).


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2 } The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows:Comic Surrealism, Verbal and Visual Q: How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: A fish! I had never met anyone like him before and I said to myself I want one of those. edie adams

Comedy Outside the Frame “It’s been real” was Ernie Kovacs’ often-repeated conclusion to many of his shows that, as his co-star and wife Edie Adams said, “became as famous as his moustache and cigar” (Adams and Windeler 109). But if anything was actually real, it was the complete surrealism of the verbal and visual combinations of each show. Only one element was for sure: Ernie would do just about anything for a laugh and certainly would shatter anything resembling a “rule” for what television should do, calling attention to the medium of television itself in the process. In one episode of Time For Ernie (nbc, Philadelphia, 1951), Ernie arrives onstage as the tv image keeps flipping and turning as if something is terribly wrong with the camera or your home set. He then walks offstage down a hallway, talking about foreign movies, and finally puts a set of knobs around his neck and a wood frame like a tv screen around his head. Then looking at “us” (the camera), he explains how to adjust our sets, turning his knobs as his face contorts according to which dial he has turned. When he twists the “vertical” button, his face suddenly becomes very “vertical.” And the skit plays

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out with more hilarious variations on this “how to work a tv screen” set-up.

surrealism and comedy Before we go further, we should explain the “surreal” label many commentators have used in describing Ernie’s comedy. Start with our opening lightbulb joke. We know immediately that we are listening once again to a “lightbulb joke,” but even knowing this, we are at first surprised by the answer: “a fish.” Then the laughter comes as we “get” that surrealism is about connecting unexpected “realities” that don’t appear “logical.” Surrealist works (film, art, written pieces) feature non sequitur, the element of surprise, and unexpected juxtapositions. Thus, the gap between thinking of people changing lightbulbs and . . . fish! But Surrealism was also a specific movement in 1920s France. Led by writer and theorist André Breton, Surrealism was a reaction to traditional art and bourgeois values and lifestyle and thus, as Elliot King and others have testified, was seen as a revolution by its members, who included Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel and his then-artist friend, Salvador Dalí (Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema 24). Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I, and the most important center of the Dada movement was Paris. From the 1920s on, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film, and music of many countries, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory. In terms of cinema, we should remember Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s short Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929) with the often-referenced sequence juxtaposing a thin cloud crossing the moon in the sky, cross cut with a man (played by Buñuel) sharpening a razor and then slicing a young woman’s eyeball (a cow’s removed eye in reality). Kovacs’ unexpected juxtapositions evoke, as we will explore, laughter, but Buñuel and Dalí’s eyeball-slicing scene, as Elliot King notes, “[n]ever fails to solicit gasps of horror from audiences, even today” (22). Why? King continues: Perhaps one imagines one’s own eyeball sliced open with horrific exactitude, or perhaps it is the unexpected impact the scene has without any development whatsoever. We are given no time to

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prepare: We don’t know anything about this woman’s past nor about what might have led Buñuel to dissect her eye, particularly in light of the non sequitur placidity (22).

Part of what makes this “surreal” then is the lack of a set-up and thus no sense of anticipation or suspense, which traditional narrative and storytelling encourage.

kovacs and keaton: beyond the fourth wall We are not suggesting that Kovacs was a member of the French Surrealist movement of the 1920s. But we are definitely taking the broader “surrealist” simple definition of “familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts” (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 22). The skit above, for instance, has several familiar objects—Ernie’s face, a board with some knobs on it strung around his neck—but what is unfamiliar is considering this combination as an actual working television set that will affect the way we perceive Ernie’s “image.” One more example from a much later skit should be helpful: Ernie is a National Parks worker, cleaning the nose of Abraham Lincoln at Mount Rushmore. He sits on a swing attached by ropes to a platform above him. The cleaning tickles Lincoln, and, yes, he sneezes blowing Ernie into oblivion. Surreal? Certainly, for we don’t need to explain that statues (familiar object) don’t sneeze (unfamiliar circumstance). Again, such comic surrealism on Kovacs’ part does not tie him to a formal revolutionary group protesting middle-class society. But as we will discuss, we can see this as having fun with images, ideas, and material that is considered almost sacred to American values and society. Put more simply, such a surrealist approach suggests that within Kovacs’ world anything and anyone could become material for laughter. Said even more simply, within the surrealist realm, nothing is sacred. The image of Ernie looking directly at the camera brings up yet another important point about the workings of comedy. The conventions of stage and film drama require that the protagonists not acknowledge the audience in any form. But since the ancient joyful farces of Aristophanes, comic actors have not only winked to the audience but also often broken through the “fourth wall” to create laughter by acknowledging those beyond the stage, the set, the The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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screen. In several of Aristophanes’ comedies, the characters turn and speak directly to the audience (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 14), creating even more laughter than that prompted by the story. And remember that for hundreds of years the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte was performed in the town marketplaces in which comic actors would grab, insult, and otherwise involve the spectators in the street (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 58). Film comedy has often acknowledged this tradition, too, especially given that so many of the silent and early film comedians came from vaudeville. Buster Keaton frequently looked at the camera and thus at us, the audience, as a form of comic punctuation to many of his scenes. Certainly, one of the best endings of an American film comedy is Keaton’s conclusion to Sherlock Jr. (1924). Keaton plays a very innocent small town movie projectionist in love with the “Girl” down the street. When he falls asleep at the projector, his “other self ” enters the film with his true love and they become the movie. (Keaton used “film language” for this as his double exposure “ghost” leaves his sleeping body, walks down the theater aisle, and hops into the film, thus becoming the “star” of his sleeping dream/film.) When he wakes up and finds the real Girl (Kathryn McGuire) with him in the projection booth, he looks to the screen through the projection booth window to see how he should behave and apes each action, including giving her a ring and then a kiss. But when the film cuts to the man on screen rocking two babies on his knee while his wife sits knitting beside him, Keaton turns to us—that is, the camera—and scratches his head. We laugh all the more because Keaton has broken the fourth wall illusion and made contact with us (Horton, Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. 14). Ernie Kovacs absolutely exploited this approach in his work on television, as our opening segment suggests. He constantly talked to stagehands (sometimes borrowing money from them on camera!) and assistants off camera. In one Percy Dovetonsils skit, Ernie as Percy looks up and comments on the cameraman’s legs! And he often moved off the set to grab some prop he needed or wanted. Ernie not only broke but also went beyond the fourth wall. Particularly in the New York shows that had live audiences, he frequently mixed with the crowds, talking to individuals as part of his act. Of course, stand-up comedy by definition is built on the direct 16

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relationship of a comic or comedian speaking to an audience, and certainly to this degree, Kovacs is clearly more aligned with stand-up than with traditional sitcom comedy. But as we have noted previously, Kovacs mixed direct talk to audiences with skits and went even further to break the boundaries between the two so that the only predictable part of a Kovacs show is that it will be unpredictable. Put another way, Kovacs created so much of his comedy by playing with the medium of television itself and thus making us, the viewers, aware of the reality and dimensions of this new form of mass communication. As we have noted, Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. had great fun making us aware we are watching a movie about a man who is watching a movie. Similarly, so much of Kovacs’ humor is the knowing wink that he is playing with the medium for the pure fun of playing with it. Let us be even more specific. As we take a closer look at Ernie’s memorable accomplishments in early television comedy, we can also see that he belongs to that ancient tradition of being a “Lord of Misrule” or “Sacred Clown,” that sanctioned member of a society who is allowed to open the gates to festivity and let us enjoy the freedom of play, celebration, and thus the spirit of carnival. In The Feast of Fools, Harvey Cox comments on such a carnival spirit in cultures through the centuries: It is hard to be festive and to think about it at the same time. Celebration demands a kind of unself-conscious participation that prevents our analyzing it while it happens (21).

Our point is simple: Ernie clearly lived his life in a similar spirit of participation. And given his nonstop schedules, it is easy to understand why he never had a moment to contemplate, say, writing a book on comedic techniques himself! This chapter covers his early and middle career in Philadelphia and then in New York. As will be clear in the next chapter, the humor that developed during those years came to an even richer fruition in California during the last few years of his life when he actually had worthy budgets for his surrealistic humor and ongoing experiments. Of course, Edie Adams as his loving co-star (after 1951) and wife (from 1954 until his death in 1962) was very much aware that a lot The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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of the humor came from the very nature of early television. Translation: no budget, no time, no finished script of any sort. None of the Philadelphia or New York shows provided funds to create a polished show or allowed the time to do so. But this situation was especially true in the early period in Philadelphia. So “winging it” was part of Ernie’s life during most of his career. To better understand “comedy outside the frame” in its total surrealistic splendor, we will consider the growth of comic diversity in all of his shows from the Philadelphia period to his final California years.

No Budget and No Time To Prepare

Cheapo props necessitated cheapo camera tricks. david walley, nothing in moderation

Milton Berle became “Mr. Television” with just one show, The Texaco Star Theater that ran from 1948 to 1956. But most stars on the variety show circuit, including Sid Caesar, had to deal with several shows in different formats and lengths over the years. Kovacs tops them all, however, in terms of numbers of shows and the incredible changes over an eleven-year television career.

the full lineup of the early kovacs shows Let us briefly detail the whole lineup and the modest budgets and brief set-up times. Note that Ernie did numerous fill-ins and guest appearances on other shows that we are not including as strictly in the Ernie Kovacs’ shows list. Framing all of this discussion is the acknowledgment that in early American television, there really wasn’t much cash available for productions. As Charles Kuralt commented in the documentary, When Television Was Young, “The producers begged you to use imagination for the budget they didn’t have.” The shows that most closely fit as Ernie Kovacs shows, that is, those in which he had almost total control include in Philadelphia: Three To Get Ready (wptz, an nbc affiliate), which was America’s first morning “wake-up” show, 7:30–9 a.m., Monday to Friday, November 27, 1950–March 28, 1952, with a strong following of 35,000 to 60,000 viewers daily.

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Time For Ernie, 3:15–3:30 p.m., for part of March as well as May and June 1951. Ernie in Kovacsland, a prime-time comedy variety show, 7–7:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, July and August 1951. Kovacs on the Corner, a late-morning comedy variety show, 11–11:30 a.m., January–March 28, 1952.

Just consider what this Philadelphia period means. In terms of a daily schedule, it meant that, for the best part of two years, he was doing two shows a day, averaging at least two hours of on-camera work with clearly no real time to write, practice, and rehearse and with no real budget at all. How did he not only survive but also thrive under such circumstances? As Diana Rico in her biography of Kovacs notes, “Ernie had honed his ad-libbing and time-filling abilities well in his years at wttm radio” (83). Certainly, nine years of “filling time” on radio was a large part of Ernie’s training for all that followed in television, and it should come as no surprise that just as he had experimented with sound on radio, he began to play with cameras and the visual nature of the medium on television. Take props, for instance. Edie Adams, who was on all of the early Philadelphia shows except Time For Ernie, said that their entire budget each week for production (other than salaries) was $15. Thus, many of the inventive props that became standards were “found” pieces, including Percy Dovetonsils’ glasses and the Nairobi Trio’s face masks. Ernie’s crews were always inspired in coming up with new ideas and inventions. wptz engineer Carl Weger, for instance, concocted a special trick lens using a soup can with two mirrors (Walley, The Ernie Kovacs Phile 65). After moving to New York in 1952, Ernie’s schedule was just as tight, even if there were a few more dollars for productions. His New York shows included: Kovacs Unlimited (wcbs-tv), which switched times from 12:45 to 1:30 p.m. to 8:30–9:30 a.m., followed by 8–9 a.m. for the last year, Mondays through Fridays, from April 1952 to January 1954. The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs), prime time, 8–9 p.m., Tuesdays, from December 1952 to April 1953. Once more, we must imagine the The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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pressures of doing a show five days a week and a special during prime time as well. The Ernie Kovacs Show (wabd, Channel 5, DuMont), late-night comedy show, 11:15–12:15 a.m., Monday to Friday, April 1954 until April 1955. The Ernie Kovacs Show (nbc), 10:30–11:00 a.m., December 1955 until July 1956, and followed with a prime time show once more for nbc from 8–9 p.m., from July to September 1956.

That critics often point to Kovacs as an inspiration for late-night hosts such as Jay Leno and David Letterman is no accident for Kovacs hosted the Tonight show from October 1956 to January 1957, from periods ranging from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Mondays and Tuesday evenings.

kovacs nonstop What was a typical day like for Ernie during those years? I asked Edie Adams to describe any given day and she chose one from 1956 as she thumbed through her calendar for that year. According to Adams: Well, a typical day started then with Ernie getting up at 5 a.m. to go over to abc to do his radio show from 6–9. (pause) Let’s start with July 1956. Ernie was doing the radio show and two TV shows. Then from 10–10:30 each morning after doing the radio show, he headed over to do his nbc Network show. At that time I was doing two songs each day on his morning show and substituting for six weeks for Polly Bergen at the Plaza in the evening. Ernie was also working on Monday or Sunday all afternoon and evening recording for the one-hour show that would play on Saturday evenings. Oh, and we managed to go to Bermuda that month with his daughters. Then in August I started rehearsals for Lil’ Abner. And don’t forget that Ernie’s daughters came to a matinee of mine whenever I was on, and we would have dinner afterwards at Sardis.

She went on to explain that often she would return from her work, turning in at 4 a.m. as Ernie was about to rise at 5. Unlike the Philadelphia and New York shows, the Kovacs shows 20

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Edie Adams “encircling” Ernie Kovacs, who enjoys it all. The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs/nbc 1952–1956). nbc/Photofest © nbc

in California from 1958–1962 were not under the same “no budget, no time” regime. But it is important to note the tireless energy and enthusiasm Ernie brought to his early work that, of course, carried over to the California shows as well. Thus, the following remarks by one of his coworkers on the California specials from 1960 until Ernie’s death in 1962 really speak to his work on all of his shows. According The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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to Robert M. Key, an engineer responsible for helping with special effects, including “fish eye and fly eye camera lenses”: Ernie was a perfectionist, driven to remarkable lengths to put on a television screen the often strange, often beautiful, always original output of his unparalleled imagination. Others around him became caught up in the drive, and it was not unusual for the actual production of a “special” (from lighting and engineering set to wrap) to consume more than twenty-four consecutive hours, without precedent or equal at the time. And the crews love it, not merely because of the amount of money they made, which was substantial, but because they genuinely loved Ernie and became thoroughly caught up in what he was attempting to achieve. It is worth observing that when he was killed that rainy January night, the crew, from the meanest to the most exalted, took up a collection among themselves to buy a full-page “we love and will miss you” ad in the trades. I do not believe that this has happened either before or since (personal interview by e-mail).

Ernie always said, “Every idea I ever had is based on the fact that it’s 2:20 and there’s a production meeting at 3 p.m.!” But comments from coworkers such as Bob Key suggest how even the nonstop craziness of his schedule became part of the fun and challenge they enjoyed. Now that we have the framework within which Ernie worked on these East Coast shows, let us take a closer look at exactly what the shows were like and what particular “surrealistic humor”—visual and verbal—he developed. But first, one final note on the difference between what was, at first, completely live television work five days a week and what was comedy as done on the stage in vaudeville across America for so many years. It is very simple. In vaudeville shows, you could hone your particular act and repeat it night after night because you were basically appearing in a different town or city each night, and even if you were in town for several nights, the audiences changed (or came back to see you do it again!). Yet, with live television that was beginning to go national, you had basically the same audience and therefore had to come up with something new every day or at least variations on familiar characters, situations, and 22

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set-ups. Therein lies the particular challenge and, often, pleasure for Ernie and his co-performers.

ernie in kovacsland A voiceover announcer for this show would begin by saying, “Ernie in Kovacsland is a short show. It just seems long!” And thus began each inventive half hour. Let us look closely at one episode to discover how early Kovacs functioned. Running as a half hour of prime time in 1951, this episode of Ernie in Kovacsland  opens with Ernie sitting on top of the desk/table on the set. He wears a bow tie and, of course, has his cigar in hand as he addresses a live audience and looks directly at us (the camera) frequently. The stage set is a European forest. Edie Adams in costume sings an operetta piece as a violin plays. As in most “comedy variety” shows, the song is done straight without humor. Ernie begins reading a poem about gypsies and breaks into Hungarian. He then turns to the camera and says “Hiya, folks. Hold it!” And the whole screen freeze-frames as he winks at us! Let’s repeat that: in 1951, Ernie Kovacs is using the freeze-frame as a visual “joke” (“Hold it!”), eight years before Francois Truffaut ended his muchwritten-about debut feature, 400 Blows (1959), with a freeze-frame of the young protagonist’s face. Truffaut is often written about as if he invented the use of the freeze-frame, but there is Kovacs playing with the language of both film and television from the start of American national television. We return to Ernie in Kovacsland after a real commercial for disabled veterans. Edie comments, “I guess all comedians want to do tragedy,” and Ernie proceeds to take on Euripides, playing Menelaus to Edie’s Helen of Troy. Even though their costumes are outrageous, they play it “seriously” at first and then begin to make mistakes and ham it up, with Ernie finally pulling off his beard and picking up some of the “Greek” props. He turns once more to the camera and says, “Don’t nobody move,” and we cut to another actual commercial, this one for joining the Navy (“When you retire you will be 38,” says the ad!). When we return to Ernie, he walks over to the Tony DiSimone Trio and asks for “ocean music, please.” As they play, he plays with them, putting a helmet on one of them and a beard on another. Once The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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more, Ernie is “breaking the frame” of what we would expect as typical conventions—that is, that musicians should play their music, and Ernie should do his jokes and skits. Yet with Ernie, everyone on camera and off was part of the comedy, and because so much was made up on the spur of the moment, they all had to be ready for anything, any time! Clearly at this point he is trying to run out the clock on his half hour, and so he begins talking to the prop man, asking him to come in closer. “The Oriental Blues” by Jack Newlon, the theme song that Ernie loved so much and used for all of his shows, begins playing, and Ernie, working to get out of his ancient Greek robes asks Edie to come over and “undo me,” commenting, “next to the last, please.” “wptz philadelphia” appears on the screen, and we hear Ernie continue to talk off-camera as we see a cartoon drawing of Edie with a beard and a cartoon drawing of Ernie as well. Put simply, in one half-hour of such an early show in his career, we have Ernie doing his interactive comic exchange with a live audience, a “straight” song from Edie, a playful nod to poetry and to Greek tragedy acted out as a skit, a comic use of film/television technique with the freeze-frame, and a playful inclusion of the musicians and stagehands into the humor unfolding before us. Note the interplay of verbal and visual humor. But also note that Ernie is not going for the fall-down-on-the-floor slapstick laugh of, say, Dumb and Dumber (1994), for instance. As abc cameraman Bob Haley has said, “Ernie wanted people to sit. He was trying to educate on all his shows. He wanted people to watch the screen at all times. You had to watch it like in the movies” (Walley, The Ernie Kovacs Phile 209). More specifically for this one episode, we can say he is often teasing and playful rather than going for slapstick and easy farce. It’s fun to see him put a helmet on a musician while he is playing, but it doesn’t get a huge laugh. Rather it evokes a broad smile. And in terms of “education,” it’s doubtful that many in the audience wrote down “Euripides” or “Greek tragedy” after the show or asked for a translation of the Hungarian he used. But you never know: some just might have asked and those in the know clearly enjoyed his playful allusions to great classics. Finally, in the spirit of the Surrealists of the 1920s, Kovacs alludes, through his carnivalesque laughter, to a wide world of cul24

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tural influences, without calling for a clear message or lesson to be learned. As Elliot H. King points out, in discussing Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Surrealist short film, Un Chien Andalou (1929), critics tried to apply Freudian, Marxist, and Jungian interpretations of what the film meant (26). But Buñuel gave the answer that surely Kovacs would have given too if asked for the “meaning” of his shows: “Nothing in the film symbolizes anything” (Mellen 153). With this playful sense of embracing audiences in the studio and in the viewing world by looking at the camera as he carried out his comedy, half-planned, half-improvised, Kovacs succeeded in creating what Mikhail Bakhtin identified as the spirit of the “carnivalesque”: Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people: they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its Laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom (7).

Following Bakhtin’s description of the nature of true carnival, it is easy to understand that within Kovacs’ “comedy world,” created each half-hour or hour that his show was on, we were not merely watching a show but were, in the carnivalesque spirit, made fellow practitioners of the show!

kovacs on the corner Let us consider one more of Ernie’s Philadelphia shows, Kovacs on the Corner, which ran in 1952 and played in the 11 to 11:30 a.m. slot. We open on a set that is a street corner with a number of informal props, including a barbershop pole, a street lamp, and a park bench, and music by the Dave Appell Trio. Ernie, with cigar, appears, and Alfred, a dog that was invisible to all except Ernie and children, comes over and starts talking to him. Their conversation is absurd, of course. Ernie carries a large female doll, which he throws offstage, knocking down and breaking some props as he says, “I’m afraid I brought out the wrong vocalist.” As he adjusts the broken telephone pole, he once more talks to the audience, asking them if they too break telephone poles. Once more, the Kovacs’ carnival has begun, and we must not just watch but also participate, as Bakhtin would say. The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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Ernie is joined onstage by a boy and girl from the audience. (We are touched to learn that the boy doesn’t go to school because he has rheumatic fever.) Once more, because the show is live, and a performer is always taking a chance with a live audience, Ernie absorbs the touching reality of the moment, rather than trying to go for any humor at this point. Next, some street cleaners show up on the corner, but we immediately “get” that they are the Dave Appell Trio, and they begin playing their music. Cut to a station break, and when we return, Ernie is a tv salesman selling . . . food! He walks out of a house, carrying a bag marked “food,” and is joined by Edie Adams. He turns to us, but we realize he is also talking to the live audience behind the camera as he says: Friends of Television, Hi! We don’t want to intrude on the privacy of your living room, but we just want to talk to you a little bit today about a product we have today that we feel is, well, pretty necessary! Eat food, friends. Eat food three times a day, friends, eat it morning, noon, and night. Yes, friends, food builds you up! [he laughs] You see food gives you all the vitamins you can’t get in vitamins. Middle of the night even, food is good for you! Food is delicious! [he laughs] You can fry food! And you can boil food and you can fricassee it too. Now friends, you take a good piece of food and roast it! [Ernie turns to Edie Adams who has been watching him.] What’s more delicious than roast food! And I want to tell you that you can get food at your supermarket and if you can’t get it at your supermarket, get it at your independent grocer. He has food.

He then hands the bag to Edie who tells us, “Accept no substitutes. Buy food. Food is good for you!” as she is clearly following the beat of Ernie’s comic monologue. Then Ernie wraps it up with, “And remember, friends, one final thing about buying food, if you spell it backwards [he turns the bag upside down], it spells doof!” This is, of course, Ernie exercising his wit and verbal humor, “riffing” on one theme: spoofing television ads. But he has fun exaggerating to the point of absurdity. Once more, we do not roar with laughter, but rather we chuckle at the silliness of the concept and the fun of seeing how far Ernie can go with such an idea. 26

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Edie sings another song, this time from State Fair, after which Ernie makes his necessary phone calls from the corner pay phone. Then the local Irish cop on the corner is joined by an old woman, who sings to the cop, “I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down.”

the ernie kovacs show Jump to one year later in New York City with a switch from nbc to cbs and to prime-time evening, and we can see that what Ernie practiced in Philadelphia, he began to perfect in New York. The date of the following episode is 1952, so it is the beginning of his New York experience. Ernie walks down through the audience to his set, a cluttered desk in front of a castle wall that has a suit of armor on it. He smokes his cigar and talks to the audience, giving a speech against television. As soon as he attacks television, the tv image flips upside down! Once again, we see Ernie playing with television “language” in an always-imaginative way. He then sings a funny song and brings a woman from the audience onstage to talk with him. In the next scene, Edie Adams sings “Old Devil Moon.” Then there is a brief section of Ernie reading letters sent in to the show, an idea he continued to use for years. One woman, Ernie reads, speaks of having thirty-three sinks in her house. What follows while the audience laughs is Ernie looking at the camera as if trying to comprehend a house with thirty-three sinks (and perhaps why someone is writing him about this). Underline this part of his shows for both Ernie’s ability to get laughter out of the absurdity of “real life” (a letter) as well as his wonderfully expressive “reaction shot” face as he contemplates such an absurdity. And throughout it all, Ernie makes use of sound effects, either from the band, the Eddie Hatrak Orchestra, or from the noise of stagehands doing everything from shooting guns to ripping items or creating flooding noises. Next there is a skit with Ernie playing an emerging artist who is pretentious and not very good! He works through various gags, including pulling out picture frames and drawing a silly sketch of Edie Adams. He then rips off his jacket and throws it at the camera and returns to his main desk onstage. Edie sings a serious ballad, and then Ernie plays a Hollywood The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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gossip reporter, Scottie, who jokes about stars, films, and censorship. He kids about John Wayne and Alfred Hitchcock, and then reads more letters to wrap up the show. He speaks to his staff off-camera. When they tell him there is less than a minute, he walks into the audience, giving away gifts. This variety comedy format is very clear: there are opening running commentary and jokes; contact with the audience, including letters mailed in that Ernie shares; usually, as in this episode, two songs from Edie Adams; and several comic skits based around topics and characters, in this case the struggling artist and Hollywood reporters.

Kovacs’ Continuity within His Carnival of Network Shows To emphasize the strong continuity in Ernie’s shows through the years, even when he switched networks, take this episode from the nbc morning (10:30–11 a.m.) version of The Ernie Kovacs Show during the 1955–1956 season. As Archie Koty’s orchestra plays, Ernie comes down the aisle smoking, and we see two Nairobi apes from the trio. They do not do the regular routine, however, because this time they are the orchestra simply playing. Ernie’s image literally flips on the screen, as we have noted in the earlier show, and then he sits at his cluttered desk with the castle wall and armor behind him. We see a photo of Edie Adams on the desk. Next, Edie breaks into a beautiful version of “The Nearness of You” as her first song. Then Ernie begins to go through letters. He holds up an ashtray mailed from Oklahoma but, as Ernie says, “with Kovacs misspelled!” Sound effects continue throughout offstage, including gunshots, and Ernie does his usual puzzled face, trying to figure out what’s happening. He explains that he mails gifts to those who write in, with some Kiwi shoe polish being the gift for the sender of the Oklahoma letter. Edie then sings “Poor Johnny One Note,” with, as always, animation and clear delivery. Following her song, Ernie has a balloon artist come onstage and shape a variety of interesting creatures from balloons with Ernie adding his commentary. Dylan Todd, a member of the Kovacs team, then does a ballad. Ernie and Edie follow with

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the most elaborate skit of the episode: a French soap opera titled, “Jacques Autre Autre,” which Ernie translates as “John’s Other Other.” They are heavily made-up and in costumes. As the skit unfolds, we learn that Edie’s character is having an affair with a baker. Suddenly, tons of French bread appear onstage, catching us completely off guard of course! As this skit ends, Ernie ties up the show with comic remarks to us and to the studio audience as music plays once more. Robert Frost once defined “freedom” as “moving easy in harness” (personal interview, 1962). Certainly, Ernie’s loose harness—providing commentary, reading letters, playing with the audience and staff, performing songs and skits as well as adding special camera tricks and sound effects—allowed him the freedom to go off on a variety of playful tangents each day he was on the air. And while these summaries of individual episodes help give a feel for the framework within which he worked in Philadelphia and New York, they do not by themselves give us a full appreciation for the rich variety of visual and verbal comedy he developed in those years. We thus should now turn to a more specific look at the comic techniques Ernie developed on these shows between 1950 and 1957. Recall Ernie’s telling words: “I know what television is not. It is not photographed radio or vaudeville.” No single sentence says more about Ernie’s purposeful mission to mine (and mime!) the possibilities of this new medium using all he had learned from life and radio.

Inside Ernie’s Vision and Practice of Comedy We have already touched on elements of surrealism as related to Ernie’s comedy, and we have begun to explore his love of playing with the new medium: television. Furthermore, we have identified Ernie as occupying that niche that combined elements of stand-up and variety shows with skits, even though he did not come from either vaudeville or the stand-up circuit. Let us now take a closer look at Ernie’s unique comic talent in perspective of comedy through the ages.

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kovacs and commedia dell ’ arte It would be difficult to think of an historical style that has affected twentieth-century performance more than the Italian commedia dell’arte. mel gordon, lazzi: the comic routines of the commedia dell’arte

One other context now needs to be introduced before we take a closer look at Ernie’s particular accomplishments in early television comedy. I am referring specifically to how Ernie indirectly fits into the ancient tradition of commedia dell’arte as it has come down to us since the days of the Romans. We are speaking of the tradition—beginning in ancient Greece and continuing most especially centuries later in Rome and then spreading throughout Europe—in which street comedy, often in the marketplace, involved comics mixing improv with stock situations with stock characters (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 59). Building on standard comic caricatures, such as the hen-pecked husband, the absent-minded professor, and the dashing young suitor, comics would take on set comic situations called lazzi (singular, lazzo) but would add variations depending on the audience and what “innovations” they may have had at the moment (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 59). Think of lazzi as “cheat sheets” in music where musicians in a club can be ready to play anything. Audiences for commedia dell’arte, therefore, were enjoying seeing familiar stories and gags and jokes in new or imaginative formats, executions, variations. And the lazzi were actually numbered and placed in a “book” for reference. For example, one lazzo was from a section on “Hunger Skits” and went like this: Coviello (or Gratiano, Pantalone, Burattino, or Arlecchino) relates how hungry he is after a shipwreck. He demonstrates his hunger by chewing on his shoes or any property on stage (Gordon 21).

The names are all stock figures that might be playing the scene. Of course, anyone who has seen Charlie Chaplin eating his shoe and shoelaces because of hunger in The Gold Rush (1925) understands 30

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how universal and thus ancient such a scene has been for comedians and audiences throughout history. Our point, however, is not that Ernie had a PhD in the history of Italian comedy from Roman times down to the present. Rather, we are saying that over the years Ernie developed his own lazzi and stock characters a la the spirit of commedia dell’arte, both consciously and unconsciously. Replace the marketplace of the Middle Ages with the living room of the American public, and you have the same sense of entertaining the masses with familiar characters within both familiar but slightly altered scenes. Take just one example: the delightfully silly poet Percy Dovetonsils. Percy never changed from the early 1950s when he was conceived with his black and white robe, his inch-thick glasses, the long curl over his face, and his poetry book and cocktail glass in hand. Our delight is in seeing, once again, what Percy is going to read to us (actual text) and what seemingly adlibbed jokes he will deliver to us and to the camera crew, staff, and live audience at the same time. Similarly, as we shall see, so many of Ernie’s gags are like regular lazzi with new variations. How many gags did he get out of a blonde in a foamy bathtub (fire shooting out near her feet or a German sub’s periscope coming up from the bubbles), for instance? Then consider how many laughs he evoked from something stretching outside its “frame,” as in Mona Lisa appearing not only as a painting, but also as a body hanging below the frame with “her” toes being licked by a sweet kitten and thus Mona Lisa not only smiles but giggles! Edie Adams told me that he was not conscious of these ancient comic similarities. But evoking these traditions helps us understand that, with almost no money in the early years and no time for practice or rehearsal, Ernie was not unlike those clowns who rolled into town and had to be funny on the spot relying on the moment, inspiration, and what they knew from past performances and lazzi. After all, Ernie did say on one show, cigar in hand, “There’s a standard formula for success in the entertainment industry and that is, ‘Beat it to death if it succeeds.’” As we will discuss, the Nairobi Trio clearly thrived on slight variations of set routines (lazzi). Another example would be the fun and comic mileage Ernie could get from the set comic situation of a damsel in distress as the evil man in a dark suit and hat (Ernie, of The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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course!) tries to tie her to the railroad tracks, or drop her off a cliff, or shoot her with a cannon, or saw her with a buzz saw, each attempt ending with a comic failure to destroy the damsel. Thus, as in comedy from Italy in the Middle Ages down through the centuries to New York and Hollywood and beyond, an understanding of laughter built on variations of set patterns has always been important.

ernie ’ s inventive use of sound, silence, and music Everything in my parents’ home made a noise. edie adams

Of course, Ernie was aware that all sound was “off-camera” for radio. And over the years he learned that a large part of radio entertainment was finding the right mix of talk, music, and, yes, noise of one kind or another. Certainly, standard radio shows had early on worked out how to make the sound of slaps (a la “slapstick” in silent comedy), gunfire, and much more. In this spirit, Ernie loved to do stunts with a remote broadcast truck outside the studio where he worked in Trenton, New Jersey. For instance, “To get a rabbit’s eye view of hunting season,” notes David Walley, “he took to the fields in a reinforced trench, capturing the sound of whizzing bullets” (Walley, Nothing in Moderation 41). Adding the visual nature of television more than doubled Ernie’s pleasures for he now immediately had two worlds of sound: oncamera and off, and for on-camera, his lively imagination could play with the surreal quality of mixing sounds and sights that simply did not go together. We will explore this area much more carefully in the next chapter as we look closely at his California “silent film”-styled work. Let’s begin, however, by noting that all of his shows featured musicians with whom he worked closely, including Archie Koty, Eddie Hatrak, Dave Appell, and the Tony DiSimone Trio. Thus, from the beginning of his career, he became interested in music not only as a variation from talking skits and monologue humor, but also as an integral part of his comic action. Of course, the Nairobi Trio would be a prime example of mixing sound and sight, as we will discuss below. What can one say about three apes playing music and bonking each other on their heads? 32

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Also, Ernie’s Hungarian heritage background helped him feel free to branch out beyond singing in English. For example, he frequently sang, in the original German, Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife,” with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, from The Threepenny Opera (1928). Ernie sang it before the opera, and thus the song was translated in 1954. It later became a Louis Armstrong hit in 1956 and the Bobby Darin pop song in 1959. But Kovacs was there ahead of them all. . . . in German! Ernie enjoyed finding images to fit the music or comically contrast with the music rather than the usual approach of television and film, which is to find music to fit the action. (This point became increasingly true in his California years, as we will explore more thoroughly in the next chapter.) Think of one musical montage with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture set to images of four toy monkeys playing drums as we hear drums, but see a cut to celery being broken for the sound of cymbals, then a cut to eggs being broken and going into a skillet but with the shells as well. Finally, the music picks up in pace, and the montage swiftly cuts between these images, including one of celery being sliced to the beat of the music. Surrealism and the carnivalesque in spirit and form! Thus, Ernie offered, through moving images and sound, three of the important elements of surrealism—surprise, unexpected juxtapositions, and non sequiturs, with the combined effect being, of course, laughter, pure and simple! Beyond music, there was Ernie’s playful use of sound effects. Guns fire, bombs explode, objects crash, but, for the most part, these are off-camera sounds in his work as we focus on Ernie’s face for his reaction to what is going on “over there.” Once more in the surrealistic vein, combining sounds that obviously do not fit the image became a specialty of Ernie’s. In one shot, he looks at his watch and we hear what sounds like Big Ben ringing. As the next chapter will explore, it is with Ernie’s development of the Eugene character that sound effects, music, and nutty visuals all came together in a wonderfully heightened and well “orchestrated” comic way.

ernie ’ s visual/ “ televised ” humor “Welcome to the orthicon tube” was one of Ernie’s favorite lines, celebrating the new technology entering America’s living rooms. The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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With the same spirit of surrealistic humor, he played with visual jokes as much as he did with sound, and, as we will see, often by using the technology of television to create the humor. In the same vein, he often drew his audience’s attention to television as being on the “kinoscope”—that is, the television screens inside the studio—so that the audience could see the show “on tv” at the same time they were watching it live. As the following areas of visual comedy will suggest, Ernie feasted on the wide-open possibilities of what could be done for laughs on camera and with and behind and through camera tricks, editing, and editing arrangements. He even enjoyed creating a set that presented a couple in their living room watching television with Ernie “on screen” who was able to reach out of their tv set and grab his audience or shoot seltzer water at them if he wished to! Once more, the “frame” was there to be used in any way Ernie wanted to use it to make us the audience, wherever we may be located, laugh.

Sight Gags Fade in to Ernie smoking a cigar underwater or a doorman at the Stork Club in New York opening the front door to let out a stork and blowing his whistle to hail a taxi. Sight gags in Ernie’s shows were plentiful and were simply funny “at first sight.” A close-up of a phone suddenly has a finger come from inside and through the center of the phone and begin to dial a number! That’s a visual joke that works well on film or television, making use of the close-up. It is also, once more, an example of Ernie playing with the medium of television and moving images. And, it is again a reversal of expectation for the audience that Ernie cultivated so often. In another scene as the theme song plays, Joe Mikolas, one of Ernie’s regulars, is, this time, the evil fellow in a black cape and hat, standing on a cliff and trying to cut the cord to which Jolene Brand as the damsel in distress clings. Instead of the cord breaking, however, the knife falls apart with a loud snapping sound. Even Ernie’s credit sequences were worth watching for these visual jokes. One sequence starts with a close-up of a cast on a foot and the word “cast” appears, followed by a photo and name for each cast member in the show. Many of Kovacs’ best sight gags could be identified by what Gerald Nachman calls “ten-second gags” (205) in the tradition of silent comedians such as Buster Keaton where the set-up and delivery of the visual joke are almost immediate. 34

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In one skit, abc News becomes a joke as Ernie, dressed in a toga and reading from a scroll, delivers the news at an “ancient” mike labeled abc (Aesop’s Broadcasting Company). At one point, he pulls up his sleeve to check the time and we see a close-up of a watch-size hourglass on his wrist! Ernie further milks his Roman sight gags by having one of the cute abc assistants come “on-camera” and kiss him as she hands him something. He looks nervous and explains, “Not now, we’re on camera!” This is followed with a sports bulletin cutting away to what looks like a typical tv news scoreboard, but, given this abc Roman report, it reads “gladiators 0 & lions viii”!

Behind the Blank Canvas Gags One form of visual humor Ernie loved was using a blank canvas to create a complete world that stretched beyond the empty white frame. Smoking a cigar, of course, in one skit, he approaches a white canvas onstage and, with a dark pen, he proceeds to draw the outline of an icebox. Music plays throughout as he works, his back to the camera. He ends by drawing a little handle on the door and then pulling the door open as real ice pours out of the icebox onto the stage. In a real sense, no more appropriate image for Ernie’s unique comic talent can be conjured up: Ernie in front of a blank white canvas turning it into anything he wanted it to be and making us laugh because we half expect that “something” will happen, but we could never completely guess how surrealistically inventive he really was. In another example, building on the icebox scene mentioned above, Ernie brings horror film actor Boris Karloff onstage and does a drawing for him. Of course, Ernie draws a haunted house, and the camera pulls in for a close-up as we see only Ernie’s hand drawing a door and then, naturally, opening it. What is revealed is Boris peeking through the door saying, “Most attractively furnished!” and smiling. Thus, Ernie’s blank canvas turns horror into humor! Humor Through Film Editing and Montage No one knew better than Ernie Kovacs that the power of film and television to “edit” meant that completely different images and scenes could easily be brought together for comic effect. In one of his cigar commercials, he plays a gunslinger who shoots it out in a saloon as he continues to smoke his cigar. At first, we have pure visual humor within the scene The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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as his hat is shot off and sails up to the ceiling and as buttons fly off his fancy leather jacket. Next, of course, his cigar is shot out of his mouth. But as he begins to shoot, we are treated to a brief montage (swift series of shots) of shots from old Westerns he obviously took the time to find and splice in. First, we see one of two cowboys on a rooftop being shot and beginning to roll off the roof as if shot by Ernie’s gun. Next, we have a close-up street-shooting scene in which, again, one cowboy takes a bullet in the chest and falls while his partner keeps firing at their opponent. Swiftly we cut to a cowboy on a horse, taking a shot and falling with the horse on top of him to the ground, and then another cowboy shot as he stands in a storefront window, falling out of the window onto the street. Then, we see an elephant groaning on the ground as if shot—somewhere and somehow—by Ernie. Yes, the surrealism of an elephant suddenly in a Western is clearly Ernie Kovacs’ imagination at work full tilt in a purely carnivalesque spirit. The shootout ends as a young lady in a long dress walks through the swinging doors only to have her skirt shot off and her long knickers exposed. But before we cut to the Dutch Masters cigar box and the commercial pitch, Ernie splices in one last “killing” and this is the explosion of a ship in a harbor. What seems particularly “modern” about this example of what we could call Ernie’s “montage (editing) humor” is the extremely short takes of each shot so that as music plays throughout, we have something of a humorous mtv music video decades before mtv existed. Let us add one more example of how editing helped Ernie to create laughter. In a nonverbal skit called “Magicians Bowling League,” Ernie, in an elaborately silly magician’s costume, challenges another magician in a black outfit to a bowling match. As music plays, his opponent bowls, and we continue to watch them as they watch what happens. We hear the ball striking pins, and then we cut to a shot of one pin remaining in the middle. The opponent in black picks up his ball again and gives it a roll, but behind his back, we see Ernie lift up his magic wand and wave it toward the end of the lane. Cut to the ball approaching the last pin, which suddenly rises in the air until the ball passes and then it settles back down on the lane. This is truly a magician’s bowling league, and we appreciate the use of film editing to create the joke and thus the laughter! 36

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Camera Tricks: From Double Exposure to Drawing on Film Ernie never tired of combining images in imaginative ways to make his audiences everywhere laugh. In one shot, he sits in a theater talking to us as a transparent ghost-like Edie Adams, as small as a mouse, climbs up his shoulder. In voiceover, we hear Ernie explain that if we think we see a woman on his shoulder then there is “something wrong with your television set.” Underline once more that seldom did any of the other early television comedians—from Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, and Steve Allen to Milton Berle, Burns and Allen, and Jackie Gleason—play with the means of the medium of television in such imaginative ways. For the most part, all of these comedians were doing their acts “on television” not with the actual television production “language.” In another scene, Ernie is sleeping when a transparent turtle appears as in his dream and begins to talk to him. Once more, the point is that the humor comes from manipulating the image by combining the turtle and Ernie through double exposure (superimposing). As soon as Ernie wakes up, of course, the turtle disappears. But the point is that fifty years before anyone talked about digital special effects, Ernie was there, with the help of his eager and talented crew, experimenting with new and incongruous ways to make us laugh. This superimposing technique was clearly a favorite of his, for during many of his Channel 5 wabd shows for DuMont, he is superimposed on the musical group, the Four Top Hatters. He also liked to experiment with split screen, including combining images of himself on both halves of the screen, so that he could talk to himself! As we noted earlier, this level of self-consciousness is part of what makes his work what we can call surrealistic humor, for our laughter is coming from our own awareness that such a “reality” is only possible by manipulating the televised image. In the same way, we enjoy Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks in his painting, The Persistence of Memory, or, as Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy shows in her book Surrealism, Giorgio de Chirico’s lifeless statues with what look like corkscrew heads in his painting The Disquieting Muses, and Alberto Giacometti’s Man and Woman bronze statue, in which the man resembles a large pick and the woman an abstract shovel, echoing male and female sexual organs. On this last work by Giacometti, for instance, Klingsöhr-Leroy captures how Surrealist The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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works invite us to consider multiple possibilities and meanings when she concludes, “Could Giacometti be playing with the biological phenomenon that the Surrealists elevated to the mythical status— the female praying mantis that eats the male after mating?” (56)

Parody and Satire Remember that Aristophanes in his ancient, but still fresh in the twenty-first century, comedies spent a lot of time satirizing and lampooning everything in Greek society, from Socrates and the philosophers to Greek tragedy and the likes of Euripides and Sophocles, as well as spoofing lawyers, politicians, and famous leaders. No wonder that even in the early years of television, comedians such as Ernie Kovacs made a lot of fun of everything and everyone coming in over the “orthicon tube.” We’ve already outlined a number of parodies from Ernie’s shows, including French soap operas, Greek tragedy, and music such as “Mack the Knife,” sung in German, or songs such as Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s 1950 hit “Mona Lisa,” originally sung by Nat King Cole. From the start, therefore, as several commentators have observed, Ernie was “cosmopolitan.” It’s one thing to make fun of the then-popular television quiz shows by coming up with, for example, “Question Man,” instead of some form of “Answer Man” or Name That Tune. Yet, Ernie’s spirit of parody ranged far and wide across literature, cinema, and, of course, television. Once more, we should remember that the Surrealists similarly reflected, as André Breton suggested, everyone and everything from Freud and the Dadaist Movement to satirical winks to popular art, literature, and music of the bourgeois cultures of their times. True, no film audience has to have read Freud and others to be deeply affected by Buñuel and Dalí’s image of a knife passing through a young woman’s eyeball. But, for many in those times who were aware of these echoes, the effect is similar to American audiences getting Ernie’s satirical winks to television quiz shows that were on the air as he was “playing” with them. Going one step further, on one show Ernie parodied prison movies with a skit called “Cell Block 648 produced by Septic Studios,” satirizing a book titled Cell Block 7¼. Ernie enjoyed doing single skit parodies in such a style, but he also was very creative in talking on-camera to us about a series of parodies, in one case, television Westerns. Remember that at that 38

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time Americans were deluged with Westerns, ranging from The Lone Ranger (1949–1957), Hopalong Cassidy (1950–1952), The Gene Autry Show (1950–1956), The Roy Rogers Show (1951–1957), and Gunsmoke (1955–1975) down to Have Gun Will Travel (1957–1963) and Wagon Train (1957–1965). Thus, Ernie was able to play with the television audience’s wide knowledge of these shows to illustrate the following parody monologue with very funny staged shots. He begins by saying, “At one time the big gun duel at the end was the big thing and we were satisfied to see this”: Fade to a Western street. Two cowboys come out (one in black and one in white) and shoot it out with the cowboy in the black outfit, of course, dying.

Ernie continues, “After Westerns practically filled the air, it was the general feeling of the Trade that at least they could vary the gun duels that occurred some two or three hundred times a week.” Fade to an aerial shot of our black and white gunfighters with our man in black falling and stretching out on the ground below us. The same gunfight, but this time shot from below with a clear ground, as if the two are standing on a sheet of glass. Then the shootout is seen from between the legs of the cowboy in white.

Ernie again: “An interesting shot developed on one show sponsored by a hat manufacturer.” Close-up of the “white” cowboy’s white hat as the camera pulls behind the cowboy to see the label “yucca hats.” There is a hole in the hat (no explanation given), and we see the cowboy in black collapse and die, through the hole in the Yucca hat. Talk about product placement!

Ernie’s voice once more: “By now we had seen so much of the cowboy and the final duel that the tv director began concentrating on everything but the gunmen doing the shooting.” Close-up of a wagon wheel, then a close-up of two women registerThe Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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ing shock at what they are seeing, followed by a close-up of a horse, then the hair of the cowboy in black and a shot of his spurs and empty bullet shells followed by close-ups of shooting but not of the shooters, and finally a bullet that goes through the tv camera as the cameraman wipes out broken glass from the lens.

Ernie continues: “The only thing that hadn’t been photographed was the bullet. Then one night on the new Western. . . .” A black background as a slow-motion bullet travels and goes through the cowboy in black, leaving a hole large enough to see the cowboy in white put his gun back in his holster and walk off.

Our narrator again: “But now the need for something more than special shots and bullet close-ups was felt and now plans are being made for next year’s Westerns. One of the first Westerns appearing next season will be aimed at the adult audience. It’s not so much about ‘what happened’ as it is about ‘why it happened.’” A brief scene plays out of a cowboy on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office being analyzed. The cowboy talks about how he killed a man.

Ernie once more: “Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone has been kicking around an idea for a Western in the Serling manner.” A set that looks like Mars with strange plants and smoke rising from the floor. Strange music a la Twilight Zone as bizarre cowgirl “creatures” with long teeth and long fingers threaten a lone cowboy who fires his gun with only flowers coming out instead of bullets. Then his gun turns into a set of, yes, bananas.

Ernie speaks: “One of the natural things to follow the Serling presentation will be one of those imaginative Westerns like one of those weird shows that come out now and then in the movies.” Cut to interior of a ranch house as a cowboy warns two women about a spaceship that has landed. “A mighty big cowboy just got

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out of it,” Ernie explains, at which point we see an eyeball that fills the whole living room window peeping in as the women shout. Switch to exterior of a town seen from above. The houses look like the size of matchboxes as “colossal cowboy” feet crunch down, destroying the town.

Finally, Ernie, seated in the control room with four television screens behind him and wearing headphones, says, “One of the more imaginative producers this year has a new show ready called Rancid the Devil Horse.” The scene opens on a cowboy outside a saloon. Suddenly a gun fires and he falls dead as the camera pulls back to reveal the “Devil Horse,” gun in hand, dressed like a cowboy and grinning. The sequence goes on a bit more to include the opposite of the earlier skit—that is, a human inside a giant’s home—and then a “foreign” (read German) Western called Das Einsam Aufseber with Ernie as Wolfgang, the German cowboy dressed in leather shorts.

This is enough to convey Ernie’s keen sense of satire and parody, all wrapped up with his personal delivery so that he is at the center of it all, appropriately located in the “control room.” Most of Ernie’s skits, in fact, were obvious winks to other works of pop culture or even great art and literature. But, as in the case of the Western spoofs we’ve mentioned, so many of Ernie’s parodies were of television itself and its multitude of programs. One 1956 example was a hilarious takeoff on the popular children’s program, The Howdy Doody Show. Edie Adams comes on camera and announces that there will have to be a substitution today for The Howdy Deedy Show and it will be by Miklos Molnar, the Melancholy Magyar. Thus, one of Ernie’s favorite characters, and certainly the one closest to his Hungarian roots, takes over with complete satirical humor from one of America’s most popular children’s shows. (Edie goes on to explain that Miklos, besides appearing on television, owns a company that produces a Hungarian wine, bor.) Cut to a group of screaming children much like those on The Howdy Doody Show and a drawing of a puppet looking like Howdy The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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Doody but with a moustache. Behind the happily screaming children is a sign on the wall saying deedyville. Of course, as we turn to Miklos Molnar, we see Ernie as he always played Miklos: the melancholy Hungarian with pasted-down hair and a huge moustache and wearing a 1920s three-piece European suit and tie. He then does a routine in his thick Hungarian accent, making fun of the “peanut gallery” and television in general. Finally, the punch line: after several characters come by, the puppet begins to jump and shout and Miklos walks over, pulls out a pair of scissors, and cuts the strings to Howdy Deedy, who then collapses on the stage as Miklos walks away smiling.

We delight in the unexpected harshness of the joke, but, of course, one assumes that any interview of parents at the time would have found many adults who wished they too could cut the strings! Finally, we should mention that Ernie himself hosted a lot of game shows beyond his regular comedy shows (and remember that Groucho stayed alive and laughing on television as the cigar-smoking host of You Bet Your Life), including Take A Guess (cbs, 1953); One Minute Please (DuMont, 1954–1955); Time Will Tell (DuMont, 1954); What’s My Line? (cbs, 1957); and Take A Good Look (abc, 1959–1960). Thus, he spoofed on his own shows the very genre he had often hosted. In a mid-1950s skit, he hosts a show called, What’s My Hush Hush? He swiftly introduces the completely silent panel and then calls a guest to stage, asking him to whisper his “hush hush” to Ernie. When he does so, Ernie looks worried and does hand signals to the guest as if explaining how to find the men’s room. The guest nods and leaves. End of game show skit!

the carnival of kovacs’ comic characters Ernie created, loved, and inhabited a number of characters, including Miklos Molnar, a Hungarian figure obviously drawn in part from his own ethnic background (and that of one of his writers, Deke Heyward), and Pierre Ragout, the French storyteller as whom Ernie wore a beret and scarf and told stories such as “Le Rouge Riding Hood” (Rico 134). Other figures Ernie developed include Wolfgang von Sauerbraten, the German disc jockey; Uncle Gruesome,

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complete with fangs and a scary wig; Howard, the World’s Strongest Ant (especially for children watching the show); the Kapusta Kid in Outer Space (puppet skits spoofing kids’ space shows); Matzoh Hepplewhite the Magician; Gertrude, the rag doll; and Kenneth Mockridge, the philosophical taxi driver, to list but a few. Let us now take a closer look at three of Ernie’s most memorable figures.

Percy Dovetonsils When Andy McKay, who worked with Ernie in Philadelphia, handed him a pair of strange thick glasses, the poet laureate of The Ernie Kovacs Show was born. Here again, Ernie’s eccentric talent comes to light, for who would have guessed that his most memorable single character would be a wonderfully silly and effeminate poet with dark spit curls of hair, inch-thick glasses, and a gown that looks more like a bathrobe than a cloak of any design. Yes, even his name—Percy Dovetonsils—is surreal and very funny. But we should acknowledge immediately that although Percy makes us laugh, we actually enjoy and look forward to his “poetic” view of all kinds of everyday experiences that get transformed into his verses. In this sense, Ernie definitely expanded his audience’s world and actually invited them to enjoy poetry, whether written by Percy or others. Ernie always began each Percy skit with the percy dovetonsils: poet laureate sign and some harp music, fading into Ernie as Percy in a book-lined study with a painting of what looks like Whistler’s mother on a motorcycle behind him. In this (undated) skit, Percy holds his cocktail glass with a large flower sticking out of it and begins speaking to us (the camera): You are using larger olives this week. Well, it’s so good to be surrounded by all my friends on the crew and today the man who is taking my picture is the Anthony Armstrong Jones of the tv industry, Norman, he’s shooting me. He says I’ve put on a bit of weight, but it’s only baby fat, my Dear.

He then shakes his head with those tight lips and his thin moustache over them.


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There’s so much talk about weight these days. Everything is so low calorie. It really isn’t very interesting when they give you low-cal chicken fat! So little left. (He shakes his head again.) So I’ve described my poem to this extent. Today I’m going to read you a poem about dieting in which there will be a clue.

He twitches his head as the camera moves in and the poem and music begin. I’m so sick of dieting, I really feel bombastic. There’s candy without sugar, rolls without butter and lard that is made of plastic. It’s the lowering of calories I’ve really grown to hate. They are so low now, they are shoved in under the plate. Oh, suzettes were made for creping and ice cream is to be caked. Hawaii is great for vacations, but Alaska was made to be baked.

Once more his silly nodding, and we fade out on Percy. As David Walley made clear, “Ernie’s humor was not for everyone” (The Ernie Kovacs Phile 206), and that is true of Percy Dovetonsils as well as any of Kovacs’ characters. What can we say about a cocktail-sipping poet in a zebra robe that explains why he is so funny? Certainly, such a character is not as broad-based in its humor as, say, Johnny Depp playing an outrageous pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean (2006 and 2007) or Jim Carrey in almost any film from Liar Liar (1997) to Yes Man (2008). But for those who are exposed to Kovacs, such a character cannot be easily explained or forgotten and continues to be savored through the decades since he was created.

Eugene Percy Dovetonsils is a performer, who loves to sip his drink and look directly at us, commenting in satirical ways that make even him laugh. But Eugene, discussed in detail in the following

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chapter, is a silent Innocent, who makes us laugh in large part because of his sense of surprise at the “silent” world around him that often erupts into inappropriate sounds and voices. Dressed in a straw hat and tie and jacket, he is just a simple man going about being in places he doesn’t seem to belong to or understand. In this sense, he is certainly more universal than a satirical poet with bottle thick glasses. And that Ernie as Eugene does not speak, of course, is a strong wink back to the glory of silent cinema before sound and dialogue in films existed. Although audiences enjoyed the nutty poetry that Percy wrote, everyone in the world could appreciate Eugene because he is completely visual (and aural) in his humor, as were Chaplin, Keaton, and the other silent comics, who needed no subtitles and who were loved in every country in which their films were shown. Put simply, Ernie was extremely perceptive in seeing that part of the future of this new medium of television lay in making use of the wealth of approaches to comedy used in silent film and by silent film comedians. In this sense, Kovacs was a cinematic and comic brother of the French writer, director, and performer Jacques Tati in films, such as Mon Oncle (1958), that were contemporary silent comedies (sound and music, yes, but no dialogue).

Miklos Molnar, Hungarian Chef We have already mentioned this Hungarian caricature, who takes over the Howdy Deedy Show. But Miklos was also wonderful in scenes as a Hungarian chef giving us cooking lessons. Now once more we need to add that not only was Ernie able to draw from his Hungarian heritage in creating this ethnic humor, he also had worked on a cooking show, Deadline for Dinner, at the beginning of his television career in Philadelphia from March 1950 to April 1952. So from the beginning of his tv work, food and fun and filling time went together. Add to this the fact that Deke Heyward, one of his writers on several of the shows, was also of Hungarian background and the Budapest boy on camera makes even more comic sense. Let us choose one Molnar skit. We see a kitchen set and Molnar (Ernie) in a white chef ’s outfit with a large hat and exaggerated eyebrows. He looks at the camera and explains he will tell us how to


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plan a menu. He holds up a plucked chicken and informs us he will make “Chicken Molnar.” Next, he starts giving us the Hungarian words for chicken and turkey and throws in, “and troika is a Russian dance,” as he begins to dance around the kitchen. He then starts to explain how to make stuffing with capers and olives, placing a caper inside an olive. Then we get a whole list of ingredients, most of which he gives us in Hungarian, finally throwing the chicken into the pot and pouring in a bottle of Hungarian wine, bor, which he splashes half on himself and half into the pot. As he gives the final cooking instructions, he concludes saying, “Pull the Chicken Molnar out of the oven and throw away the chicken. He tosses it over his shoulder. “And drink up the sauce.” He concludes by drinking the leftover wine and ingredients. Fade out on yet another satire of cooking shows done Hungarian style! What to say? Once more, Gerald Nachman puts it well: Kovacs “was a devotee of the Kitchen Sink school of comedy, in which everything—and especially the kitchen sink—was a resource” (204). Add to this Ernie’s celebration of America as a nation of people from all over the world. Remember that so many comedians and entertainers in general wanted so much to be assimilated as “Americans” that they either made little or no mention or reference to their native heritages. Groucho Marx perhaps smoked as many, if not more, cigars than Ernie Kovacs, but he and his brothers never built sketches or films based on their European Jewish heritage. Similarly, the Three Stooges (family name: Horwitz) made no allusions or references to their Ukrainian Jewish roots. Ernie remained a Kovacs in name and in heritage and with a carnivalesque appreciation for the diversity of what America accepted as a country, not so much as a proverbial “melting pot” but rather a rich and spicy and humorous ethnic “gumbo.”

The Nairobi Trio Have you ever tried to explain them to anyone else? edie adams speaking about the trio

Hands down, however, it is the Nairobi Trio that audiences familiar with Kovacs usually mention first when his name appears. And as Edie Adams commented, there really is no easy way to explain how 46

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purely engaging and hilarious these three apes were and still are. I wish to add that there was really nothing else on television like them: these three apes were unique. The basic set-up was always the same and only the lazzi (routines) differed, if only slightly. The song was always “Solfeggio,” which Ernie heard in 1954 via his stage manager, Ben Gaiti, who had given it to Ernie’s director at DuMont, Barry Shear (Walley, The Ernie Kovacs Phile 96). In terms of clothing, all three apes are in long jackets and wear what are variations on derby hats. The ape on the viewer’s right plays a piano while the ape on the left holds two tympani drumsticks as if he is playing a drum, but none is visible. The ape in the middle, most often played by Ernie himself, is engaged in some activity that varies from eating a banana to plugging what look like large spikes into a board of some kind. There is the mechanical sameness of them simply playing the song while the middle ape is carrying out some other interest. Then comes the complication of some antagonism that develops between the drummer and the middle ape. This leads to a bonking or clubbing of the middle ape and then usually revenge carried out on the drummer. But variations always came through with the seemingly uninterested, mechanical piano player sometimes unexpectedly becoming involved. Yet, the comic plot is even more involved, for there are always the close-up shots of the middle ape’s anger toward the end as he breathes heavily, sucking in the mask and blowing it out. Then there is the initial shock registered on the middle ape’s face once he is struck as he tries to contemplate what has happened. Part of the humor, of course, is that the bonking seems quite unmotivated. There is nothing to gain by clubbing the middle ape (and the weapon varies from skit to skit so that it is not always drumsticks but often hammers of one sort or another). Finally, there is the usual unmasking of the middle figure at the conclusion of many of the skits, revealing Ernie as the audience applause builds. Edie Adams explained that many different players took to the ape suits, including herself, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, and many others. Clearly, the repetitiveness of the skits and the simplicity of them meant that no training or rehearsals were necessary and thus anyone could become an ape (or gorilla as they are often called, too). The Flow of the Philadelphia and New York Kovacs Shows

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Take one Nairobi skit, for example. The familiar tune is playing, our piano player is plunking the keyboard, the middle ape is this time conducting the music with a baton, and the ape on the left is playing an imaginary drum with his long sticks. While the middle ape is conducting, the drummer turns in a mechanical way and does a drumroll on the conductor’s head (hat). The middle ape looks puzzled, but keeps on conducting. The same action repeats a second time. Note that, as usual, the piano player plays with his back to the others. It’s important to observe too that the backdrop is completely dark, so we see nothing except the three apes. And as we pull back now, we note that the conductor is conducting now not with his baton, but with a peeled banana. As the camera pulls in for a close-up of the conducting ape with his long dark hair, derby hat, and cigar in mouth (of course!), we hear the “lyrics,” sung by the singers on the record. The words sung twice are: Me so la, ray fa me so So me la fa ray so so bo

And the drummer does a third bonking on the conductor. Now he— the middle ape—watches the drummer as he mechanically turns back to his drumming position while the words continue and half the banana falls to the floor: Do me fa, si ray me si La me ray fa me so so

The male singers continue with similar lyrics as a fourth bonking takes place. We are now in for an extreme close-up of the conductor ape’s face, which breathes in and out with anger. Pull back for a middle distance shot of the trio as the conductor watches the drummer. But then he goes back to conducting with his banana apparently oblivious or not remembering his previous beating. Yes, another one takes place. And as the whole scene repeats, the conducting ape looks up at the last second to avoid one more beating and sees the drummer with raised sticks over his head. Now the conductor continues to conduct but with his eyes turned completely on the drummer. Music continues as the camera pulls in 48

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for a two-shot of the conductor and the piano player. At this point, the piano player turns and taps the conductor on the shoulder and as he turns to see the piano player, he is zonked on the head one more time. Close-up of extreme anger on the conductor’s face (in-and-out movement of the mask) as he rises and walks over to the drummer and picks up the one prop on the set—a china vase—and shatters it over the head of the drummer. Fade out as he has at last extracted revenge. In concluding our Nairobi commentary, we should note that animals have been not only an important part of storytelling and mythology throughout human history but also a strong element in comedy. Surveys show, for instance, that the most recognized face during the twentieth century was not that of any human, such as John F. Kennedy, John Wayne, Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, or Bruce Lee, but that of Mickey Mouse! And certainly even as far back as Aristophanes and some of his comedies—including The Frogs, The Wasps, and The Birds—projecting human behavior on other species has allowed for even greater humor.

And Now for the Final Cut Edie Adams confirmed that Ernie and his cohorts had so much fun doing skits and planning out mad scenes that often they were guilty of entertaining themselves but not thinking clearly enough about a general audience. (One can often hear off-camera laughter from the crew at times when the live audience doesn’t laugh at what is obviously an “in-house” joke.) Enter Edie! As she notes: I was able to help with, well, editing. I mean I would come in from whatever I had been doing and they would show me something and I would say, “It’s not funny” or “I have no idea what’s going on here so just drop it or change it.” And they would generally listen to me and make changes, because Ernie really needed someone to do this since he was so into whatever he was doing that often he didn’t really know if something was funny to others or not (personal interview).


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Cut to the future after Kovacs’ death. Did he influence a lot of comedians? Yes, we can find elements of his humor in Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live skits and in The David Letterman Show approach to on-camera humor that is halfimprovised with guests. But as Gerald Nachman puts it, “It would be nice to say Kovacs influenced tv comedians, but impressed them is much closer to the truth. Nobody in tv ever took up where he left off ” (203).

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3 } Silents Please! Ernie, California, and Working with Music, Sound, and Surrealistic Visuals on His Specials I have a desire to illustrate music. ernie kovacs

I have often wondered, as many others have, exactly what he would have done with the wonders of digital effects, considering the marvels he created with mechanical and optical effects. robert m. key

Ernie’s California period was from 1958 until his death in January 1962. It was a period in which he combined Hollywood, and thus work in feature films, and work with television specials. The specials actually had budgets, with time to plan and shoot skits and scenes, as opposed to trying to make something up on the spot on live television every day as he had done in Philadelphia and New York. During his California years, Ernie split his energies between working in television and learning to play the Hollywood game as he appeared in ten feature films. But our focus here is on how Ernie built on his earlier television work to see what he could do to go beyond what he had already done back East. Besides guest appearances, Ernie did four shows during this final period: Kovacs on Music (nbc), half-hour prime-time special on May 22, 1959 Take A Good Look (abc), prime-time quiz show, from October 1959 until July 1960 Silents Please (abc), half-hour show about silent movies, from March until October 1961

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The Ernie Kovacs Show (abc), monthly prime-time special in May, June, and September 1961 to and including January 1962

Yet, if we first consider Kovacs on Music, we should note that it is clearly an American television masterpiece not only of comedy but also for its use of music and visual effects. It is Kovacs at his best because in California, unlike his Philadelphia and New York shows, he had time to plan and indulge one direction—music and visuals— as opposed to having to wear all the hats required by a variety show format. Barry Shear directed Kovacs on Music, and Ernie wrote and starred in this half-hour special along with Edie Adams and a support team, with music by a young André Previn and his orchestra. Clearly, this California show links back to his first “no dialogue” half-hour show, which ran in New York as The Ernie Kovacs Show special for nbc, January 19, 1957, with Barry Shear directing and music by Harry Sosnik and his orchestra. By the time Ernie got to his monthly specials in California in 1959, therefore, he had already paid his dues, experimenting with music, visual humor, and a playful approach to “film language” itself. As we begin to take a close-up look at how Ernie’s fertile California shows functioned, it is important to highlight the line from Ernie in one of the shows: “I have a desire to illustrate music.” Note that he does not say, “I want to make you laugh four times a minute using music and visual humor,” or anything like that. Nothing in the quote is about comedy. Thus, we are exploring how someone who made his name on radio and in early television as a comedian grew to embrace a larger media world that did not ignore comedy, but rather, saw laughter as only part of the larger picture. Certainly, we have no shortage of examples of how comics and comedians the world over have either grown to leave comedy completely behind or tried to incorporate both the dramatic and the comic. Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, made the world laugh for nine seasons/years and could average about four jokes per minute during that time (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 124). By ending his popular show at the height of his career, Seinfeld was clearly signaling he was ready for change, even though by the year 2009 that new direction was still not apparent. Ernie Kovacs, in contrast, showed a clear evolution from the hap52

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pily haphazard variety show formats to the tightly thought-out “illustrations” of music—comic and non-comic in his late New York period and throughout all of his California period. Consider the following sequence from Kovacs on Music, his first California show.

Dancing Gorillas No sequence captures how Ernie took on high culture with surrealistic visuals more clearly than the extended ballet skit with gorillas dancing to Swan Lake in what Edie Adams said were costumes weighing forty to fifty pounds each! For this reason alone, Ernie chose male dancers to be ballerinas and insisted that they be good dancers for he was well aware that the comedy would come from seeing good dancing by “creatures” we don’t expect to be able to dance. Just to see clowns jumping around to classical music would become a tiresome slapstick joke after ten or fifteen seconds. But the following scene from Kovacs on Music plays out for four minutes and fifteen seconds. Ernie loved to give introductions and here is his opening talk on the Swan Lake scene. Looking very serious and respectable in a suit and, of course, smoking a cigar, Ernie explains: The delicate art of the ballet is a secluded and particular form of musical loveliness. I’m sure none of us has failed to be thrilled by the sight of a prima ballerina exhibiting the flawless grace of breathtaking leg extensions or the solidity of arabesques and attitudes.

He then specifically mentions Swan Lake and many of the famous ballerinas who have danced it, including Maria Tallchief and those from the Bolshoi Ballet in Russia. Then Ernie comments: Tonight we are presenting a somewhat synopsized version of Swan Lake because of time limitations. . . . Inasmuch as most of the ballet dancers here in Hollywood are at the Bolshoi performance tonight, we were in trouble. However, I was most fortunate in securing a somewhat unknown group whose audition production had us Silents Please!

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cheering and applauding because of the magnificence of their execution. So tonight I am particularly happy to be able to include within this program, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet.

Fade to black and fade in on a ballet stage with five “ballerinas” grouped in the center in the distance as the music, played “straight,” begins. The set is classical, with only what look like Greek columns spaced around the stage. The ballerinas seem large, but, because of the distance, we don’t yet know what they are or how huge they are. Then there is an overlap dissolve to a close-up of one ballerina, and we see “she” is, clearly, well, a gorilla, looking to be at least three to four hundred pounds, with long hair flowing over her costume. What follows is the actual Swan Lake ballet: the dancers are on toes, they circle, they use all the sweeping arm movements, and the music is absolutely played as it would be during any professional ballet. Furthermore, there is no trick scenery or joking props. Put simply, everything is professional and normal for a production of Swan Lake except for the one element: gorillas, instead of women, are the ballerinas! The main ballerina, a lighter-colored gorilla, leaps and seems as weightless as any professional dancer except for the fact that “she” looks to weigh more than three hundred pounds. Add to all of the above the fact that the camera does not do anything fancy but merely records the mastery of the dancing presented. The scene intensifies when the male archer arrives with his bow and soon the man is dancing with the “blonde” main dancer. This is followed by a wonderful dance by the four dark gorillas, and then all are dancing together. As they complete the dance and take a bow, another off-stage gorilla appears, bringing our main lady a bunch of bananas instead of a bouquet of flowers! Comment: Our natural reaction is to chuckle or even laugh out loud at first at the absurdity (or surrealism!) of ballet-dancing gorillas. But after the initial surprise, we become absolutely fascinated at how well they perform. Once more, Ernie is not going for “dumb and dumber” fall-down slapstick silliness, but for a truly artistic illustration of the music that deeply impresses us as much as it amuses us. Add also that the lack of a live studio audience laughing increases 54

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the “realism” and “seriousness” of this clearly impossible scene that has proven to be possible. Thus, Ernie is going beyond the mere laughter of, say, the Nairobi Trio, to pull us into the moment and enjoy how professional it all is once we accept the nutty premise! Let us now turn to the California monthly specials.

The Ernie Kovacs Monthly Specials Having worked with nbc, cbs, and DuMont, Ernie did the monthly specials for abc. What follows in discussing one show was basically standard for them all. Each consisted of about eight segments, separated by blackouts, with at least one extended musical piece richly “illustrated” (Rico 279). On his second monthly special, Ernie put it this way: Actually there is a purpose to this program even if it doesn’t seem so to the naked eye, if I may use that expression on tv.

He continued by stating: The inherent love that I have for music is really why I am here. The money means nothing—the money is nothing—consequently, it means nothing. But it is the desire to illustrate music, sound to sight, more or less.

Always over budget and often working twenty-four to forty-eight hours, thus running up huge amounts in overtime, Ernie’s faithful crews loved him. The studio executives, however, were constantly on the warpath. His first special, for instance, was budgeted at $11,000 and Ernie spent $25,000 (Rico 286), then when abc raised the funding to $25,000, Kovacs’ costs usually ran at about $35,000. In Philadelphia and New York, so much of what Ernie did was live and had to be done on the spot at that moment. But in California, according to Edie Adams, Ernie luxuriated in having a month to plan and shoot a show. So since he had more time, why did he insist on doing so much nonstop overtime work? The answer, says Adams, was simple: “Ernie felt he got better performances and effects if people pushed themselves beyond the usual workday.” Silents Please!

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Once again, those familiar with the hard guidelines and union regulations of contemporary television work can appreciate what a different era it was when Ernie Kovacs was doing his most mature work. Quite simply, the television networks and studios were a lot looser and less formulated in those years, and Ernie thrived on that flexibility. Finally, we must note that television soon settled into halfhour or hour weekly shows with a season of twenty to twenty-six weeks (or a shorter season for hbo shows such as The Sopranos), but the monthly special is a format that has not continued. Once more, Kovacs was fortunate to find such a niche that suited his vision of what television could be.

the eugene show, november 26, 1961 We will detail one show to capture the full complexity and inventiveness of a single half-hour episode. Scenes are numbered so that we can fully appreciate how much was programmed into one show. We have also added the running time in minutes and seconds of each scene to help capture the timing of Ernie’s comedy. Finally, I have added a brief commentary on the importance of each scene for its comedy and/or its originality. First, consider Eugene as a Kovacs character once more. Eugene carries a lunch box, wears a suit and a white straw hat, and, with each step he takes, his shoes make a noise as if he is walking through crunchy corn flakes or something similar in terms of the squishy and crunching sound made. The lunch box is a small detail but one that suggests Eugene is in some way a working-class man who definitely is not enjoying two-martini lunches with Percy Dovetonsils or anyone else. What his occupation is, however, we never learn. He is always a wanderer, passing by and passing through. Also consider his name: “Eugene” comes close to “eugenesis,” which means being very fertile or prolific. Put even more directly, “eu” is a Greek root word that means beautiful or good. Thus, we can speak of “beautiful genes” or good genes. We don’t want to exaggerate the importance of the name, but it is interesting that it echoes such positive notions and sounds, too—neither male nor female but perhaps something in the middle. “Bob” or “John” or “Henry” would certainly be much more “male” names. And clearly, Eugene is far from being a macho man. 56

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The episode unfolds in this way:

Scene 1 (1:35 minutes) Eugene in a blank hallway walking toward us, peering at the camera as if it were a fourth wall, thus trapping him in a space with no exit. The title “Eugene” appears, and as he turns around, the hallway appears to have shrunk to smaller than five feet from what seemed yards long originally. Eugene pulls out what looks like a measuring tape and tapes it above him across the hallway. Meanwhile on the screen appear these words: Eugene: Everybody’s been talking all day. Since the milkman said “good morning,” There’s been nothing but talk talk. For the next half hour, there won’t be any talk at all.

At this point, Eugene has put tape from the ceiling to the floor, too. He glances to the side and down to the floor and, in close-up, we see a Dutch Masters ashtray with a lit cigar in it, thus sponsorship is established. Music is playing too at this point. Eugene picks up the cigar and begins to smoke it, clearly enjoying his moment. Comment: Eugene is established as a character in motion. But we have no clue as to where he is headed or why and part of the surrealistic effect is that the hallway is something of an unidentified prison, for Eugene appears to be trapped. He seems to be trying to find a way out, but does not seem to be in any rush and clearly enjoys his cigar. We are pulled into the clever strangeness of this world, but there is no hearty laughter here.

Fade to black and Scene 2 (1-minute commercial) The same theme song continues as Ernie, looking like a “normal” man in a suit (and thus not dressed as Eugene) attending a concert, takes his program and begins to sit in the audience, which includes a woman in a mink coat and an older gentleman. Once Ernie is seated, we see that he is surrounded by eight others in the audience, all of them looking off-camera, toward the stage. At this point, Ernie pulls out a cigar from his pocket and begins to unwrap it. All the members of the audience suddenly turn on him. He looks surprised but puts the Silents Please!

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cigar back in his pocket, and the audience turns back to watching the stage. The camera now tracks to the stage where a string quartet is playing the song we have heard from the beginning of the scene, and each musician is smoking a cigar. The camera then tracks over to a box of Dutch Master cigars and the usual Dutch Master advertising words appear on screen: “Step up to finer smoking pleasure.” Comment: Yes, a commercial, but once more, the pure fun and imaginative silliness Ernie was able to practice in coming up with these one-minute spots! Add once more that this is funny, but as we have said, as always, it evokes a chuckle rather than a belly laugh. Of course, these ads also reflect a period when it was possible to advertise smoking on television.

Fade to black and Scene 3 (3:20 minutes) We are back to Eugene, and what we thought was just tape has actually become a door for him to open and thus escape from his imprisoning hallway. He is now in a dark room and lights a match to better take in the surroundings. The match now becomes a searchlight illuminating small circles on the wall while the rest of the room and screen are dark. Music plays. He then waves to the wall, and we hear a creaking sound like either animals marching or something moving, and the wall moves forward. Eugene then takes out a pen, draws a light switch, clicks on the switch, which makes the sound of a light turning on, and indeed, the room lights up. The wall then “retreats” back into its place. Eugene next draws a lamp on the blank wall and a table underneath it. He adds a light chain and when he pulls it, there is a clicking sound, but nothing happens. Ernie/Eugene next snaps his fingers as if forgetting the obvious and draws a cord to a wall socket, which he also draws. One side of the double lamp immediately lights up, and he pulls the light chain for the second light so a bright lamp now shines as it too comes on. Eugene now walks, making squishy crunchy sounds, past an actual table to the other wall, where he draws a painting. He walks away, hears a sound, and turns to see the painting is swinging on the wall, as if not centered correctly. He returns, straightens the picture, and then walks across the room after seeing a workman at the table adjusting something, even though

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nothing is visible. Once the workman completes his task, he crawls to the side and turns on a switch that creates a television screen in front of Eugene’s chest, even though there is no television set. Thus, we have just the square image of a Western scene playing out as Eugene looks over it. The workman then turns off the switch and the image disappears, which confuses Eugene who leans forward as if looking for where the television disappeared. The workman next walks off-screen, out of the room. Eugene comes to the front of the table and looks for a cord to pull but finds nothing. As Eugene comes toward the camera, it is once again apparent that the camera is the fourth wall, for he pulls on what is revealed to be the window shade and light suddenly pours in. We now see he is raising a window that we cannot see. Once the window is up, a strong loud wind blows in and knocks off his hat. Eugene swiftly closes the (imaginary) window and pulls down the unseen shade only to have it slip back up with a loud noise, thus light pours in once again. Eugene now sees a comely housemaid in what looks like a bathing suit. She is apparently vacuuming the floor even though we see no machine. We hear her vacuuming, however, as Eugene follows her, watching with great interest. She finishes and walks off. Eugene now strolls to another corner where he sees a sign on the wall: beware of the gnarf. Nearby is a rope leash, obviously tied to a “gnarf.” The camera tracks the leash to a spiked dog collar that is moving as if a dog was there next to a water dish. We hear the loud sound of water being lapped up. Eugene stands watching as the gnarf now growls and pulls on the leash (even though we see nothing) and actually pulls the leash out of the wall along with a part of the wall. Still holding his lunch box, Eugene draws another door. Instead of opening it as before, however, he uses a razor to slice the white canvas and slip out. Comment: Edie Adams and others have often commented how Ernie saw television as a cartoon frame. In this scene, Eugene starts almost entirely with a blank screen and creates the world he lives in, drawing lamps, doors, furniture, and more. But, as if in a dream, that world can suddenly include other characters—the cleaning lady, for instance, and the dog—who we haven’t seen before. Finally, as he slits the white screen and disappears, he is walking outside “the cartoon

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frame.” This scene alone is fully “carnivalesque” both in making us aware of elements of visual images and filming for television and in pulling us in to “participate” in this creative carnival with Eugene.

Fade to black and Scene 4 (1-minute commercial)

Ernie as a cigar-smoking cowboy comes into the street of a Western town and sees another gunslinger, also smoking a cigar, behind him. This becomes the famous shootout in which the other cowboy is shot a dozen times by Ernie. When the other cowboy puffs on his cigar, smoke pours out of a dozen holes in his body as the camera pans down to the cigar box of Dutch Masters with the familiar sign: “Step up to finer smoking pleasure.” Comment: Let us highlight the comic surrealism of a cowboy who is shot so many times but seems not to be aware of a single bullet and, as he walks off smoking, does not, in fact, appear to be bleeding or in any danger of dying. Smoking holes in a body and no blood—surrealism, yes. And once again, we enjoy the obvious level of amazing “freedom” Ernie was allowed to practice in those “early days” of television advertising when one could, for instance, do what you cannot do now and advertise cigars.

Fade to black and Scene 5 (14 minutes)

Eugene walks down a hallway lined with classical statues. He still carries his lunch box, but this time he wears a striped light-colored jacket. The first statue is a copy of Michelangelo’s David (nude male) statue, complete with a fig leaf covering private parts. As Eugene walks past him there is the sound of a loud sneeze. Eugene stops, looks at the statue, but nothing seems wrong, so he shakes his head and continues. Next, he passes the statue of a nearly nude couple kissing, and as he hears loud erotic breathing, he turns to see that the statues are still statues despite what he hears. He looks troubled but continues on. The next statue is a copy of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. We hear the male statue humming, clearing his throat, and continuing to hum. Again, Eugene takes this in but walks on. The final statue is a female harpist who reaches up and grabs his shoulder after Eugene has passed her. He walks on and then stops. In a close-up of the back of his head, we see his hat rise up in sur60

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Kovacs as Eugene in touch with a “living” statue. The Ernie Kovacs Special (abc November 10, 1961). abc/Photofest © abc

prise. Soft romantic music now plays as Eugene turns and walks (with the squishy sound of his feet as always) to the statue that now is clearly a statue, not a person, and kisses the face of the harpist. The result is that the whole statue collapses into a pile of broken pieces. Eugene turns, looking troubled, and arrives at the door at the end of the hall, where he sees a moose head with large antlers for the first time. He opens the door and from the other side, we see him peek into a book-lined room. But he closes the door and is back in the statue hall looking at the moose. He takes off his hat, leaves it on the moose’s antlers, and enters the other room. Silents Please!

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Inside the other room, he sees the rear end of the moose with its tail wagging. There is also a crunching sound. Eugene looks out at the antlers and pulls back his hat with a chunk missing since clearly the moose has been eating his hat. Eugene puts on his hat and closes the door. We detect quickly that we are inside a men’s club as an old gentleman in a wig reads a paper. He sits next to a copy of Emanuel Leutze’s painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware with his troops in 1776. As Eugene walks away, we hear the sound of water draining. Eugene looks puzzled and turns to see Washington in his boat sinking out of the picture frame, which becomes merely the Delaware River with no characters in it. Ernie/Eugene then walks up to examine the painting and pulls a string attached to the old man’s head only to reveal that it is attached to the wig, which almost slides off his head. Eugene rearranges the wig and walks on. In his squishy walking manner, Eugene now approaches the bookshelves lining the walls. One section is marked fiction and the next one nonfiction while the third section, with very few books on the shelf, turns out to be dirty books. Eugene stops and carefully looks around as if ashamed to browse, and then, smiling to himself, he picks up one book and runs one finger over the top. Not finding any dirt, he shakes his head and frowns and returns the book to the shelf. Next, he sees a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa smiling, but he hears her laughing. In a pov shot, the camera pans down below the frame to reveal a kitty licking Mona Lisa’s naked feet, which are hanging out of the frame. Eugene turns away and returns to the bookcase and begins to look at the titles of some of the books. The first book he pulls from the shelf is titled Von Richoffer and shows a World War I biplane on the cover. He opens it to read and we hear the sound of planes flying. When he turns the page, there is an explosion and he closes the book, returning it to the shelf. Looking further along, he picks up Alexandre Dumas’ Camille and opens it to hear a female coughing nonstop. When he turns the page, there is a huge cough and as he turns to the last pages, more coughing, so he closes this book, too. Next, Eugene tries Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but there is the 62

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Kovacs as Eugene about to discover war (cannons and explosions) and peace (a dove flying from the book). The Ernie Kovacs Special (abc November 10, 1961). abc/Photofest © abc

nonstop firing of cannons and the shooting sounds of, yes, a war! Disturbed, he closes the book and opens the back pages to find a dove that actually rises from the book and flies away. Eugene closes the book, smiling. But before he returns it to the shelf, he opens it one more time near the beginning to hear a bugle sounding an attack and then he shoves the book back in place. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea catches Eugene’s attention now, but as he pulls the book out, seemingly half of the Atlantic Ocean shoots out of the bookcase into his face, so he swiftly returns the book to the shelf. He is shaking water from his hands Silents Please!

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when he hears a harp strumming, as if to get his attention, but all he sees in that direction is a telephone on a table. A female assistant runs to answer the phone as the harp sound plays again. We pull back to reveal another, younger man in the club lounge reading a paper and the female servant signals to him, but he signals that he won’t take the call and so she shakes her head and hangs up the phone. Eugene moves over to the phone and dials only to have the sound of machine guns going off, so he nervously hangs up. He reaches inside his jacket and apparently finds blood as if he had been shot. He sees a drink next to the phone, which he picks up and sips, but the drink going down to his stomach sounds like a waterfall and disturbs the businessman who turned down the phone call. Eugene shakes his legs and we hear the water settling throughout his body. Nearby is a small statue of a basketball player with arms raised, ball in hand, and when Eugene puts down his glass the statue drops the ball in his glass. As usual, Eugene is puzzled but takes no action. He moves on to a pinball machine, pulling the ball release only to have the ball go out of the back of the machine and through the wall. Meanwhile, in the frame is the old man in a wig, still reading. Eugene retrieves his lunch box and sits down beside the businessman, the younger member of this very clearly all-male club. Bored, Eugene starts to pull his fingers, but each time he does so, they explode like bombs going off. Quite bored at this point, Eugene taps a small hourglass on the table beside him, which suddenly sounds like Big Ben going off. He picks up the hourglass and puts it in his jacket pocket, but when the Big Ben sound continues, he slaps his pocket thus shattering the hourglass. Through all this, the businessman continues reading, uninterrupted. Eugene is still very bored. In super close-up we see him take a small box from his pocket and place it on the table. When he pulls a small round object from the box, we understand that this is a tiny lp record player. Once he places the needle on the record, he unbuttons his vest to reveal an electric wall socket where he plugs in a small cord so that the record player can work. We then begin to hear one of Ernie’s favorite “foreign” songs, “Mack the Knife,” sung in German. The businessman beside him is finally disturbed, so Eugene takes 64

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the record off and puts it back in his pocket, and the businessman goes back to reading. Yet, Eugene is even more bored so he opens his lunch box with a large explosion going off for each latch that he opens. He pulls what looks like celery out of the box and begins to eat. With each bite, we hear explosive sounds once again. The businessman is again disturbed. We now hear what sounds like bowling balls hitting pins in a bowling alley as the celery settles in Eugene’s stomach. This is too much for the young gentleman, who stands and leaves. He goes to a long table to read, but Eugene joins him. Once more, Eugene opens his lunch box with two explosive sounds and begins to take food out. As the camera pulls in closer, we see Eugene place food on the table, which seems level, but as David Bordwell recalled in our introduction, “whenever Mr. Kovacs (Eugene) set something on top of it, it rolled or slid out of control.” As Eugene eats, he reaches over and starts the record player playing another song, this time a ballad: “There was a fire burning in my heart, burning for years and for you.” He continues to place food on the table and to his surprise, every piece rolls off the seemingly level table. Not only that, each object rolls into the lap of the businessman reading the paper. Eugene then runs an experiment, dropping many vegetables on the table as the song continues and all these pieces roll into the businessman’s lap. Eugene next places a small piece of food on a string and hangs it from his hand, only to see it hang at an angle as if what looks like a steady room is clearly not steady any more. As the song continues, Eugene knits his brow, obviously trying to figure out what’s going on. Next, Eugene pulls out at least a dozen small tomatoes, or whatever vegetables he finds, drops them on the table, and watches them roll off into the gentleman’s lap. This is repeated three times as the record seems stuck while he carries out this action. Close-up on Eugene looking extremely puzzled. Finally, he unscrews his thermos and tries pouring milk into a cup. It misses by several inches and falls at an angle and runs along the table. He tries several variations of this gag, finally letting all the milk run onto the table as the camera tracks down the “flood” to see it flowing into the lap of the gentleman reading the paper. But as we pan up to the gentleman’s face, we see he is more amused and surprised than angry. Silents Please!

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A slanted room as Eugene (Kovacs) explores a men’s club. The Ernie Kovacs Show (cbs/nbc 1952–1956). Photofest

Eugene now stands and twists the table to a forty-five-degree angle, but as he does so the whole room (the set, of course!) goes to an extreme angle, including the wall behind him. finis appears on the screen as a scratchy old song plays: “There’s an old spark of love still yearning for you.” As the tune plays, Eugene pushes on the letter “I” before the “S” in finis and it slowly disappears. Comment: Where to begin with such a flowing fourteen-minute sequence of seemingly unrelated events that are finally all held together because they happen to Eugene? We can begin by noting there are roughly forty-nine “jokes,” or comic moments, within this fourteen-minute film. Count them and note how at this period of his comic life, when he had the time, energy, and financing to plan such sequences, he could build on comic set-ups to milk them for numerous laughs. Simply look at how much laughter Ernie could generate from trying to eat and drink when the table and then the room appear to have become tilted, for instance. 66

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We see here how far Ernie had come in such a skit compared to the short, pressured pieces in most of his Philadelphia and New York work. That said, we can be more specific and point to Ernie’s humor as nonlinear. By this we mean that the character of Eugene has no clear motive or goal that we are aware of. He is simply passing through a world that is half-real and half-absurd and thus wholly surreal. Statues, for instance, come alive and then crumble. Mona Lisa, as we mentioned earlier, like Eugene, “breaks the frame” and becomes real, but this does not seem to amaze Eugene, who simply moves on. Book classics become more than printed pages as they produce sound effects as well as objects ranging from doves of peace to ocean waves pouring forth beyond the “borders” of their covers. We can be more specific about the unity of this nonlinear humor in saying that the scene is not only held together by Eugene as a character, but also by the sense of a men’s clubroom as well. Thus, the humor becomes very much “variations on a theme,” similar to commedia dell’arte, for instance. Nonlinear humor also means that we have no idea what will happen next, which, as noted earlier, is a major characteristic of surrealist work. Thus, it is a complete surprise when Eugene pulls a micro record player out of his pocket and starts playing records the size of a large coin! Not only that, we laugh when we see him pull his jacket aside and we notice he is “wired” with his own electric outlet for the record player. Finally, what better example than this Eugene sequence to show the fun Ernie was having taking on so much of “respected culture” in art, including paintings (the Mona Lisa and Washington Crossing the Delaware), statues (David and others), and literature from Tolstoy to Hemingway. Such a spirit as we see in Kovacs’ comedy is truly carnivalesque, for during a carnival period, “the whole world is seen in its droll aspect” (Bakhtin 11). I would stress that although much of traditional satire places the creator above the subject being mocked, in Kovacs’ more carnivalesque and surrealist mode, in contrast, the laughter is not mocking art or literature so much as “opening” each piece up to a perspective we may never have had on what has always been respected. One suspects that almost every American has seen copies of the Mona Lisa. But Kovacs opened up our traditional and serious respect for da Silents Please!

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Vinci’s art by “breaking the frame” and thus surrealistically combining art with a real woman whose naked feet hang outside the frame. Put simply, Ernie invites us inside his carnivalesque vision, where we are all allowed to laugh without being disrespectful, as Bakhtin suggests about carnival laughter. Bakhtin notes that, by its very nature, carnival allowed for a time to make fun of anything or anyone—including the Church, Christ, religion in general—as long as no one was physically hurt. And, in fact, playful satire such as Kovacs practiced can also draw audiences into works with which they might otherwise not be familiar for he is assuming the viewer is aware of War and Peace or Washington Crossing the Delaware and, if not, they may well want to find out more. When I was on the set of the television show Northern Exposure, doing interviews in 1992, I was often told that many viewers enjoyed John Corbett’s character, Chris the radio dj, quoting literature from Kafka to Proust. In fact, they enjoyed his scenes so much that local libraries had many requests for whatever book was mentioned on the show the night before! We have no statistics on how many Americans went to their local libraries for copies of Tolstoy, Dumas, and Hemingway after seeing Eugene in his comic library, but such a carnivalesque approach to culture as Ernie portrays may well have had such a result.

Fade to black and Scene 6 (1-minute commercial) A jungle scene with two natives scared away by an ape. Ernie with cigar in mouth is the white hunter who picks up a gun to shoot the ape. He opens a double-barrel shotgun and tries to stuff two bananas into it as the ape jumps up and down. Finally, he picks up a banana, peels it, and tries stuffing it in the ape’s mouth. But the ape takes the cigar out of Ernie’s mouth, replacing it with the banana while the ape enjoys the smoke. We then get the usual “step up to finer smoking pleasure” finish and photo of Dutch Masters cigars. There is applause and laughter—this time, however, from a live audience. Comment: If the Nairobi Trio can play music, then why shouldn’t apes get the best of white hunters and walk off with cigars? Once more, we have Kovacs using humor to sell a product and being allowed to do as he pleased for such a commercial.

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Fade to black and final credit sequence (4:35 minutes) Fade in on an eyeball up-close. There are three blinks of the eye and a close look reveals they are actually each a different eye. A black circle grows out of the final eye and blacks out the screen as we fade into a huge buzz saw turning in front of a tree. “Written by” appears on screen but without a name given yet. The Kovacs familiar theme song plays throughout this final credit sequence. The camera pulls back to see a damsel in distress, tied up and being pushed by the evil man in a black cape toward the blade. But as the words “Ernie Kovacs” appear and fade on the screen, the blade falls out of its frame and rolls away. Fade to black and fade in on the damsel in distress, this time in front of a cannon as our caped bad man tries to fire at her. “Directed by” appears on the screen. She waves in distress as the words “Ernie Kovacs” appear. The cannon goes off, but nothing happens except the words “and Joe Behar” showing up on screen. Fade to black and back in as we now have our damsel dangling from a cliff as our caped fellow tries to cut the rope so she will fall. “Associate Producer Milt Hoffman” now appears on screen as the evil man’s knife snaps in two. Fade to black and back as we now get the shot we have described earlier of a foot in a cast with cast appearing on the cast. And we meet our comic acting team including the damsel ( Jolene Brand), the caped villain ( Joe Mikolas), followed by Bobby Lauher and Maggie Brown. Fade to black. The damsel and villain are in a lab full of different bottles. The credit “Art Director Al Wein” appears on screen as the villain concocts steaming, dangerous brews. But before he can force the damsel to drink, the brew burns through the glass and pours onto the floor. Fade to black, and now the damsel is tied to a tree as the villain threatens to chop her up with an ax. “Technical Director Gene Lukowski” is the next credit as the villain swings to strike her and the ax head flies off behind him. Fade to black and back as the villain now lights a stick of dynamite in front of our damsel, who is tied to the tree as the credit appears: “Assistant Director Ken Herman.” But the dynamite does not go off. Fade out and fade in on a water faucet being turned on with the camera tracking down a hose as the credit “Assistant Producer Milt Hoffman” appears and fades. The camera simply tracks down the hose to a sprinkler. Fade out and in on the villain holding a batch of poison Silents Please!

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darts that he waves at the damsel. He tries to blow one through a cane pipe at her but he accidentally inhales the dart and chokes. Fade out and in on the damsel strapped to a tree again as a truck with a row of spikes is parked in front of her. “Lighting Art Phelps” rolls on and off screen as the villain takes to the truck but cannot start it up. Fade out and in to the damsel-on-the-railroad-track scene. Now the credit “Audio Jim Flock and John Neal” appears as the villain has trouble with the damsel on the track, and then we see another credit, “Video Wall Standard.” Other credits appear as we cut to a scene from an old movie showing a train coming down the tracks. Back to the damsel on the track, we hear the train approach, but we see a little toy train zooming by, leaving our heroine in no danger. Fade out and in on the eyeball blinking again. Then finally a shot of Dutch Masters cigars one last time. Comment: More than four minutes for a credit sequence? Outrageous, yes! And once more, a tribute to a time gone by when studio executives could indulge such a maverick talent as Ernie Kovacs. This was long before the creative final credit sequences we now see in so many feature films, with “outtakes” and mistaken scenes and extra winks to the audience that are not unlike Kovacs’ comic touches in handling credits. Do we get tired of some of the variations on the old lazzi, such as the damsel in distress? Perhaps sometimes, but while the Eugene sequence is often brilliant in its inventiveness, Ernie clearly enjoys being corny in many of these ten-second jokes and gags.

Further Illustrations of Music, Light, and Dark Space does not allow to fully detail how imaginative Kovacs was in illustrating music. But let us conclude with two more examples, one light and one dark. The light one takes place in a kitchen without a single human character. As the music plays, objects within the kitchen come to life to the beat and tune of the music or, put more accurately, as if they were creating the music. To highlight a few of Ernie’s playful shots we see: • three faucets, hot, cold, and lukewarm running • paper towels unfolding by themselves

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• a coffee pot shaking to the music • sardines coming out of a can as if dancing • all kinds of kitchen implements shaking on the shelf • a banana peeling by itself • milk bottles shooting out milk • a mixer mixing • a toaster popping up toast • a chicken with a thermometer in it dancing

If Salvador Dalí painted melting clocks or Max Ernst formed metallic sculptures of cartoonish figures (The King Playing with the Queen), clearly, Ernie Kovacs gives a new surrealistic twinge to what any kitchen can become—given the right music, of course! Add too that any viewer sitting in her or his living room could at least identify with the idea of a kitchen and each object in the kitchen shown. But it was Ernie’s talent that he could make us visualize and hear kitchens from a new and carnivalesque perspective. Ernie’s serious and dark example of illustrating music is taken from a night city scene that unfolds in the following way. Slow and heavy orchestra music plays as we see a dark, empty city street. A boy carrying newspapers by a street lamp leans down and pets a large cat. Shots of a New York-looking skyline and we pan down to the cat eating out of a sardine can. More shots of city skyscrapers with no characters in the frame and then a super close-up of the cat’s face. Return to the street scene and then the camera slowly pulls back to reveal the street in daytime with a policeman on one side, a fruit vendor next to him, and a young man in a black leather jacket in a doorway across the street. Slowly, we pull up to one door and we see a dark-haired woman in a sexy dress (is she a woman of the streets?) coming out of her apartment. The camera pans across the street to the man in a leather jacket and we swiftly intercut between the woman, the policeman, and the leather jacket man. Now the camera goes to a window on the second floor, and we see a blonde waking up with a baby in the bed behind her. She is looking at the sky and smiling. The camera goes down to the dark-haired woman and the man and the policeman, who is eating an apple. Beside him is the fruit vendor. We pull back as it is Silents Please!

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night again and the image of the street waves, as if the city were under water. Streetlights come on and city lights in the distance come on in the skyscrapers. Music holds as we track in to an apartment window where the mother and child are and the mother pulls down the shade. Black out. A whole novel or feature film is suggested here, but we are only given this dramatic teaser that has not a single joke, sight gag, or laugh. And once more, Ernie is working without spoken language. At five minutes and forty-five seconds, “Street Scene,” as it is labeled, must have surprised those viewers who thought Ernie was supposed to be funny. On the other hand, it delighted those who knew that, with Ernie Kovacs, you never knew what to expect next. During an October 1961 interview on Canadian television, Ernie was asked, “What do you think is the right technique for presenting comedy on television or any other medium?” (Bellman) Clearly, a PhD thesis or long book could be written on such a topic! But Ernie was amazingly concise with such a question: I don’t have an audience for my shows. [Note: he is speaking of the California specials, not the live shows earlier that did have audiences.] I don’t believe in that. My show is timed out to within, like, three seconds, and if I find something plays a little longer, I will play it longer. But I don’t have it for laughs. I don’t leave any space for laughs (Bellman).

And then Ernie goes beyond the question of comedy that, as we have explained in this study, is exactly the unique accomplishment of Kovacs: But this is not primarily a comedy show. This is more or less an experiment that I am doing.

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4 } Ernie in the Movies: From Comic Director to Supporting Character Actor We don’t read scripts. We read locations! ernie kovacs, from diana rico, kovacsland

From 1956 to 1961, Ernie appeared in ten films: Operation Mad Ball (1957); Bell, Book and Candle (1958); Our Man in Havana (1959); It Happened to Jane (1959); Wake Me When It’s Over (1960); Strangers When We Meet (1960); Pepe (1960); North to Alaska (1960); Five Golden Hours (1961); and Sail a Crooked Ship (1961). In his five brief cinematic years, Ernie never became a famous lead actor. But he came through often as an impressive supporting character in both comedies and dramas and thus proved to be one of those rare actors who could move from television to film and back again successfully. To put this in a clearer context, it’s important to realize how small a group this is. Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, is still funny in reruns of Seinfeld (1990–1998), but he has not yet become a movie star and has actually not really tried to cross the bridge, often commenting how difficult such medium crossing can be. Similarly, although a few actors—such as James Garner, Bill Cosby, and Lucille Ball—have been able to move between the two mediums, we cannot speak of the distinguished feature film careers of television comics such as Milton Berle, Johnny Carson, Dick Van Dyke, and Mary Tyler Moore. We are therefore speaking not only of different mediums but also of hugely different roles for actors who perform in narrative films. For Ernie, each film was clearly a move from being a comic creator, director, and star in charge of everything, to fitting in as a secondary actor in one role in a production controlled by others and in scripts that, unlike his shows, were to be played out rather than improvised or radically changed.

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Let’s be even more specific. Consider what a switch Hollywood narrative filmmaking was for someone like Ernie who had been so intensely involved with every level of television from creating and directing to acting and producing, with the clock always ticking away and time forever running out. As Jeff Greenfield notes: To make his ideas work, Kovacs needed the run-of-the-house. In his last video-taped specials, he was not only star, writer, director and producer, but a control room presence as well (7).

With Hollywood filmmaking, on the other hand, there was a script and someone else directing, organizing, producing, and editing. Thus, as an actor, Ernie was learning his part and how both to “fit in” the whole production and, at the same time, to bring his role to life as much as he could under the director’s coaching and approval. Actually, after the nonstop 24/7 work schedule he had in New York, the pace and structure of cinema was hugely attractive to Ernie as a “break” from his East Coast routine. Kovacs once commented with a happy smile that when working on a film: I change my suit, take five minutes to look at the script and then play gin rummy with the director. Hours later they shoot five or six lines and I’m through for the day (Rico 223).

Before continuing with his cinematic career, it may be helpful to mention one TV comedian-turned-film-actor in comparison and contrast to Ernie. Robin Williams came up through the stand-up club ranks and appeared on shows such as The Richard Pryor Show, Laugh-In, The Billy Crystal Comedy Hour, and Happy Days. He finally settled into his own sci-fi sitcom from 1978 to 1982, Mork & Mindy. Williams’ move into half-hour sitcom points to a strong difference. Ernie made his mark with his own form of variety comedy and never took on the demands of plot- and character-driven half-hour television comedy. Like Hollywood films, sitcoms depend on scripts and consistent development to have a beginning, middle, and a conclusion that reached a resolution for the issue/problem of that episode. Williams then was courted for cinema, continuing to play a cartoonish character as he starred in Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980). But 74

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with George Roy Hill’s The World According to Garp (1982), Williams had to become more “human” and dramatic, which led to roles requiring drama and fully developed characters, including Dead Poets Society (1989) and his Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor role in Good Will Hunting (1997). Williams, in fact, gave George Roy Hill credit for helping to shape him beyond tv comedy to take on dramatic feature film roles (personal interview 1982). Given the very different switch Ernie was making from tv to feature Hollywood cinema, there is much to admire in his short film resumé. It was a great loss, of course, that Kovacs’ life was cut short just as he was emerging as a talented comic film actor, as his roles in the films we will discuss clearly demonstrate. Ernie Kovacs may well have gone on to become a celebrated movie actor had he not died at age 41 on a rainy evening in 1962 on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills. We have already seen that his final television specials made in California emphasized silent art combining visuals and music and sound but not always comedy. Similarly, as we shall note, besides a variety of comic supporting characters he played in films such as Operation Mad Ball (1957), Bell, Book and Candle (1958), and It Happened to Jane (1959), he also took on drama, for instance, playing a sinister police figure in Carol Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s serious novel about politics in Cuba, Our Man in Havana (1959). Just as effective in its dramatic effect was Ernie’s performance as Roger Altar, a best-selling novelist, in Strangers When We Meet (1960). Finally, Ernie did have two starring roles: in a Mervyn LeRoy military comedy, Wake Me When It’s Over (1960), and in Mario Zampi’s Five Golden Hours (1961)—both of which, however, turned out to be disappointments with critics and at the box office. “Nothing in moderation” does say, as we have explored, a lot about Ernie’s approach to life and, finally, death. But had he practiced a little moderation, he may well have gone on to starring comic and dramatic roles on the big screen. That said, Ernie was extremely fortunate to “fall into” a project with two individuals who became his very good friends for the rest of his life, on- and off-camera, and who thus helped and inspired one other. The film was a Columbia Pictures wwii screwball comedy production, Operation Mad Ball (1957), under the direction of Richard Quine and starring Jack Lemmon, Ernie in the Movies

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who had just won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in John Ford’s military comedy-drama Mister Roberts (1955). Lemmon had long admired Ernie’s television comedy and they became immediate friends. Furthermore, Quine, who already had a string of impressive film hits such as The Sunny Side of the Street (1951), So This Is Paris (1955), and My Sister Eileen (1955), and who was one year younger than Ernie, was impressed with the comic originality Ernie was bringing to his role in Operation Mad Ball as Captain Paul Locke, an army security officer in an army hospital in France at the end of wwii (Rico 222). The positive creative energy of this trio—Kovacs, Lemmon, and Quine—led to their inspired work together not only on Operation Mad Ball, but also, as we will observe, on Bell, Book and Candle and It Happened to Jane (released as Jane From Maine as well) and with Ernie and Quine doing one more film together, Strangers When We Meet.

Under Locke and Key: Ernie Is Not Hogan’s Hero in Operation Mad Ball (1957) Operation Mad Ball, written by Arthur Carter from his play and co-written by one of Hollywood’s most enduring comedy directors and writers, Blake Edwards ( Jed Harris is also listed as a writer), is “tagged” on imdb as “the real battle of the bulges.” The movie is set in France in 1945 in an army hospital with 325 soldiers and 87 nurses as the army was closing down all medical centers after World War II. Thus, thirteen years before Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), which, of course, was followed by the still much-loved television series running from 1972 until 1983, and a good eight years before Hogan’s Heroes (1965–1971), Hollywood presented a nutty no-holds-barred war comedy. Set in the operating rooms rather than in the trenches, Operation Mad Ball is what one critic calls “an unusually zany comedy” with its fine comic cast of Lemmon, Kovacs, and Mickey Rooney (Thomson 703). Lemmon plays Private Hogan who falls in love with Nurse Lieutenant Betty Bixby played with comic flair by Kathryn Grant, who, soon after making this comedy, married Bing Crosby. Ernie is the comic Bad Guy in this film. He is the security officer Paul Locke who catches Lemmon in his “misconduct” as a soldier and threatens 76

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Kovacs as security officer Paul Locke with Private Hogan ( Jack Lemmon) in Operation Mad Ball (Columbia Pictures Corporation 1957). © Columbia Pictures Corporation c.p.c. 8423-15

him with everything from prison, violent beatings and even death. But in a wildly comic performance, Ernie too falls in love and winds up bending and breaking regulations as well. Made a dozen years after the end of wwii and a handful of years before the Vietnam War and the resulting antiwar attitudes of the ’60s, Operation Mad Ball appears very much as a “postwar” comedy in which the military “machine” and regulations are beginning to be decompressed, decomposed, and simply shattered with humor, irony, and good visual slapstick as well (Mickey Rooney is hilarious as a dancing, nonstop character). The French owner of the Hotel de Poste, where the U.S. army folk want to have their “Final Ball” party, puts it well when Private Hogan reminds her that America has liberated her country from their enemies in wwi and wwii. “I don’t think we can survive another liberation,” she says. What follows is a truly mad and hilarious “operation” as Hogan and others struggle and finally succeed in carrying out their ball at, Ernie in the Movies

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yes, the Hotel de Poste. This becomes a truly happy ending for, after the ball, they are headed home to be either civilians or to other posts, but the war is completely finished. Viewing the film today, we feel Ernie enjoyed being a part of this movie both for the chance to learn more about cinematic comedy and because of the friendships formed on-camera and off with Lemmon, Quine, and others. As Diana Rico notes: Despite his flippant description of movie work, Ernie took his acting very seriously. As Captain Paul Locke, he got to play the kind of man he loathed, and he threw himself into the role with gusto (223).

Add also that he was working in California so that this film was part of his eye-opening introduction to what life in Hollywood would be like since Edie and his daughters were still in New York (he flew them out frequently to be with him). Let us examine a few scenes to more closely appreciate Ernie’s first shot at being a movie actor. The film opens with Ernie clearly on night patrol as the head guard, flashlight in hand, out scouting. A turn of the light and he finds a soldier and a nurse in the dark kissing! Our first violation has been discovered, and the credits roll. As the credits end and the film opens, we are at a dance (preview of the ball) in the Officer’s Club. Immediately, we are caught up in the gender and army regulation conflicts of interest. All the nurses are “officers,” whereas Hogan (Lemmon) is a private, as are most of the soldiers, except Locke (Ernie) who is a captain. Locke looks very dapper in his well-pressed officer’s uniform, trim hair and moustache, and, always, cigarette in hand. He is eyeing Betty Bixby (Kathryn Grant), who is a nurse and a lieutenant. When the rumba music starts playing, Locke says to her, “Do you rumba, Lieutenant?” This conflict between following military “correct” lingo and the male-female chemistry leads to one comic moment after another. In fact, while Locke goes off to get two drinks, Hogan sneaks in where he does not belong since he is not an officer and approaches Bixby, saying, “Lieutenant, you are beautiful!” Locke returns, drinks in hand, and is so upset that he has Hogan arrested, which, itself, becomes a comedy leading up to Locke’s line, “At ease, you’re under arrest!” Quite simply, we feel how natural such a role is for Ernie, 78

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cigarette in hand, lots of gesturing, hilarious reaction shots, and that pleasingly gruff voice that we easily accept him as an authority figure, but also as someone who wants to be in love and one of the boys and to have a ball, too. The film turns into a madly dark comedy as Locke’s arrest of Hogan leads to sending the private to work in the mortuary with the “stiffs.” Quine, his writers, and acting team then carry out some perfectly executed and hilarious scenes. The set-up is that one prisoner of war (they wear pw jackets) corpse is missing, and Hogan must “find” a corpse as a replacement. He takes a live German prisoner and wraps him as a corpse with help from his tent mates, promising the “corpse” his freedom when they finish. But when Locke arrives and hears Hogan speaking, he asks the private, “Were you just talking to the cadaver?” Hogan says no, of course, and then Locke speaks about needing an autopsy. We suddenly have a twitching corpse, which leads to some of Ernie’s best-ever reaction shots. Yet, by the time Locke discovers what has happened, he insists that Hogan must take care of the situation by burying the “corpse.” Which he does! Ernie’s character has another dimension besides being an overseeing officer and another fellow who is interested in the nurse. In several scenes, we get a number of laughs as he is projecting into his soon-to-be post-military life back home, where he hopes to run for Congress, get elected, and serve in Washington. Thus, we have, for instance, a cleverly bizarre conversation as he works to convince one soldier to be his assistant now as training for a job later in Washington. Hogan succeeds in carrying off the ball and winning the nurselieutenant (his line to her: “Tonight we have a chance to be just you and me!”). And Locke fails as a security officer in his assignment to stop the ball and also fails to win the love of the nurse. Yet, he does succeed in “having the general dancing on the ceiling Saturday night,” and is congratulated by his commanding officer. So, in the end, everyone has participated in enjoying this “Mad Ball Operation,” as the hospital is closed down and all may leave. To watch Ernie in this first feature film role is, therefore, to enjoy seeing him feel comfortable from the very beginning with both being part of a team and becoming a character himself, drawing on his many talents with expressions, gestures, and timing. That his perErnie in the Movies

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formance still rings truly funny is verified by viewer comments on imdb.com (Internet Movie Database). One, for instance, says, “Ernie Kovacs was a treasure.” And, as another viewer notes, “Kovacs is . . . so gleefully obtrusive in his part that one breathes a sigh of relief when he finally gets his come-uppance.”

“Magic in Manhattan”: Ernie, Witchcraft, and Romance in Bell, Book and Candle (1958) Even though Ernie dropped from third billing in Operation Mad Ball to fourth in his next film for Quine, Bell, Book and Candle, his performance became even more nuanced and richly appealing. In the film, Kim Novak plays Gillian, a witch living in New York with her bongo-playing warlock brother, Nicky ( Jack Lemmon). Gillian does what witches are not supposed to do or are not even supposed to be able to do: she falls in love. And the man in the center is a well-respected New York book publisher, Shepherd Henderson, appealingly and playfully done by James Stewart. Enter Ernie as Sidney Redlitch, a whiskey-guzzling, cigarsmoking pop novelist, whose book, Madness in Mexico, is not only a best seller, but also one of Gillian’s favorites. When we first see Sidney more than ten minutes into the film, it is obvious that Quine and Ernie have built the character’s appearance on an exaggerated version of Ernie’s real looks. As Sidney, it’s Ernie’s hair but it is left to grow to early Beatles length, and Ernie’s moustache as Sidney is bushy enough to make it hard for him to eat, smoke, or talk! Daniel Taradash and John Van Druten’s script from Van Druten’s play combines romantic comedy from Novak and Stewart (and, remember, they had just finished Hitchcock’s Vertigo the same year), with splendid slapstick and nutty comedy from the secondary characters. These include not only Ernie as a “fish out of water,” both in New York and in the world of witches since his character appears from Arizona and New Mexico, but also Elsa Lanchester as a wildly oddball witch and Gillian’s aunt, Queenie Holroyd. Finally, add Hermione Gingold as an over-the-top chief witch, Bianca de Passe, and one more major attraction in the film: New York City in winter. And while this isn’t a Frank Capra message comedy or a Monty Python anarchistic farce, it is a satisfying ensemble comedy that depends on 80

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Kovacs as the whiskey-guzzling pop novelist Sidney Redlitch in Bell, Book and Candle (Columbia Pictures Corporation 1958). © Columbia Pictures Corporation c.p.c. 8323-17

the energy and interaction of all. Yes, there are certainly winks to and echoes of René Clair’s “bewitched” comedy, I Married a Witch (1942) with Fredric March and Veronica Lake, and there’s no doubt that romance, comedy, and witchcraft led to the popular television show, Bewitched (1964–1972), six years later. What we learn early on is that Gillian (Novak) has used her “witchly” powers to bring Sidney (Ernie) to New York and to make “Shep” (Stewart) fall in love with her because she is jealous of Merle Kittridge ( Janice Rule), an old high school friend who is his fiancée. Little does she realize how all will come back on her as Sidney Ernie in the Movies

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decides to write about “magic in Manhattan” and “witch brother” Nicky ( Jack Lemmon) winds up helping him and becoming good friends with Sidney. Of course, knowing that they were becoming best friends off-camera, too, helps us appreciate the chemistry of these fine comic performances even more. Furthermore, add the obvious comic background Ernie brought to his “writer” role with his years of playing Percy Dovetonsils. Once again, he is the cutely shy, oddball writer with a slight accent and a drink and cigar in hand, laughing, winking, blinking, and feeling awkward. But there is an engaging relaxed quality to Ernie’s performance that draws us into his screen presence. Thus, although much of the plot is quite obvious, we still care for Sidney and his enjoyment of exploring “magic!” When he makes it clear that he is “one of them” with these “warlock powers” and will help Sidney, Nicky proves his powers by asking Sidney to look down the street at a couple kissing in a car. Nicky then waves his hand and the horn starts blasting as if it was broken or stuck. Cut to Ernie’s double expression of excitement and almost disbelief as he looks back at Lemmon with those eyes that express all without Ernie having to say a word! Similarly, the comic chemistry is well orchestrated by Quine in scenes occurring at the Zodiac, a jazz club that is the center for New York witches. It is here that we see Nicky playing bongos while witches at tables carry on conversations. But in that silent film comedy tradition that Kovacs loved so well, we see several sequences where the music plays as we watch Nicky educating and explaining “everything” to Sidney, who can’t believe all he is hearing. Ernie does not get a lot of screen time in this film, but he is memorable for the moments he does appear, including a scene when Shep Henderson, as editor, reads half the Magic in Manhattan manuscript and dismisses the whole book as rubbish. “Complete garbage,” says Henderson, as Sidney, looking very disturbed, comes back to him with, “But every word is gospel, I mean gray suit, black tie gospel!” thus getting a smile from us all. Ernie then does a great move of putting his hand over his face and quietly saying he may write a sequel, Voodoo Among the Virgins! The plot comes down to the need for them all to visit Bianca, the chief witch, to convince her to break the spells Gillian has cast and, 82

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in fact, to break her spell as a witch so she can then fall in love with Shep. The scene with them all, including Sidney, visiting Bianca is a truly hilarious moment. Quine handles this scene well, especially Ernie’s reaction shots once more as Nicky says to Bianca, “It never pays to get mixed up with human beings.” Despite the film’s many pleasurable moments, critics were harsh, singling out Novak as lacking any real dimensions to her role. But Kovacs was often praised, including by Variety, which saw him as “a comic standout” (Rico 236). The point is, however, that Ernie was clearly growing as a film actor, inspired by his friends and “coworkers,” and thus enjoying coming into his own in that other medium, feature narrative Hollywood cinema.

“Mothers Against Malone”: Ernie, Railroad Moguls, and It Happened to Jane (1959) Hardly a year after making Bell, Book and Candle, the QuineLemmon-Kovacs trio was at it again, with Kovacs back up as the third-listed main character of It Happened to Jane. An offbeat romantic comedy crossed with a “democratic” message comedy, this film is in the Frank Capra tradition of It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) or Meet John Doe (1941). A blue jean-wearing Doris Day plays Jane, a widowed mother, trying to survive as a lobster farmer in the Maine coastal town of Cape Anne, and Jack Lemmon is George, her friend and local lawyer, always trying to run for city council but never winning. Of course, it is inevitable that by film’s end they are a happy couple. Ernie is the railroad mogul, Harry Foster Malone, whose growing monopoly of New England railroads has left small towns such as Cape Anne “off the beaten track,” so to speak, and thus in danger of bankruptcy and decay. The Norman Katkov script, which comes from one of his own stories, unfolds like a Norman Rockwell painting but is saved by ironic twists, including Ernie’s memorable and sarcastic performance as a kind of comic Citizen Kane of American railroads. Even his character’s name, Harry Foster Malone, winks to Welles’ Charles Foster Kane, and, in fact, Kovacs was asked to play Malone as a kind of Orson Welles figure. Thus, Ernie had his head shaved and gained forty pounds (Rico 239). Ernie in the Movies

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The film did not do well at the box office when released in 1959. Nevertheless, we can see a definite advance in Ernie’s growth as a film actor. The role of a railroad mogul “bad guy,” of course, is extremely stereotyped. And, clearly, Ernie, under Quine’s direction, enjoyed playing out these stereotyped moments to the hilt. We see him from his first appearances in the film in his New York mansion and boardroom with servants and a group of suited officials who work with him, as he speaks, smokes, eats lobster, and is very much in control. Malone, of course, is set up as the extreme opposite of the wholesome, small-town Maine atmosphere of children, old folk, locals, and their activities, including Jack Lemmon as not just a lawyer but a Boy Scout leader as well and Doris Day as a strong citizen speaking up for her rights before the town meeting. Typical of her upright character, she speaks before a judge saying, “It’s the principle of the thing that counts,” thus sounding a lot like Jimmy Stewart’s characters in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). Ernie plays his role with just enough irony and, at times, even quiet behavior. We come to enjoy his conversion by the film’s end when he suddenly becomes a true “good guy.” In the finale, he shows up in Cape Anne, smoking his cigar, of course, and wanting to be part of the festivities until he is discovered by Jane and George. He takes off running with the whole town running after him.

harry foster malone up close Let’s be more specific in identifying what each Malone scene adds to the film and to Ernie’s growing abilities as a film actor. Of course, the main thrust of this romantic comedy does mean that Day and Lemmon are the stars and take on most of the screen time, with Ernie in clearly a supporting role, with much shorter scenes and thus limited overall screen time in the film.

Scene 1 The whole “Maine” story has been set up, including the death of hundreds of lobsters because the Malone-controlled railroad staff did not deliver them to their destination. Thus, the first time we see Malone in his New York wealthy setting, surrounded by his staff and board members, he is, ironically, eating lobster. What Ernie does so well is to display a variety of quirky facial gestures, 84

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Kovacs as the railroad mogul Harry Foster Malone in It Happened to Jane (Columbia Pictures Corporation 1959). © Columbia Pictures Corporation

as well as body and hand motions, that convey an annoyed tycoon without shouting or overplaying the role. We “get” that he’s the bad guy, but already we enjoy him as being more a silly character than evil or calculating.

Scene 2 This time, besides smoking a cigar as always, Malone is playing five-card stud at a table with some of his executives when the phone rings and he confronts Jane for the first time by voice over the phone. The contrasting scenes help advance the story and comedy as we “get” that Malone is a new railroad baron who has come in from other businesses and is thus learning the ropes himself. In contrast, after this scene, one shot is with an old local engineer showing a train engine to some young boys and telling them, “I took Teddy Roosevelt from Bangor to Boston on this train in six hours!” Scene 3 Cut to Ernie’s next scene. He is in a bathrobe in his luxurious bathroom. His African-American servant helps him into his bed, which has doors on it almost as if he was in a Pullman berth. Ernie in the Movies

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Ernie is handed the New York newspaper and sees that Jane from Maine has made the front page because she is protesting the big capitalist boss: Malone. He is upset and decides to play hardball. With a theme that still runs so true more than fifty years later, It Happened to Jane sets us up for what becomes both a theme and a subplot for the film as we see how important media attention can be to shaping public opinion and business deals. Clearly, Malone is not only new to being a robber baron of the railroads, but he is also a beginner in learning how to manipulate or stay out of the media. “Playing hardball” means that Jane must come from Maine to New York City, thereby gaining national attention. Her arrival is set up with a montage of images that recalls the sorts of transitions used in so many classical Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. Thus, Jane arrives in nyc to appear on nbc! And the headline becomes “mothers against malone!”

Scene 4 We now have Malone, watching Jane on television from his home office as he continues to smoke. Discussion with executives begins to bring up gender—gals against guys—issues as Ernie complains she’s getting so much attention because she is a woman and a mother and a widow. Scene 5 Malone is surrounded by staff and executives (all male, of course), but instead of being in a boardroom, Ernie is on a table getting a massage as, of course, he smokes and talks. The scene is original and just right for Ernie to “milk it” for all its worth for visual and verbal humor. He gives a speech to his team while his AfricanAmerican servant pounds his back so that his voice is shaking completely so that he’s both difficult and funny to listen to. Part of his upset talk is about his own life: I’m fifty-two years old, and I was born in the lower East Side and I wasn’t lucky enough to go to college or law school. I’m a slob who came up the hard way. Anyone who gives trouble to Harry Foster Malone gets trouble. got that??!!

And, of course, his team players get it, though none look enthusiastic. But part of what works so well in this scene is that not only are 86

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there echoes of Orson Welles and Citizen Kane, but also that his speech does playfully reference all the “kitchen sink” dramas of the 1950s, particularly those on television at the time. Also, the speech and Ernie’s performance make us sympathetic to him as we see that he wasn’t a spoiled rich child who is now continuing to exploit people out of a family tradition. The speech done, he has his people call nbc and on “live broadcast” by phone, he gives Jane the old train as a gift to “help out,” thus winning media coverage, which cuts both ways: he is generous, but the media can read it as Jane is winning! Cut to Maine as the bumbling lawyer George now comes to the forefront, making a passionate speech at the town meeting and beginning to plan how the town will use the old 97 train engine to make deliveries even when Malone has cut off his tracks to their use. The battle is now on, full speed, as it is not only mothers but also townies and Cub Scouts who are organized against New York big businessmen.

Scene 6 By now, we are expecting the unexpected in how Ernie will appear, and we are not left disappointed. This time, he is being shaved, his face completely covered in lather as he is, as usual, smoking and surrounded by his unsmiling team. Cut to Malone’s office, where neon rods map out his track routes across a huge wall. He and his team study the map to see how Jane could possibly make any routes work. Thus, in 1959, audiences were treated to a high-tech version of capitalism on the move. We hear radio coverage that sides with the town and Jane as they work to find alternative tracks. Close on Malone as several of his team start to hand in their resignations. These are not comic moments, but we do see Ernie handling his frustration well, cigar in and out of his mouth as he tries to deal with the increasing tension. Scene 7 A nervous Malone is confronted by one of his chief aides who demands to speak to him. Sitting across from Malone, the aide says, “Listen to me or I quit. You are fighting an attractive widow. You must stop!” This scene ends with Malone’s puzzled and worried reaction as he says not a word. Once more what we are seeing in Ernie’s performance is fine shading of a stereotypic Ernie in the Movies

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bad guy character so that we see him as definitely more human and complex. We cut to Jane in white on top of the train in the scene we’ve expected with George as she finally pushes him to propose and, of course, she accepts. Thus, romance and the big race are in full force and motion.

Scene 8 Malone has listened to his staff members and is on the phone giving full clearance for the Cape Anne train to get through. The train is out of coal, however, and all of the townspeople are running around trying to find some to keep everything on schedule. Scene 9 In a brief shot, we see that Ernie has called in a helicopter and is flying to the town.

Scene 10 Malone now arrives in the town and, for the first time, meets face to face with Jane. Thus, we have Ernie and Doris Day together at last. She makes it clear she still doesn’t trust him, so demands that he ride with them on the train. He is trying hard to “win out” over bad publicity and the misgivings of his staff, so he agrees. Jane’s little daughter now comes up and asks him, “Why are you so mean?” And once more we savor Ernie’s fine reaction shot as he gives her no answer but looks hurt as if he wants, of course, to please her, too. Scene 11 Cut to the train ride as Malone must go to work, too, shoveling coal on the train. Scene 12 In the end, the train arrives at Cape Anne and the crowd hears that Malone has donated what the town has been wanting for years: a new fire engine! It is at this point that we see smoke coming from behind a lamppost and then, yes, Ernie emerges, with cigar, looking at the crowd. When he is identified as the new benefactor of the town, everyone, including Jane, starts to rush after him. Fade out with a “happy ending” in Maine as the railroad baron has now become the town benefactor. Cigar in hand throughout this enjoyable film, Ernie added comic and humanizing gestures to a stereotyped figure. His smile, odd looks and gestures, and playful 88

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laughter remain with us as a more developed comic figure well acted by Kovacs.

“You Can Have Me and Money, Too!” Ernie, the Slippery Con Man and Gambler in North to Alaska (1960) Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska is a “Northern” mock Western that plays with many stock stereotypes of the genre to create a wideopen ensemble comedy that even has John Wayne “playing” with his own image as a Western hero. Put simply, this film is long on farce and short on anything beyond the multiple slapstick scenes that pile up one after another. Ernie is cast again as the “third” actor, but that is misleading because his character, Frankie Canon, the slimy bad guy in this tale is one-dimensional. There is no room for any shading of character as we have seen in Bell, Book and Candle and It Happened to Jane. The script, drawn from an unproduced play by Ladislas Fodor and written by John Lee Mahin, Martin Rackin, and Claude Binyon, sets three successful gold mining partners—Sam McCord ( John Wayne), George Pratt (Stewart Granger), and George’s brother, Billy Pratt (the 1950s teen singing idol, Fabian)—in conflict with Frankie Canon, who has won a hotel in a card game and has cheated the trio out of their gold mine claim by falsifying the papers of an old drunk porter (Mickey Shaughnessy). But gold is not all that these men in Alaska in 1900 are after. The French-born actress Capucine plays Michelle “Angel” Bonet, a French hooker with a heart of gold . . . so to speak! Mix confused romance with three huge fight scenes that strive to outdo the Marx Brothers or Three Stooges and you have an overly predictable comic broth that ends with Ernie bathed completely in mud, holding a crumpled cigar and asking for a match, as Sam finally confesses his love for Angel, thus winning her and beating out Frankie, George, and Billy for her favors as “the end” appears. Ernie as the slippery but also suave Frankie Canon is given third billing, but Hathaway gave him far less screen time than Ernie had in It Happened to Jane. In fact, many have judged Canon to be his least satisfying film role (Rico 272). But I would have to agree with the Variety reviewer who noted: Ernie in the Movies

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Wayne and Kovacs share comedy honors. Wayne displays a genuine flair for the light approach, and Kovacs, apparently sensing instinctively that the shortest path to humor is to seem to be playing it seriously, is the best of the lot (Variety, November 9, 1960).

Put simply, Ernie takes this shallow stereotypic role, and once again has fun with it shading it with his own originality. First of all, Ernie appears very dapper in his special suits and ties. Also, in this role, his hair is completely well trimmed, as is his moustache. Even his cigars are thinner than those in his other film roles! Furthermore, once again, “less is more” in many of his actions in this film. For instance, the first huge slapstick fight scene is in the Alaskan casino bar of the hotel as vats of beer explode while bodies are hurled here and there. Frankie watches with a playful smile, cigar in mouth, and then when all is over and bodies lay on the flooded floors, he simply walks over to the casino tables and picks up all the money available, pocketing it without any other action or wording other than his knowing smile. The film then moves to Seattle, where Sam is on business but also trying to bring back his partner’s girlfriend Jenny, who has left him. Sam finds out Jenny is already married, but he picks up Angel from a brothel, wanting to bring her back as a substitute for his partner. It’s no surprise that Angel begins to fall for Sam, but when they arrive in Alaska, she has to confront Frankie with whom she had had an affair long ago. Ernie gets one solid scene with her in her hotel room, which he has offered her since he now owns the hotel. “Angel, it’s been a long time,” he says, smiling, smoking, and being friendly but not overbearing. He mentions their meeting in New Orleans and time together, coming closer and saying, “We are going to start all over again but on a grand scale!” Clearly upset, Angel is not buying into their old hooker-client relationship, and so she slaps him. Frankie looks surprised and then “gets” that she is falling for Sam and begins to caution her about falling in love. At this point, he is speaking almost like an older brother or friend as he warns her: “Respectability—it’s not good for you!” At this point, she tries to leave the room, but he takes the initiative and

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heads for the door, quietly delivering this parting line: “If you ever need any friendliness, just call for Frankie!” He leaves the room as Sam arrives outside the hotel and appears ready to join Angel upstairs. But then he hesitates and looks like he will leave. At this point, Angel turns on her con artist abilities and starts shouting and throws one of her suitcases through the window where it lands next to Sam on the muddy street. Soon he is upstairs, helping her as she is exiting the hotel with all her baggage. Sam helps her into his wagon, and we cut to Frankie, smoking his cigar, smiling one of those very twisted smiles that only Kovacs could do, saying to himself, “Well, I read her all wrong.” Given the lack of depth of his character, this quiet moment gives Frankie, a little humanity as he acknowledges that she is in love and that, as dangerous and impractical as love may be, it is what she wants. The film then cuts to a long middle section of Angel being taken by Sam to his partner George (Granger) as a possible substitute for his once-loving Jenny. The problem is, however, George is not present at that moment and Angel must endure Billy (Fabian), George’s younger brother, falling for her. This is followed, as one would expect, with George meeting Angel, but he backs off, realizing Sam is the man for her. Angel is now fed up with all of them and ready to return to Seattle, but that means returning to Nome first. Frankie hasn’t missed a beat and has a suite ready for her in the hotel. When he enters, sweetly, and begins talking, he emphasizes their “partnership,” not affection. Coming closer to her and looking very dapper, he says, “You can have me and money, too.” She responds, “I am running out of Alaska for the same reason I came.” She pauses and then says, “Because I’m stupid.” What is enjoyable about this scene and Ernie’s performance is that once again, he downplays his actions and reactions, which lends a human touch to the “bad guy” character he must inhabit. Sam is on the angry offensive now that he discovers Frankie has used the drunken porter to set up a legal charge against Sam and George’s land and thus their gold claim. The set-up is ready for the final huge carnivalesque fight that takes place on a very muddy street and involves, by scene’s end, the whole town. Sam finds and

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strikes Frankie, who is, as usual, very well dressed. What follows is an imaginative battle of fists, hammers, broken boards, barrels, and much more as everyone is clobbered and pushed into the mud. Even rams are set loose on the crowd and a Salvation Army band strikes up “When The Saints Go Marching In.” Frankie, knocked deep into the muck, stands up looking more like a mud statue than a human. He asks for the match for his cigar, which he then throws away. This is the last we see of him, for the film goes for the easy and predictable coming together of Sam and Angel as she refuses to stay in Alaska unless he gives her a good reason. Of course, he then says, “Because I love you!” and the dozens of townsfolk surrounding them break into cheers as the happy ending begins. This is not Ernie’s best cinematic role, but even drenched in mud, we feel he gave it his best shot, adding nuance to such a superficial character.

A Comic Trio: Pepe (1960), Five Golden Hours (1961), and Sail a Crooked Ship (1961) Consider how Ernie’s television career evolved from his carnivalesque, half-improvised variety approach to his live shows to his carefully planned “silent” humor in the Eugene work, combined with music and often with Ernie going purely for the visual and the sound track without humor. In much the same spirit, Ernie’s film career, as brief as it was, led up to a fine dramatic role, also with ironic and comic elements, in Strangers When We Meet, which we will consider in the conclusion of this chapter. But let us briefly mention his final three comedies, each of which had moments, but none of which held together as complete for either critics or the public. Pepe was directed by the talented George Sidney, whose credits included Anchors Aweigh (1945), Show Boat (1951), and Pal Joey (1957). In this 157-minute failed comedy, starring Cantinflas, Sidney brought in thirty-five “guest stars” for brief roles—ranging from Ernie as an immigration officer to Joey Bishop, Bobby Darin, Bing Crosby, and Maurice Chevalier, to Janet Leigh, Judy Garland, and Peter Lawford—for no other reason than to say they were all in the film. 92

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Funeral director Kovacs with a wealthy Italian widow (Cyd Charisse) in Mario Zampi’s dark comedy Five Golden Hours (Columbia Pictures Corporation 1961). © Columbia Pictures Corporation

Italian producer Mario Zampi directed Five Golden Hours, which was shot in England. Ernie played a funeral director out to con rich widows out of their fortunes. The predictable end comes when he falls for Cyd Charisse, who ends up the true winner. Alec Guinness might well have been able to milk this BritishItalian comedy for more laughs, but Ernie looks embarrassed at times with this one-dimensional plot in which even beautiful Cyd Charisse seems wooden. Director Irving Brecher of Sail A Crooked Ship came to the project with such fine writing credits as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). Yet, the catchy set-up plot—a group of bank robbers steal a ship to make an escape, with Ernie playing the ship’s captain—never fully brings together the ensemble group, which includes Frankie Avalon, Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, and Carolyn Jones. In each of these three comedies, we find moments in which Ernie appears not only to be having fun, but also to be trying to help the Ernie in the Movies

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film be better than it is. But in each case, he does not succeed because he was not the director and/or producer carrying out his “nothing in moderation” visions as he did on television. Strangers When We Meet, however, was a different matter.

“I’ve Never Been In Love”: Ernie and His First Dramatic Role in Strangers When We Meet (1960) Strangers When We Meet teamed Ernie with director Richard Quine once again, in what turned out to be both his first dramatic role and his most critically successful. Quite simply, Ernie’s performance is excellent and demonstrates that “nothing in moderation” could lead to excellent drama as well as flat-out comedy. A contemporary drama, bordering on melodrama, about suburban infidelity, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Larry Coe, a successful architect, husband, and family man, who has an ongoing affair with Maggie Gault (Kim Novak), a suburban wife and mother. Ernie has, once again, third-place billing in the part of best-selling novelist, Roger Altar, but, even though he has only a handful of scenes, his role is extremely important to the set-up and delivery of the drama. The New York Times review of the film singled Ernie out: “He not only is an immanent comedian but also is an actor of stature” (Weiler). The title of Evan Hunter’s sharply etched script, based on his novel, points toward the affair between Larry and Maggie. But, in fact, the drama is extremely well set up in the early breakfast scene between author Roger and architect Larry, who are meeting for the first time. We cut from a street scene showing Schroder’s Café to an interior set-up inside the café for the rest of the scene. In this spirit of two male strangers meeting and becoming friends as a set-up for the whole film, let us take a closer look at the scene. Roger kicks things off with, “I have a theory that men are only honest with each other over breakfast.” Kovacs looks extremely good: white shirt, dark tie, and jacket, well-combed hair and thin moustache and a cigarette (no cigars in this film!) in hand. But Roger’s insecurity comes out immediately as he asks Larry, “Tell me something, Coe. Does my name mean anything to you?” Larry answers no, and Roger proceeds to explain that he is a writer and has published 94

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two books that have sold very well. His first book “was serialized by the Post, chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and mgm bought the galleys to make a film.” And with a clearly insecure heaping of more self-praise, he notes that his second book was on the best-seller list for thirty-four weeks and that Fox was currently shooting it as a film. Larry gives the writer a “let’s skip to the business of being here” look and asks why Roger chose to meet with him. Roger, still smoking, pulls a folded magazine sheet out of his pocket and hands it to Larry, commenting, “I ran across this house in a magazine in a dentist’s office!” Larry eyes the picture with pride and comments, “That’s the only house I haven’t wanted to tear down and start all over again!” These two strangers have now met and thus can begin to talk business. Roger wants to build a new house and have Larry design it for “under $100,000.” Differences of opinion are immediately clear as Larry makes the point that, “the kind of house I build won’t advertise you, it will advertise me. I can’t afford to have a dull house go up with my name on it.” And as he sees Roger trying to digest this, he adds, “You understand that because who gets your reviews: you or your editor?” He then assures Roger he will read at least one of his books. Roger puffs away, commenting on the hips of the waitress who has filled their coffee cups. Larry then states that he must get to know “everything” about Roger before he goes to the drawing board to come up with a house plan. “So far all I know,” Larry says sarcastically, “Is that you like coffee and hips.” After a bit more conversation about the house, Roger takes another puff on his cigarette and says, “I like you, Coe.” There is a slight pause and, “do you like me?” Douglas looks Ernie over and comments, “I’m not sure yet, but I think I will.” Roger laughs, “I’m not asking you to marry me,” to which Larry Coe closes the conversation with, “I’d have to refuse!” The scene is very well played out by Kovacs and Douglas as two male strangers, both professionals, both successful in their fields but also both feeling they need something more. Roger feels especially insecure and single, while Larry is a family man and husband but wanting to do what he wants to do, not what others judge he should. In this sense, we can actually speak of Quine’s film as a “buddy film” Ernie in the Movies

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in its set-up that plays out with a main plot of adultery, but the subplot of the building of Roger’s home. Ernie as Roger plays a man trying to find not only personal and professional satisfaction but also trying to find himself. Many commentators speak of the stark realism of the film that cuts away romance and comedy to present a troubling sense of how life was for many as the 1950s were ending and the full force of the 1960s had not yet happened. At the center of this “realism,” I would suggest, we see Ernie in his finest film role as he plays an insecure American white male. Feminist studies have helped the areas of male and masculinity cultural and cinematic studies emerge, too. It has long been an obvious observation that Hollywood has been shaped and controlled primarily by men and that so many film genres focus on tough and attractive men, whether these heroes be cowboys, gangsters, musical dancers, or strong father and husband figures. In the introduction to their anthology, Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark make the point that “masculinity is an effect of culture—a construction, a performance, a masquerade—rather than a universal and unchanging essence” (7). Yes, the majority of screen time in Strangers When We Meet is taken up with the Maggie-Larry affair and its consequences. But my suggestion is that with the opening set-up of these two male strangers beginning a friendship (and declining marriage!), the “buddy” and male growth theme is significant. The second scene with Coe and “Rog,” as the two friends insist upon calling each other, takes place in Roger’s book-lined apartment when Coe comes to talk over architectural plans for the house. Coe is ushered in by one of Rog’s alcoholic lady friends, and when Rog appears in his black bathrobe, cigarette in hand, he is shocked to learn it is after 3 p.m. for he had been writing late into the night and morning. In the dialogue that follows with the three of them present, Rog says, “I am an important American writer.” The girlfriend laughs and says to Coe, “But he hasn’t got a thing to say.” Rog looks upset and chases her out of the apartment, saying, “I laugh all the way to the bank.” Alone at last, Coe realizes that he’s not engaging Rog’s attention to go over the plans. “Something’s eating you, isn’t it?” he asks the writer. This leads to one of the most important exchanges in the film 96

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as Rog begins to complain about the drawings for the house being “oddball” and that he’s worried friends won’t like his new dwelling. Coe counters with a comment about how we need to live and work for ourselves and be free, rather than trying to second-guess others. Rog returns to the house in the magazine that got his attention and asks why not build that house? To this, Coe replies, “I built that house for a Fresno lawyer with four kids. This new house is for you!” Roger then begins shouting at Larry. Coe highlights the similarity of their situations—author and architect—saying, “You know, Rog, we both start with a blank piece of paper.” He continues, making the point that, “I do what I want to do and hope that what I will come up with, others will like, too.” After some feedback from Roger, Coe states, “We can’t try to please them all.” Coe then challenges Roger, saying, “Rog, I know one thing, you have to find out what’s important to you!” There is a brief pause as we see Roger thinking it all through, cigarette in hand. And Kovacs “plays” that silent reaction moment extremely well, ending with a humble and quiet comment to Coe, “I think it’s a great house.” Underline this response as showing transformation and growth in his character, a characteristic we have not seen in his comic roles. The scene finishes as Roger laughs and says, “It’s an oddball house,” to which Coe responds, laughing, “But you’re an oddball character!” Strangers When We Meet does provide the strong Douglas and Novak affair plot, which brings up family, marriage, relationships, hidden desires, and buried secrets—all well-worn themes in 1950s Hollywood. In this sense, Quine’s film strikes an original chord as being male-centered long before more obvious buddy films, such as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Clearly, however, such a mixed approach confused many including, as Diana Rico has pointed out, “the male critical establishment” that “pretty much dismissed [Strangers When We Meet] . . . when it opened” (262). We see the house in progress of being constructed throughout the film, and it is satisfying to see a dream come true as Coe lets himself make the house he wants to make, building on what he has learned about Rog, who he is, and what he may become. As we near the end, Ernie in the Movies

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we see the house near completion as Rog appears with a cover for his novel that he has written without worrying about critics. Like the house that Larry wanted to build, this is the novel that Roger wanted to write. He has found that satisfaction, but he still has nobody with whom to share his excitement, except a bottle. Cut to an even later scene as Rog confesses he has never been in love and urges Coe not to throw away what he has found. “It’s not that easy to find.” Coe hears him, smiles, and hands Rog the keys to the house. In a splendid moment, Rog takes the keys, smiles, and says, “I’m gonna go out there and fall in love with the first girl I see.” What we feel at this moment is how well this male friendship has evolved as they have helped each other. Then as Coe leaves, they remember that they began as strangers and Coe comments that it is always hard to get to know anyone so that they become more than strangers. Quite simply, Roger is Ernie Kovacs, turning in a remarkable performance that is strong and subtle at the same time. It is a serious portrayal, and yet Ernie embraces self-mockery as well. As Coe and Roger part, they are not strangers, but understanding and accepting male friends.

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5 } The Kovacs Legacy: “I Don’t Know. I Just Do It!” What helped us all a great deal was the fact that we were all young and largely unfamiliar with the word “can’t.” larry gelbart, laughing matters

I’ve never had quite the same thing happen with other people that passed away, where the memory is so indelible that you forget sometimes that they’re gone. A year later they are still indelible in your mind and you still think about them. Several times I got caught literally and I couldn’t believe myself. I’d suddenly say when someone was talking, “Oh, shit, that’s wonderful, wait until Ernie hears this . . . .” I’d forget . . . . He really left a mark; he wasn’t just a talented nice guy. jack lemmon, from david walley, nothing in moderation

Where is Ernie today? David G. Walley, who wrote a biography of Kovacs titled Nothing in Moderation, suggested that he could be anywhere, still playing and entertaining. “[W]herever Ernie is at this moment, there is a game in progress with plenty of Havanas and fountains of Jack Daniels and Wild Turkey . . . sky’s the bottom line.” And who would be at this game? According to Walley, those playing at the game would include “Aristophanes, Ben Jonson, Petronious, Ernie and Moliere” (221). Can we think of any more appropriate carnival? Mikhail Bakhtin, in writing about the nature of carnival in Europe but projecting to the spirit of the carnivalesque in any culture, commented:

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Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it (7).

Looking back on the nature of Ernie Kovacs’ original forms of comedy on early American television in the 1950s into the 1960s, it is certainly fair to say whenever and wherever Ernie was “working,” a carnival was in session and all of those around him had to understand that. Thus, it seems accurate to say that Ernie Kovacs brought a spirit of carnival into the new medium of television, a spirit that has had lasting influences. Ernie’s comment, “I don’t know. I just do it!” is absolutely “carnivalesque” in the sense we have been discussing (Nachman 203). Let’s be more specific. The carnival spirit can be seen as celebrating the three f’s: freedom, fantasy, and festivity (Horton, Laughing Out Loud 4). Certainly, Ernie felt the freedom to do just about anything he wanted to do (as long as no one was being hurt!), and he had endless amounts of fantasy, which allowed him to dream up what to do. Finally, the festivity was in the sharing of his comedy with others. If you do all of this by yourself for yourself, that is not the carnival spirit. Carnival is to be shared “in the streets” and, in this case, in the living rooms of America. In my personal interviews with Edie Adams, she explained she enjoyed helping to edit at times because, as she put it, “Ernie really needed someone to help edit because he was so into whatever he was doing that often he didn’t know if it was funny or not” (personal interview).

Kovacs Meets Kansas in 2004 Fade in to a large auditorium in the Bowlus Fine Arts Center in the small Kansas town of Iola on a perfect late September evening in 2004. The curtain opens and, yes, the Nairobi Trio is revealed in all their living glory, playing “live” for a wildly enthusiastic audience. Was this a loving dream of a Kovacs admirer or did the Nairobis really appear in Kansas? The latter is true, because shortly thereafter, Edie Adams also appeared on stage to talk about the Kovacs years. Before the eve-

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ning was over, Percy Dovetonsils showed up, martini glass in hand, and read a delightful poem. The occasion was the twelfth annual Buster Keaton Festival hosted in Iola, Kansas, which was Keaton’s birthplace. The 2004 Festival offered a special focus on Kovacs as an innovator in television comedy in the way that Keaton was a pioneer in using the medium of cinema for laughs that could not come from vaudeville, stage, or radio. Clearly, it was a special treat having Edie Adams on hand. For those who had some familiarity with Ernie’s shows, she brought back memories and added details they had not known. But it was also a pleasure to watch younger members of the audience, who had never seen any of Ernie’s shows, warm up and become totally involved in her presentations. Put simply, to see Kovacs’ work with a large contemporary crowd gave an immediate answer to the question: is Ernie’s work still funny and perceived as imaginative? The answer is a resounding yes! Add to this that the Nairobi Trio and Edie Adams received a standing ovation. That particular evening in Kansas was poignant as well as funny, for the festival ran the half-hour television pilot for The Medicine Man, the show that Ernie was shooting with Buster Keaton on January 13, 1962, the day Ernie died in that tragic auto accident. Who knows if the show would actually have become a regular series, for Ernie claimed he was only going to make it because he was deeply in debt (Rico 299). Yet, knowing how much Ernie wanted to make a feature silent comedy focused on Eugene (and co-starring his friend Alec Guinness), one cannot help but be both moved and thrilled at the same time to see Keaton and Kovacs in the same frame, clearly enjoying each other’s company and presence in a very silly television Western comedy.

Ernie in Control: “I don’t know. I just do it!” Many skits in Ernie’s shows, especially in the later years, start with Ernie in the control room, surrounded by monitors and staff assistants as he speaks (and smokes) from a position of . . . control. This “behind the scenes” on-camera approach was not used by Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Steve Allen, or any other television star of

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that time. But it was a location that Ernie loved, for it signaled that what we had been watching, were viewing, and would continue to take in was a product of this cigar-smoking comic “manipulating” everything he could to produce images we would not easily forget. How much of a control freak and geek was Ernie? According to Edie Adams and many others who knew him, 200 percent plus. In a 1961 Canadian interview, when asked by an incredulous interviewer whether it was true that he was editing a sequence using Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije to illustrate the “life of a drop of water” (Bellman), Kovacs answered yes and then went into a detailed description of how they were shooting the life of a raindrop! Add to all of this the fact that Kovacs was one of the very few writer/director/producer/ actors who moved back and forth between what were once the separate worlds of cinema and television, and Ernie’s remarkable accomplishments become even more worthy of attention. In the same Canadian interview, Ernie explained that he showed some of his sequences from his specials to his movie producer friend, none other than Sam Goldwyn of mgm fame. He showed Goldwyn a musical sequence similar to the musical “kitchen” sequence mentioned previously but, in this case, set in an office where pens squirt ink in tune to the music and file cabinets open and close to the beat, to mention just two items in Ernie’s surreal musical carnival montage. According to Ernie: Goldwyn asked, “How long did it take you to shoot this?” And I said, “We worked quite a long time on this, Sam. We worked all day.” And he said, “It would take me one year.”

And Goldwyn was correct, because if you really put this scene into filmmaking, it’d take many filmmakers a year. But in the stillundefined world of American television of the 1950s and 60s, Ernie was able, by luck and by pluck and by the loving support of his production team, to do what to others seemed impossible. The quote above from Larry Gelbart refers to his work writing with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and the whole writing team assigned to Sid Caesar. Yet, Gelbart’s words equally apply to Ernie Kovacs: they were all too young to understand or accept “can’t”!

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Kovacs, American Television of the 1950s, and Comedy Surveys show that from the beginning of national broadcasting of television, Americans tuned in for hours a day. By 1956, reports document, “Americans spent as much time searching for amusement on tv as they did earning a living” (Sikov 6). It should be no surprise that comedies represented many of the most popular shows including those of Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and, yes, Ernie Kovacs, in terms of comedy variety shows, and Father Knows Best, I Love Lucy, The Burns and Allen Show, and The Goldbergs, to mention but a few of the top sitcoms. According to Ed Sikov: The abundance of popular comic talent and product strongly suggests that audiences of the 1950s were indeed amused by comedy and that the handiest, most accessible, and above all most domestic medium of comedy was not the cinema but television, the brand new gadget that brought laughs directly into the living room and kept them there for the duration of an evening, a season, even several years (6).

And Ernie Kovacs was on the cutting edge of this phenomenon. What should be totally clear by now is that Ernie created his own comic universe on American television of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. As one critic has noted, “Kovacs probably could not have created the work he did at any other time in television history, arriving before tv had become a creative quagmire, and before all the formulas had been frozen” (Nachman 202).

Kovacs Encore Onscreen we see an old-fashioned television is on in a living room. On the television screen, a “friendly fireman” is about to read the story of Little Red Riding Hood as the camera moves to a man in the living room who is reading and trying to concentrate on his newspaper, not the tv. Finally, in his frustration as the tv blares on and on, the man picks up a pistol and shoots the television. As we pan to the tv screen, we see the friendly fireman hanging out of

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the screen into the living room, dead! Once more, Ernie is working “outside the frame” to open and even explode boundaries, borders, rules, and customs to help us “see” and experience this visual medium in an unusual and, yes, humorous way. Ernie the person is gone, but his spirit remains to touch us all with laughter and pleasure, and it is this spirit of comic festivity that, as Harvey Cox reminds us, every culture needs: “When festivity disappears from a culture something universally human is endangered” (11). Fortunately, Kovacs’ festivity has not disappeared, and we are all the better for it. How many Nairobi apes does it take to change a light bulb? Simple: one Percy Dovetonsils!

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Appendix: Summary Of Ernie Kovacs’ Personal Life Kovacs’ professional career is covered in the text but a few of his key dates are as follows: Born January 23, 1919, in Trenton, New Jersey, of Hungarian immigrant parents. 1937, graduated from Trenton Central High School and moved to New York City to study acting. August 13, 1945, he married Bette Wilcox. They had two daughters, Elizabeth (“Bette”) and Kip Raleigh (“Kippie”) who died in 2001 after a lifetime of poor health. September 12, 1954, Kovacs married singer Edie Adams in Mexico City. June 20, 1959, their daughter, Mia Susan Kovacs was born. She died in an automobile accident in 1982. January 13, 1962, Kovacs died in a traffic accident in Los Angeles.

*** A few facts from Kovacs’ life should also be emphasized. Financially, Ernie went from being the son of a rich bootlegger to being poor for most of the rest of his life. He never learned to budget, even when the money was rolling in, thus, he owed more than $400,000 when he died. He said that he read a lot of the classics as a child and that his mother made sure he saw a lot of films, including those of Chaplin and Keaton, which may explain his love of silent comedy (Biography: Ernie Kovacs, a&e documentary). As a young actor, he had a variety of roles, including parts in Aristophanes’ wacky comedy, The Birds, and, in high school, The Pirates of Penzance. He was in a New Jersey hospital for a year and a half, at first with pneumonia, then with tuberculosis. Thus, not only did health become a constant issue for Kovacs, but his early hospitalizations may have led to a desire to overcome pain with humor.

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Throughout it all, his high school drama teacher and mentor, Harold Van Kirk, helped in any way he could. At twenty-six, Ernie married Bette Wilcox, a twenty-one-year-old dancer, and they had two daughters, Bette Lee and Kippie. Under the stress of Ernie’s tight schedules and lack of time at home, the marriage soon dissolved. Bette deserted him in 1949. Later came two very hard years when Bette kidnapped their daughters and remained hidden until Ernie, with the help of detectives and his mother, finally located them in Florida. He married Edie Adams in 1954 and they were a loving couple until his death in a 1962 automobile accident. Their strong marriage was a credit to Edie, who dealt with tight schedules, two growing daughters, the late night or all-night poker games, and the debts, and still managed to work on her own career.

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Notes

Introduction 1. “Milton Berle: Mr. Television,” video tribute, Paley Museum of Television and Radio, New York. 2. And how Hungarian was this New Jersey child who grew up to live in Philadelphia, New York, and California? When I asked his loving widow, Edie Adams, this question in her home in 2004, she began singing a Hungarian song in Hungarian. She explained that the song went with a dance that Ernie enjoyed doing as well. Thus, the answer, in brief, is “very Hungarian!” In fact, when Ernie and Edie were interviewed for the popular television show, Person to Person, in 1955 in their spacious New York apartment overlooking Central Park, Ernie noted that he was happy, but that the old saying was, “How can you be a Hungarian and be happy? That isn’t supposed to be so!” One last note from Edie Adams is also helpful as we begin to access and assess Ernie’s accomplishments in American television and cinema. She made it clear in our interviews that, “some of Ernie’s best comic moments were not on camera.” She conveyed one particular evening in the 1950s during a weekend on Long Island. Ernie had a pet marmoset, a small monkey, that he loved and called “Howard,” and he didn’t want to leave it at home. “So we went to the restaurant and Ernie stuck Howard in his pocket. Now you have to understand that for Ernie, humor was everywhere and any time, because, of course, Howard started climbing out of his pocket and Ernie started doing some funny things reacting to whatever it was that was coming out of his pocket, and the people at the next table were freaking out!” According to Edie, there were many moments of similar comic intensity throughout their life together.

Chapter 1 1. All references from Edie Adams are from personal interviews in her

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California home during 2004 or in Iola, Kansas, September 2004, at the Buster Keaton/Ernie Kovacs Festival. 2. Nachman explains how vital and daring so many of these comedians and comics were. But he also uses Sid Caesar as an example of a “cautionary tale for what was to befall some of the renaissance comedians who came along after him” (19). As he notes: The life span of too many of those comics was similarly brief and shortcircuited. Many later led tortured lives. Like Caesar, several of the great satirists of that era self-destructed. Others, like [Tom] Lehrer and [Dick] Gregory, went into self-imposed exile. Sahl went over the edge when he became embroiled in the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, losing his comic distance. His incomparable career peaked in the early sixties, and by the end of the decade, he was blacklisted, without a platform (19). Ernie Kovacs, on the other hand, by avoiding the political, played to enthusiastic audiences until the end, only having to do battle with studio executives because of his over-budget productions.

Chapter 2 1. More specifically, we are speaking of shows that were not focused on Ernie creating whatever he wanted. In Philadelphia on wptz (nbc), these would include Deadline for Dinner (1950–1952), a half-hour cooking show, and Pick Your Ideal (most of August 1950 to April 1952), an afternoon fashion show. In New York, besides guest appearances, Ernie was a panelist on both Take A Guess, a cbs prime-time quiz show, ( June–September 1953) and One Minute Please, a DuMont prime-time quiz show ( July 1954 to February 1955). 2. What made life a bit easier at a certain point in New York, Edie Adams explained, was the hiring of a wonderful woman, Lillian Degore, to be their “secretary,” but who actually did a lot more than answer the phone and arrange schedules. 3. Ernie in Kovacsland was directed by Benny Squires and starred Ernie, Edie Adams, Joe Earley, and Andy McKay, with music by the Tony DiSimone Trio. Writers listed are Ernie, Ollie Crawford, and Hugh Prince. 4. Kovacs on the Corner was directed by Joe Behar and written by Kovacs, Marge Greene, and Donald Mattern. Actors included Edie Adams, Johnny Merkin, Peter Boyle, Joe Earley, Marge Greene, and Ed McDonnell. 5. On Ernie’s first Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–1953), he was directed by Ned Cramer, and, besides Edie Adams, added team members Trigger Lund and Andy McKay, with music by Eddie Hatrak and his orchestra.

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Notes to Pages 10–27

6. This nbc Ernie Kovacs Show was directed by Barry Shear, who joined the team in 1954 when the show was done for the DuMont network. Music was by the Archie Koty Orchestra and writers included Rex Lardner, Deke Heyward, and Mike Marmer. Co-performers were Edie Adams, Bill Wendell, Dylan Todd, Barbara Loden, and Matt Dennis.

Chapter 3 1. Ernie also worked with abc for Take a Good Look (1959–1960) and Silents Please.

Chapter 4 1. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called Ernie’s performance “perhaps the most witless.” 2. Soon after the film was completed, California became home for the whole Kovacs family.

Chapter 5 1. The Nairobi Trio that evening was made up of members of the organizing committee of the Buster Keaton Festival in Iola. It was important to the crowd that evening that the appearance was completely unannounced. Earlier that day and the previous day, clips of Nairobi performances had been shown to the audience, many of whom had never seen the Trio before, so the impact of the sudden appearance that evening was truly magnificent. We all felt Ernie would be proud! 2. As Ernie, in part, described the shooting: We cross-dissolve to a practical cloud, which has some fog around it. The raindrop comes out of the cloud, and we pan with the raindrop. Now we must “super”(impose) over the raindrop a tiny reflect spot of light, which we’re getting from a crystal, which is being lit. We take this in and now a series of shots develop from this which are quite remarkable in their achievement. Then we go from there to a stream. And Ernie continues, in this quite unbelievable sense of wonder, at the detail of using the language of television to do what he loved to do: illustrate music! 3. What to say finally about such experimental and comic universes? As we conclude, it is important to mention what Sigmund Freud and others have Notes to Pages 28–103

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noted, that comedy is often a form of personal defense from harsh realities (Neale and Krutnik 74). Rodney Dangerfield commented on one npr radio interview that he developed his comic approach of “I can’t get no respect” because growing up, he had no father and a mother who never woke up before 11 a.m.

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Works Cited

Internet Sources The Ernie Kovacs Blog: http://erniekovacs.blogspot.com/. This blog is written by Kovacs fans Al Quagliata and Ben Model. Al started writing for Ben’s Kovacs Web site in the mid ’90s and then started his own. You can visit both by clicking on the link above. This site is the middle ground where these two Kovacsians meet to bring you all the latest goodies from Kovacsland! Nairobi Trio on You Tube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uw03hS_EMY MySpace: Ernie Kovacs: http://profile.myspace.com/kovacsland The Museum of Broadcast Communication (Chicago) www.museum.tv/ archives/etv/K/htmlK/kovaksernie/kovacsernie.htm The Ernie Kovacs/Edie Adams Fan Club: 3940 Laurel Canyon Blvd., 199, Studio City, CA 91604, e-mail: [email protected]

Other Sources Adams, Edie. Personal interviews, 2004. Adams, Edie and Robert Windeler. Sing A Pretty Song: The “Offbeat” Life of Edie Adams, Including the Ernie Kovacs Years. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Allen, Steve. Make ’Em Laugh. New York: Prometheus Books, 1993. Andrews, Bart. The “I Love Lucy” Book. New York: Bantam, 1985. Aranda, J. Francisco. “Out of Innocence,” in The World of Luis Buñuel, edited by Joan Mellen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Ashbrook, John. Terry Gilliam. Harpenden, U.K.: Pocket Essentials, 2000. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968. Bellman, Bill, “Interview with Ernie Kovacs,” Canadian Television (cbc-tv), October 31, 1961.

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Belton, John. Personal e-mail, October 11, 2004. Benson, Robby. Who Stole the Funny? A Novel of Hollywood. New York: Harper Entertainment, 2007. Berle, Milton. Milton Berle: An Autobiography, with Haskell Frankel. New York: Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 1974. Blau, Eleanor. “Ernie Kovacs: Zany Influence on tv Comedy.” New York Times, May 30, 1986. Bordwell, David. Personal e-mail, October 7, 2004. Caesar, Sid. Where Have I Been? An Autobiography, with Bill Davidson. New York: Crown Publishers, 1982. Cassidy, Marsha F. What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Castleman, Harry and Walter J. Podrazik. Harry and Wally’s Favorite TV Shows. New York: Prentice Hall, 1989. Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark, editors. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge, 1993. Cox, Harvey. The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Crowther, Bosley, “Witless Situation.” New York Times, April 9, 1960. Dangerfield, Rodney. Interview, npr radio broadcast, October 8, 2004. Frost, Robert. Personal interview, Amherst College, 1962. Gelbart, Larry. Laughing Matters: On Writing M*A*S*H, Tootsie, Oh God! and a Few Other Funny Things. New York: Random House, 1998. Gordon, Mel. Lazzi: The Comic Routines of the Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1983. Greenfield, Jeff, “Introduction,” in The Vision of Ernie Kovacs. New York: Museum of Broadcasting, 1986, pp. 5–7. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard Books, 1993. Horton, Andrew. Laughing Out Loud: Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ———, editor. Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———, editor. Comedy/Cinema/Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1991. Key, Robert M. Personal interview by e-mail, Spring 2004. King, Elliott H. Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema. Harpenden, U.K.: Kamera Books, 2007. Klingsohr-Leroy, Cathrin. Surrealism. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2004. Kovacs, Ernie. How To Talk At Gin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. Marc, David. Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Boston, Unwin Hyman, 1989.

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Martin, Pete. “I Call on Edie Adams and Ernie Kovacs.” Saturday Evening Post, December 28, 1957. Mellen, Joan, editor. The World of Luis Buñuel: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Morton, Robert. Stand-Up Comedians on Television. New York: Harry Abrams, 1996. Nachman, Gerald. Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003. Neale, Steve and Frank Krutnik. Popular Film and Television Comedy. New York: Routledge, 1990. “North to Alaska,” Variety, November 9, 1960. Perret, Gene. Comedy Writing Step By Step. Hollywood, Calif.: Samuel French, 1982. Peterson, Russell L. Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night TV Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Richmond, Ray, editor. The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997. Rico, Diana. Kovacsland: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1990. Rico, Diana and Ben Herndon. “Great Shows: Ernie Kovacs,” Emmy, Summer 1981. Saks, Sol. Funny Business: The Craft of Comedy Writing. Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Publishing Co., 1991. Schickel, Richard. “The Real Ernie Kovacs IS Standing Up,” Show, December 1961. Sennett, Ted. Your Show of Shows. New York: Collier Books, 1977. Sikov, Ed. Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Smith, Evan S. Writing Television Sitcoms. New York: Perigree Books, 1999. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Knopf, 2003. tv-Free America Survey, www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html Van Horne, Harriet. “Importance of Kovacs Being Ernie.” New York WorldTelegram and Sun, July 24, 1951. Vision of Ernie Kovacs, The. New York: The Museum of Broadcasting, 1986. Waldron, Vince. Classic Sitcoms: A Celebration of the Best in Prime Time Comedy. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1997. Walley, David G. The Ernie Kovacs Phile. Boulder, Colo.: Bolder Books, 1975. Works Cited

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Walley, David G. Nothing in Moderation: A Biography of Ernie Kovacs. New York: Drake Publishers, 1975. Weiler, A. H. “Study of Infidelity: Strangers When We Meet,” New York Times, June 30, 1960. Wild, David. Seinfeld: The Totally Unauthorized Tribute. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998. Williams, Robin. Personal interview on the New York set of The World According to Garp, April 1982. Young, Jordon. The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV’s Golden Age. New York: Past Times Publishing Co., 1999.

Video and Television Sources kovacs tapes and dvds The Best of Ernie Kovacs, 2 dvd set. Six hours of material, including interviews. White Star Productions (www.whitestarvideo.com). Also available as a 5 vhs collection from White Star. Biography: Ernie Kovacs: Please Stand By! vhs, 90 min. a&e Productions, 20th Century Fox (New Video, 126 Fifth Ave., New York, ny 10011). “Ernie Kovacs: tv’s Comedy Wizard.” vhs, 70 mins., 1991. Produced by Sandy Oliveri and Paul Harris. A Movie Time Inc. Production (Video Treasures, Inc. 2001 Glenn Parkway, Batavia, Ohio 45103). “Eugene” from The Ernie Kovacs Show. vhs, 29 mins., November 24, 1961, abc tv (Video Images Co.). The Kovacs Show. Documentary, Broadcast Seminar Series, Paley Museum of Television and Radio, New York. Person to Person. Television interview of Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams in their New York City home, 1955.

kovacs on television Milton Berle: Mr. Television. Tribute documentary, Paley Museum of Television and Radio, New York, 1985. Thirty Years of TV Laughter. Documentary, Paley Museum of Television and Radio, New York. When Television Was Young. Documentary, Paley Museum of Television and Radio, New York.

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Index

Adams, Edie, 19, 20, 21, 23, 31, 37, 49, 52, 55, 59, 101, 102, 108nn2; in The Ernie Kovacs Show, 28; in Ernie in Kovacsland, 24–27; marriage to Ernie Kovacs, 4, 13, 17, 78, 106, 107nn2; on the Nairobi Trio, 46–47 Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The, 5 Allen, Gracie, 37 Allen, Steve, xv, 11, 37, 101 Allen, Woody, 7, 8, 11, 102 All in the Family, 5, 6 Altman, Robert, 74, 76 Amos ’N’ Andy, 5 Anchors Aweigh, 92 Andy Griffith Show, The, 5 Appell, Dave, 25–26, 32 Aristophanes, 15–16, 38, 105 Armstrong, Louis, 33 Arnaz, Desi, 5 Avalon, Frankie, 93 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 25, 67, 99 Ball, Lucille, 5, 73 Bell, Book, and Candle, 73, 76, 80, 81, 89; plot of, 81–83 Belton, John, xvi Benny, Jack, xviii, 37, 101, 103 Berle, Milton, xviii, 9, 73, 101; on

comedy, xvi, 7; on television as a medium, 3; as television pioneer, 3, 5, 8, 11, 18, 37, 103 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 5 Bewitched, 81 Billy Crystal Comedy Hour, The, 74 Binyon, Claude, 89 Birds, The, 105 Bishop, Joey, 92 Bordwell, David, 65 Borsht Belt, 7 bourgeois, 11 Brand, Jolene, 34, 68 Brando, Marlon, 10 Brecher, Irving, 93 Brecht, Bertolt, 33 Breton, André, 14, 38 Brooks, Mel, 7, 8, 11, 102 Buñuel, Luis, 14, 25, 38 Burns and Allen Show, The, 1, 103 Burns, George, xviii, 37 Buster Keaton Festival, 101, 109nn1 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 97 Caesar, Sid, 18, 37, 108nn2; and Kovacs, 101–103; as television pioneer, xiv–xv, 8–11. See also Your Show of Shows Camille, 62

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Cantinflas, 92 Capote, Truman, 10 Capra, Frank, 4, 80, 83 Captain Kangaroo, xi, 9 Capucine, 89 carnivalesque, 8, 24–26, 33, 42, 60, 67, 92; Harvey Cox on, 17; Mikhail Bakhtin on, 25, 99–100 Carol Burnett Show, The, 3 Carrey, Jim, 44 Carson, Johnny, 73 Carter, Arthur, 76 Chaplin, Charlie, 30, 42, 105 Charisse, Cyd, 93, 93 Chayefsky, Paddy, 10 Chevalier, Maurice, 92 Un Chien Andalou, 14, 25 Churchill, Winston, 1 Citizen Kane, 87 Clair, René, 81 Coca, Imogene, 9 Cohan, Steven, 96 Colbert, Stephen, 4 Cold War, 2, 4 “comic” vs. “comedian,” xvi commedia dell’arte, 16, 30–32, 67 Communism: fear of, 2, 4 Corbett, John, 68 Cosby, Bill, 11, 73 Cox, Harvey, 17, 104 Crosby, Bing, 76, 92 Curb Your Enthusiasm, xi, 6 Dada, 11, 38 Dalí, Salvador, 14, 25, 37–38, 71 Dangerfield, Rodney, 110nn3 Darin, Bobby, 33, 92 David, 60, 67 David, Larry, xi David Letterman Show, The, 50 Day, Doris, 84–89, 85

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Dead Poets Society, 75 Dean, James, 10 Degore, Lillian, 108nn2 Depp, Johnny, 44 Dick Van Dyke Show, The, 5 Diller, Phyllis, 11 Douglas, Kirk, xviii, 94, 97 Dumas, Alexandre, 62, 68 Dumb and Dumber, 24 Dutch Masters cigar advertisements, 57–58, 60, 68, 70 Eddie Hatrak Orchestra, 27 Edwards, Blake, 76 Ernst, Max, 71 ethnicity, xvii, 10, 42, 45–46 Euripedes, 23–24, 38 Fabian, 89, 91 Father Knows Best, 103 Feiffer, Jules, 10 feminist studies, 96 Fields, W. C., 4, 7 Five Golden Hours, 73, 75, 93 Flight of the Conchords, xi, 6 Fodor, Ladislas, 89 Ford, John, 76 Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Los Angeles, xi The 400 Blows, 23 Four Top Hatters, 37 “fourth wall,” 15, 59 Fox, Michael J., 6 “frame,” 12 Freberg, Stan, 11 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 109nn3 Friends, 6 Frost, Robert, 29 Gaiti, Ben, 47 Garland, Judy, 92


Garner, James, 73 Gelbart, Larry, 1, 8–9, 102 Gene Autry Show, The, 39 George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, The, 8 Giacometti, Alberto, 37 Gilliam, Terry, xvii–xviii Gingold, Hermione, 80 Ginsberg, Allen, 10 Gleason, Jackie, 8, 37 Goldbergs, The, 5, 103 Gold Rush, The, 30 Goldwyn, Sam, xviii, 102 Gordon, Mel, 30 Granger, Stewart, 89, 91 Grant, Kathryn, 76, 77 Gregory, Dick, 11, 108nn2 Greenfield, Jeff, 74 Guinness, Alec, 101 Gunsmoke, 39 Hanley, Peter, xv Happy Days, 74 Hark, Ina Rae, 96 Hart, Dolores, 93 Hathaway, Henry, 89 Have Gun Will Travel, 39 Hefner, Hugh, 10 Hemingway, Ernest, 63, 67–68 Heyward, Deke, xv, 42, 45 Hill, George Ray, 75, 97 Hitler, Adolf, 49 Hogan’s Heroes, 76 The Honeymooners, 5 Hopalong Cassidy, 39 Hope, Bob, 3 Howdy Doody Show, The, 41–42 Hunter, Evan, 94 I Love Lucy, xv, 5, 103 I Married a Witch, 81

It Happened to Jane, 73, 75, 76, 83–89, 85 It’s a Wonderful Life, 4, 83 Jones, Carolyn, 93 Karloff, Boris, 35 Katkov, Norman, 83 Keaton, Buster, xviii, 10, 34, 45, 101, 105; “breaking the fourth wall,” 15–16; in Sherlock Jr., 16–17; and vaudeville, 3–4 Kennedy, John F., 49 Kerouac, Jack, 10 Key, Robert M. “Bob,” 22, 50 kinescope, xvii King, Elliot, 14–15, 25 Klingsöhr-Leroy, Cathrin, 37–38 Koty, Archie, 28, 32 Kovacs, Ernie, xiii, 21, 61, 63, 66, 77, 81, 85, 93; birth, 1, 105; “blank canvas” sketches, 35; breaking “the frame,” 31, 62, 64, 67–68; camera, direct address to, xii, xvi, 8, 13, 26; camera tricks, use of, 37; children, 105–106; in Deadline for Dinner, 44; death, xi, 75; editing, use of, 35–36; in Ernie in Kovacsland, 19, 23–24; in The Ernie Kovacs Show, 27, 28–29, 52; Eugene, character, 33, 44–45, 56–67, 61, 63, 66, 92; in The Eugene Show, 56–67; film career, xi, 73–98; Gertrude the rag doll, 43; Howard, the World’s Strongest Ant, character, 43; Hungarian heritage, xii, 1, 10, 23–24, 33, 41, 45–46, 107nn2; the Kapusta Kid in Outer Space, character, 43; Kenneth Mockridge, character, 43; in Kovacs on the Corner, 25; Index

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in Kovacs on Music, 51–52; “less is more” acting style, 90; marriages, 105–106; Matzoh Hepplewhite the Magician, character, 43; Myklos Mylnar, character, 41–42, 45–46; Nairobi Trio sketch, xiv, xv, xvi, 19, 28, 31, 32, 46–49, 55, 68, 101, 104, 109nn1; “nothing in moderation” philosophy, xi, xviii, 75, 94; parody and satire, use of, 4, 11, 38–42; Pierre Ragout, character, 42; Percy Dovetonsils, character, xii–xiii, xiii, xvi, 16, 19, 31, 43–44, 56, 81, 101, 104; as “sacred clown,” 17; “sight gags,” use of, 34, 54, 58, 59–65, 70–71; silence, use of, 45, 72; in Silents Please, 51, 109nn1; sound and sound effects, use of, 33; as supporting character actor, 73; in Take a Good Look, 51, 109nn1; television programs, xiv, 18–20; television specials, xiv, 21; in Time For Ernie, 13; Uncle Gruesome, character, 42; Wolfgang von Sauerbraten, character, 42 Kuralt, Charles, 18 Lake, Veronica, 81 Lanchester, Elsa, 80 Lardner, Rex, xv Lawford, Peter, 92 lazzi, 30–31, 47, 70. See also commedia dell’arte Lee, Bruce, 49 Lee, Janet, 92 Lehrer, Tom, 108nn2 Lemmon, Jack, xviii, 47, 75–88, 85 Leno, Jay, 5, 20 LeRoy, Mervyn, 75 Letterman, David, xi, 5, 8, 20

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Leutze, Emanuel, 62 Liar, Liar, 44 Life of Riley, The, 5 Loden, Barbara, xv Lone Ranger, The, 39 Lund, Trigger, xv “Mack the Knife,” 32, 38, 64 Mahin, John Lee, 89 Mansfield, Jayne, xviii Marc, David, 4, 5, 7 March, Frederic, 81 Marmer, Mike, xv Martin, Steve, 7 Marx Brothers, 4, 9, 89 Marx, Groucho, xviii, 42, 46 masculinity, 96 M*A*S*H, 76 May, Elaine, 11 McCarthy hearings, 2 McCormick, Ken, xii McKay, Andy, 43 Meet Me in St. Louis, 93 Mercury Theater of the Air, The, 1 Michaelangelo, 60 Mickey Mouse, 49 Mickey Mouse Club, The, xv Mikolas, Joe, 34 Mister Roberts, 76 Mona Lisa, 66 Monroe, Marilyn, 10, 49 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, xi, xvii–xviii, 80 Moore, Mary Tyler, 73 Mork & Mindy, 74 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 4 Murrow, Edward R., 1–2; idea of being “on location,” 2 Museum of Television and Radio, xvii My Favorite Husband, 5


Nachman, Gerald, 10–11, 34, 46, 50, 108nn2 Newhart, Bob, 11 Newlon, Jack, 24 Nichols, Mike, 11 Nothing in Moderation, 99 Northern Exposure, 68 North to Alaska, 73, 89–92 Novak, Kim, xviii, 80–81, 83, 94, 97 Old Man and the Sea, The, 63 One Minute Please, 42 Operation Mad Ball, 73, 75–80 orthicon tube, 33, 38 Our Man in Havana, 73, 75 Paley Center for Media in New York, xvii Pal Joey, 92 Palin, Michael, xvii–xviii Parker, Charlie, 10 Pepe, 73, 92 Person to Person, 107nn2 Perret, Gene, 3 Peterson, Russell L., 4 Pinky Lee Show, The, 9 Pirates of the Caribbean, 44 Pirates of Penzance, The, 105 Popeye, 74 Post–WWII United States, 1 Presley, Elvis, 10 Previn, André, 52 Queen Elizabeth, 49 Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, 6 Quine, Richard, 75–88, 94 Rackin, Martin, 89 radio, as a medium, xi, 1 Reed, Donna, xviii Reiner, Carl, 7, 8

Richard Pryor Show, The, 74 Rico, Diana, xviii, 19, 77, 97 Robinson, Edward G., xviii Rockwell, Norman, 83 Rodin, Auguste, 60 Rogers, Will, 4 Rooney, Mickey, 76, 77 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh–In, xi, 50, 74 Roy Rogers Show, The, 39 Sahl, Mort, 10, 11 Sail a Crooked Ship, 73 Saks, Sol, 6 Salinger, J. D., 10 satire, 4, 9 Saturday Night Live, 9, 50 Screening the Male, 96 Seeger, Pete, 10 Seinfeld, 6, 73 Seinfeld, Jerry, 52, 73 Sennett, Ted, 9 Serling, Rod, 10, 40 Sesame Street, xi Shaughnessy, Mickey, 89 Shear, Barry, 47 Sherlock Jr., 16–17 Show Boat, 92 Sidney, George, 92 Sikov, Ed, 103 Simon, Neil, 8 Sinatra, Frank, xviii, 47 sitcoms, 5–7; formula, 6; versus vaudeville, 7 Socrates, 38 “Solfeggio,” as signature song for the Nairobi Trio, xvi, 47 Some Like It Hot, 10 Sophocles, 38 Sosnick, Harry, 52 So This Is Paris, 76 Index

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Spigel, Lynn, 2, 7 stand–up comedy, 7; versus vaudeville, 7 Stewart, James, xviii, 80, 83 Stewart, Jon, 4 Strangers When We Meet, 73, 75, 76, 92; plot of, 94–98 suburbs, 1 Sullivan, Ed, 8 Sunny Side of the Street, The, 76 surrealism, 4, 9, 13–15, 17, 18, 22, 24, 29, 32–34, 36, 37–38, 40, 53, 54, 60, 67, 71. See also Dada Take a Good Look, 42, 51 Take a Guess, 42 television: Kovacs on, xiv; as a medium, xi–xiv, 2, 17, 29, 33–34, 44 Texaco Star Theater, The, 18 Thinker, The, 60 Thomas, Danny, xviii, 8 Threepenny Opera, The, 33 Three Stooges, The, 46, 89 Time Will Tell, 42 Todd, Dylan, 28 Tolstoy, Leo, 62, 67–68 Tonight Show, The, 20 Tony DiSimone Trio, 23, 32 Truffaut, François, 23 Twain, Mark, 4 Twilight Zone, The, 40 UCLA Film and Television Archive, xvii Uncle Floyd Show, The, xi

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Van Dyke, Dick, 73 Van Kirk, Harold, 106 vaudeville, xi, 3, 7, 11, 16, 20; versus theatrical realism, 7 Vertigo, 80 Wagner, Robert, 93 Wagon Trail, 39 Wake Me When It’s Over, 73, 75 Walley, David, xiii, 18, 32, 44, 99 War and Peace, 62, 62, 68 Washington Crossing the Delaware, 62, 67, 68 Wayne, John, 49, 89 Weger, Carl, 19 Weill, Kurt, 33 Welles, Orson, 87 Westerns, 36, 38–40, 60, 89, 101 What’s My Hush Hush?, 42 What’s My Line?, 42 When Television Was Young, 11, 18 Wilder, Billy, xviii, 10 Williams, Robin, 11, 74–75 Williams, Tennessee, 10, Winters, Jonathan, xvi, 11 World According to Garp, The, 75 WPTZ television station, 19 WTTM radio station, 2, 19 Wyler, William, xviii Yes Man, 44 You Bet Your Life, 42 Your Show of Shows, 8–10 Zampi, Mario, 75, 93 Ziegfeld Follies, 93


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