Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy: Nothing in Moderation

By Andrew Horton

Exploring the pioneering career of the man whose quirky comic experiments influenced decades of television, from Laugh-In to Late Night.

 


A true pioneer of television, Ernie Kovacs entertained audiences throughout the 1950s and early 1960s with his zany, irreverent, and surprising humor—and also inspired a host of later comedies and comedians, including Monty Python, David Letterman, much of Saturday Night Live, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Captain Kangaroo, and even Sesame Street. Kovacs created laughter through wildly creative comic jokes, playful characterizations, hilarious insights, and wacky experiments—"Nothing in moderation," his motto and epitaph, sums up well Kovacs's wholehearted approach to comedy and life.


 


In this book, Andrew Horton offers the first sustained look at Ernie Kovacs's wide-ranging and lasting contributions to the development of TV comedy. He discusses in detail Kovacs's work in New York, which included The Ernie Kovacs Show (CBS prime time 1952–1953), The Ernie Kovacs Show (NBC daytime variety 1956–1957), Tonight (NBC late-night comedy/variety 1956-1957), and a number of quiz shows. Horton also looks at Kovacs's work in Los Angeles and in feature film comedy. He vividly describes how Kovacs and his comic co-conspirators created offbeat characters and situations that subverted expectations and upended the status quo. Most of all, Horton demonstrates that Kovacs grasped the possibility for creating a fresh genre of comedy through the new medium of television—and exploited it to the fullest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292779624

Andrew Horton

Andrew Horton, the Jeanne H. Smith Professor of Film and Video Studies at the University of Oklahoma, is author of the popular Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (California, 1994) and other books. Most recently he coedited Play It Again Sam: Retakes on Remakes (with Stuart McDougal, California, 1998) and wrote the introduction to Three More Screenplays by Preston Sturges (California, 1998).

Book preview

Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy

Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy

Nothing in Moderation

By Andrew Horton

Copyright © 2010 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2010

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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

Introduction: Nothing in Moderation

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

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

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

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

5 } The Kovacs Legacy: I Don’t Know. I Just Do It!

Appendix: Summary of Ernie Kovacs’ Personal Life

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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, copy-editor, 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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 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.¹ 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 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