Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Johnny Deadline: Ernie Kovacs

 by JB

And now the rare column about an actor who does NOT appear in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

I first discovered Ernie Kovacs when I was 15 years old. WTTW, the PBS station in Chicago, produced a revelatory twelve-part series, The Best of Ernie Kovacs, narrated by his best friend Jack Lemmon. Who was this strange, mustached man and why did his comedy speak to me? I did some digging and discovered a record album, The Best of Ernie Kovacs, at my local library and proceeded to check it out every couple of months for the next ten years. His comedy wasn’t like anyone else’s. Although widely different in scope, tone, and approach, I would compare his comedy to contemporaries Bob and Ray. You either “got” them or you didn’t, and if you did, they were all staggeringly funny. One of my favorite Kovacs bits was “Droongo,” a parody of the board game craze that swept the nation in the 1950s. He performed it on radio, TV, and later adapted it to a Mad magazine piece titled, “Gringo.” You can listen to that here.
He started his career on local television in Philadelphia, but quickly gained fame with a series of ground-breaking programs in the early years of television, the success of which led to better markets and better opportunities. He was a frequent guest on talk shows and game shows; he even hosted his own twisted game show, Take A Good Look, in 1959. The crown jewels of his career were a series of television specials he made for Dutch Masters cigars in the late '50s. These are classics of their form, playing with the very medium of television itself. His work would go on to inspire Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Sesame Street, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Saturday Night Live, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and Mystery Science Theater 3000.
My favorite of the television sketches is probably the “Office Symphony,” broadcast in 1961. It was unlike anything else to be seen on television back then:



A big audience favorite was the “The Nairobi Trio,” an odd sketch that Kovacs repeated many times in his career. Trivia fans: that’s Kovacs, wife Edie Adams, and Jack Lemmon in the gorilla suits:



One more sketch he repeated quite a bit, on both radio and television, “Mister Question Man:”



What I loved about Kovacs was that his humor was so undeniably HIS: skewed, weird, and odd in a way beyond words, seeming to come straight from... Kovacsland. He was an American original. He actually appeared unannounced one night on The Steve Allen Show and accused Allen of ripping him off. “Get your own material for Christsakes,” he railed... as Allen’s producers cut to a commercial.
At the height of his television fame, Hollywood beckoned. He made ten films:
Operation Mad Ball (1957); Bell, Book, & Candle (1958); It Happened to Jane (1959); Our Man in Havana (1959); Wake Me When It’s Over (1960); Strangers When We Meet (1960); North to Alaska (1960); Pepe (1960); Five Golden Hours (1961); and Sail a Crooked Ship (1961). He quickly became typecast as “The Captain,” a scatterbrained, quirky, incompetent Army officer. He also played several drunks. Ernie’s favorite of all his films was Five Golden Hours; it’s my favorite too. Kovacs plays Aldo Bondi, an amiable swindler taking wealthy widows for a ride. For decades, a framed lobby card from the film hung in my classroom.
Unfortunately, Kovacs' life was cut tragically short. An automobile accident took his life on January 13, 1962. He was 42 years old. His tombstone reads, “Nothing in Moderation.” He was supposed to appear in It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World with Edie Adams, in the part eventually played by Sid Cesar.
Shout! Factory has done a wonderful job preserving his legacy. Adams made it a bit of a crusade during her lifetime to pay off his debts, preserve his work, and buy the rights to his masters—in many cases, preventing them from being destroyed. A few times her representatives literally stopped a truck from driving the material to be dumped into the ocean.

Shout! Factory offers a six DVD boxset, The Ernie Kovacs Collection, with a broad, representative sampling of his work. This was followed by the 3-disc Ernie Kovacs Collection, Part Two. Shout! Factory’s amazing collection of Kovacs game show episodes, Take A Good Look, is no longer available on its website but can be purchased elsewhere. The Best of Ernie Kovacs, the PBS series that first introduced me to Kovacs, was briefly available on DVD; copies are still available on Amazon. The record I used to check out of the library is now available as a “Centennial Edition" CD.
Zoomar, the novel Kovacs published during his lifetime, occasionally comes up for auction on eBay. A used copy is currently for sale on Amazon. (Oh, wait! No, it isn’t. I just bought it. Sorry.) Diana Rico published a wonderful biography, Kovacsland, in 1990. Ernie in Kovacsland: Writings, Drawings, and Photographs from Television’s Original Genius, a scrapbook of career ephemera was published last year... and is a lot of fun.

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