Ernie Kovacs - Visual Humor and Characters

Visual Humor and Characters

At WPTZ, Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non sequitur gags and for carefully allowing the so-called fourth wall to be breached. Kovacs' cameras commonly showed his viewers activity beyond the boundaries of the show set—including crew members and outside the studio itself. Kovacs also liked talking to the off-camera crew and even introduced segments from the studio control room. Ernie frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows. One of Kovacs' Philadelphia broadcasts was "enlivened" by a homeless man who sought shelter inside the TV studio; Kovacs invited him onto the set, where he slept for the duration of the telecast, but nonetheless was introduced on camera to the audience as "Sleeping Schwartz." He was once knocked out when a pie in the face still had the plate under it.

Kovacs' love of spontaneity extended to his crew, who would occasionally play on-air pranks on him to see how he would react. During one of his NBC shows, Kovacs was appearing as the inept magician Matzoh Heppelwhite. The sketch called for the magician to frequently hit a gong, which was the signal for a sexy female assistant to bring out a bottle and shot glass for a quick snort of alcohol. Stagehands substituted real liquor for the iced tea normally used for the gag. The look on Ernie's face upon taking the first shot was priceless when he realized that he would be called upon to drink a shot of liquor for each successive gong. Kovacs pressed on with the sketch and was quite inebriated by the end of the show. On another occasion, as "Percy Dovetonsils", he found that his drink contained a live fish.

Kovacs helped develop camera tricks still common almost 50 years after his death, one of which became one of his signature gags. His character Eugene sat at a table to eat his lunch, but as he removed items one at a time from a lunch box, he watched them inexplicably roll down the table into the lap of a man reading a newspaper at the other end. When Kovacs poured milk from a thermos bottle, the stream flowed in a seemingly unusual direction. Never seen on television before, the secret was using a tilted set in front of a camera tilted at the same angle.

He constantly sought new techniques and used both primitive and improvised ways of creating visual effects that would later be done electronically. One innovative construction involved attaching a kaleidoscope made from a toilet paper roll to a camera lens with cardboard and tape and setting the resulting abstract images to music. Another was a soup can with both ends removed fitted with angled mirrors. Used on a camera and turning it could put Kovacs seemingly on the ceiling. An underwater stunt involved Kovacs—an inveterate cigar smoker—sitting in an easy chair, reading his newspaper and somehow smoking his cigar. Removing it from his mouth, Kovacs was able to exhale a puff of white smoke, all while floating underwater. The trick: the "smoke" was a small amount of milk which he filled his mouth with before submerging. Kovacs repeated the effect for a Dutch Masters commercial on his ABC game show, Take a Good Look.

One of the special effects he employed made it appear as if he was able to look through his assistant, Barbara Loden's, head. The illusion was performed by placing a black patch on Loden's head and standing her against a black background while one studio camera was trained on her. A second one photographed Kovacs, who used the studio monitor to position himself exactly so that his eye would appear to be looking through a hole in her head.

He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Silent Show, in which Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring sketch was The Nairobi Trio, three derby-hatted apes miming mechanically and rhythmically to the tune of Robert Maxwell's "Solfeggio".

Kovacs could use extended sketches and mood pieces or quick blackout gags lasting only seconds. Some could be expensive, such as his famous used car salesman routine with a jalopy and a breakaway floor: it cost $12,000 to produce the six-second gag. He was also one of the first television comedians to use odd fake credits and comments between the legitimate credits and, at times, during his routines.

Kovacs reportedly disliked working in front of a live audience, as was the case with the shows he did for NBC in the 1950s. He found the presence of an audience distracting, and those in the seats frequently did not understand some of the more elaborate visual gags and special effects, which could only be appreciated by watching studio monitors instead of the stage.

Like many comedians of the era, Kovacs created a rotation of recurring roles. In addition to the silent "Eugene," his most familiar characters were the fey, lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils, and the heavily accented German disc jockey, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Mr. Question Man, who answered viewer queries, was a satire on the long-run (1937–56) radio series, The Answer Man. Others included horror show host Auntie Gruesome, bumbling magician Matzoh Heppelwhite, Frenchman Pierre Ragout, and Miklos Molnar, the sardonic Hungarian host of a cooking show. The Miklos character wasn't always confined to a kitchen; Kovacs performed a parody of The Howdy Doody Show with "Buffalo Miklos" as the host. Poet Percy Dovetonsils can also be found playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata on a disappearing piano and as a "Master Detective" on the "Private Eye-Private Eye" presentation of the US Steel Hour on CBS March 8, 1961. On the same show, the Nairobi Trio abandons their instruments for a safe cracking job; still with a background of "Solfeggio" but speaking, two of the three appear in an "Outer Space" sketch.

Kovacs never hesitated to lampoon those considered institutions of radio and television. In April 1954, he started late-night talk show The Ernie Kovacs Show on DuMont Television Network's New York flagship station, WABD. Stage, screen, and radio notables often dropped by as guests. Archie Bleyer, head of Cadence Records, came to chat one evening. Bleyer had been the long-time orchestra leader for Arthur Godfrey's radio and television shows. He had been fired by Godfrey the year before along with fellow cast member, Julius La Rosa, when it was discovered Bleyer's record company had a contract with LaRosa without Godfrey's knowledge. Bleyer and Kovacs were shown in split-screen, with Kovacs wearing a red wig, headphones, and playing a ukelele in a Godfrey imitation, while talking with his guest.

Kovacs' television programs included Three to Get Ready (an early morning program seen on Philadelphia's WPTZ from 1950 through 1952), It's Time for Ernie (1951, his first network series), Ernie in Kovacsland, (a summer replacement show for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, 1951), The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56 on various networks), a twice-a-week job filling in for Steve Allen as host of The Tonight Show on Mondays and Tuesdays (1956–57), and game shows Gamble on Love, One Minute Please, Time Will Tell (all on DuMont), and Take a Good Look (1959–61). Kovacs later publicly accused Allen of stealing material and characters from him and then performing them in only slightly obfuscated form. (For example, Kovacs' "Mr. Question Man" bore a resemblance to Allen's "Answer Man," and later, Johnny Carson's long-running Carnac character.) Kovacs also had a short stint as a celebrity panelist on What's My Line?, but took his responsibilities less than seriously, often eschewing a legitimate question for the sake of a laugh. An example: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, the founder of the automobile company, was the program's "mystery guest." Previous questioning had established that the mystery guest's last name was synonymous with an automobile brand, Kovacs asked, "This may seem like a long shot, sir, but by any chance are you Abraham Lincoln?"—a reference to the Ford Motor Company's brand of luxury automobile. When Kovacs gave an interview admitting that he was absent from the show when he wanted to go out for dinner on a Sunday, his stint on the panel show was over.

Kovacs became a regular on NBC Radio's Monitor beginning in late 1958, often using Mr. Question Man in his radio monologues.