Can an artist be ahead of his time but behind the curve? A bold original but a throwback to an earlier era? This violent contradiction may explain why comedian Ernie Kovacs—who died in an auto accident nearly 50 years ago, at the full flower of his creativity—still seems like such a singular talent. His 1950s broadcasts became the blueprint for satirical TV comedy, with their recurring oddball characters, their parodies of other programs, their fake commercials. Without Kovacs there would have been no Saturday Night Live, no SCTV, no David Letterman or Conan O’Brien. Yet his brilliant and surreal sight gags, the like of which have disappeared from the tube entirely, were inspired by the great movie comedians of the silent era, especially Buster Keaton. The end of one tradition and the beginning of another, the link between the big screen and the small one, Kovacs might have been the most important transitional figure in American comedy.
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Running over 13 hours, the six-disc DVD box The Ernie Kovacs Collection is the most comprehensive survey of the comedian’s work ever, beginning with his earliest live broadcasts on NBC in May 1951 and concluding with the stunning half-hour specials he taped for ABC in late 1961. To be honest, I’d rather have the old WTTW series, which was released on DVD in 2000 but is now out of print. Thirteen hours is a long haul, and some of the sketches included in the box are tedious, especially those culled from the two-hour NBC morning show Kovacs hosted from December 1955 to July 1956 (desperate to fill time, he’ll take a good two-minute idea and stretch it out to a deadly ten minutes). But the set also includes complete versions of important projects, like the half-hour Saturday Color Carnival episode from January 1957, whose sketches are exclusively pantomime, and the equally conceptual May 1959 special Kovacs on Music.
A born improviser, he also understood the value of impulse. One of his best-remembered characters, the lisping poet laureate Percy Dovetonsils, was created instantaneously when someone handed Kovacs a pair of gag glasses with coke-bottle eyes pasted behind the lenses. Thrust into the pressure cooker of a live broadcast, he could be funnier when things went wrong, and his mischievous stagehands were happy to oblige. In one segment (excerpted in a montage on disc one), Percy picks up his ever-present martini glass to find a goldfish swimming in it; in another, from July 1956, a lame gag in which Percy drapes a napkin over his face to make his martini magically “disappear” falls apart when Kovacs empties the glass and then realizes it’s two and a half ounces of straight gin. Without breaking character, he swallows the booze but then clues the audience in on this practical joke and milks it for the rest of the segment. (Addressing the director offscreen, Percy asks, “Did I read the poem or didn’t I?”)
Most of these specials included a montage of blackout gags, accompanied on the soundtrack by a clip-clop rendition of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Mack the Knife” and linked onscreen by the image of an audio waveform moving with the music. Only a few seconds long, these wordless blackouts are flawlessly executed and show Kovacs’s wild sense of humor in its purest form: A businessman touches a pointer to a painting of a dam and the dam bursts, releasing a torrent of water onto the conference table. A weight lifter trying to pick up a barbell stands up straight and his arms stretch like rubber bands. A woman enjoying a bubble bath is startled when a periscope rises from the water. In a shooting gallery the wooden profile of a duck pivots to reveal a tiny cannon that fires back at the contestant. A man at a masquerade party pulls off his rubber caveman mask to reveal an identical mask underneath. Submerged in a tank of water, Kovacs takes a drag from his cigar and expels a mouthful of white smoke (actually milk). No idea was too elaborate: he once blew $12,000 on a six-second gag that showed a used-car salesman slapping the hood of an automobile and the auto crashing through the pavement.
