See the Giant Clams

When TV added sight to sound, the hope was that the comic scene would be enriched with visual as well as verbal guffaws. Instead, the Big Eye seems to transfix comedians into frozen-faced patter-pushers. Visual gags, when they happen, are a cut below Charley's Aunt. With vaudeville dead, the turn of last resort has been the old silents. Last week some of this vintage wackiness seemed to have rubbed off on Comedian Ernie Kovacs who interrupted his regularly scheduled program of reruns, Silents, Please, with a half-hour of bubbleheadedness of his own. While it may not have been up to Chaplin, it was still, at times, a reminder of how good and funny comedy used to be.

The show's best turn was its first. An off-camera voice, bad, sang Mack the Knife in German. Sound waves waggled on an oscilloscope. A succession of 10-sec. sight gags interrupted the picture: water leaked from an oil painting of the ocean; a fire hydrant squirted at a dog. Mackie Messer wavered on.

Subsequent foolery had Kovacs in a Cecil B. DeMille suit, grafted by trick camera work on antique film clips as a furious and futile director. The joke dragged on too long. But it was followed by one inspired bit of mockery: an immense, grossly fat ballerina staggering to the first crashing chords of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, with the rest of that philharmonic turkey illustrated by rhythmically cracking celery and splattering eggs.

Kovacs plans to do three more midget spectaculars to substitute now and then for the Silents, Please program that he, in the idiom of the medium, hosts. The odds are that they will be the only shows on the air whose credits lists will flash the appealing message; SEE THE GIANT CLAMS EAT THE FRIENDLY NATIVES.

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