Celebrating a Comedy Composer

By Richard Zoglin

The face had a cartoon-like directness: big mustache, Magic Marker eyebrows, oversize cigar. Yet few TV entertainers were a more intriguing set of contradictions than Ernie Kovacs. A boisterous cutup who relished tacky props and low-down slapstick, yet a closet highbrow who orchestrated comedy to Bartok and Beethoven. A talk-show pioneer, yet the creator of a classic half an hour that included not a single line of dialogue. A TV "star" who never had a network series that lasted more than two seasons, yet who influenced video comedy for the next two decades, from Laugh-In to David Letterman.

Another Kovacs anomaly: though his legend has grown since his death in a car accident in 1962, at age 42, his programs--mostly in quaint black and white--have remained largely unseen. Unlike the TV work of most of his comedy contemporaries (who are still active or whose shows can be seen in reruns), . the bulk of Kovacs' tapes have either been lost or relegated to dusty shelves. To remedy that, the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City has mounted a summerlong retrospective of Kovacs' oeuvre that demonstrates once again the importance of seeing Ernie.

The Kovacs tribute is the sort of venture that the museum is uniquely suited to carry out. Founded ten years ago by CBS Chairman William S. Paley, the institution now houses 25,000 radio and TV tapes (ranging from episodes of I Love Lucy to notable moments like the Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show), all of them available for screening by visitors to its trim building in midtown Manhattan. The museum also schedules regular exhibitions devoted to major performers, creators and programs from broadcasting's past. Among recent subjects: Milton Berle, Rod Serling and Masterpiece Theatre.

The museum is a vital repository not just of artistic highlights like old Kovacs shows but of the broadcast record of major historical events. "Can you imagine having had television cameras on Columbus' ships landing in the New World?" asks Robert Batscha, the museum's enthusiastic president. "It boggles the mind. But 400 years from now people will be able to say, 'Here we are living on Jupiter, and we have this wonderful historic footage of men landing on the moon.' " TV's early programming was preserved only haphazardly, and much of the museum's job has been to locate "lost" material. Still missing, for instance, are the first Super Bowl and Johnny Carson's debut as regular host of the Tonight show in 1962.

Many of Kovacs' live appearances, too, are gone for good. A onetime actor and newspaper columnist, Kovacs began his TV career as a local daytime host on Philadelphia's WPTZ in 1950. He was soon picked up by NBC and worked at one time or another for four networks (including the short-lived DuMont), hosting everything from a cooking program to several live comedy-variety shows, as well as a series of innovative comedy specials.

To bolster its own collection of Kovacs' work, the museum sifted through 200 tapes kept in storage by Edie Adams, Kovacs' widow and longtime co-star. She had rescued some of the material from ABC shortly after Kovacs' death, when the network was starting to record over it. "I took the insurance money and bought a wall of stuff that said 'Kovacs,' " she says. "I didn't know what half of it was."

The excavation has provided ample proof of Kovacs' prodigious achievement. Not that all of it is funny. Much of Kovacs' comedy strikes a viewer today as rather obvious and crudely executed. Steve Allen, another pioneer of live TV comedy, was a more dexterous verbal wit; Sid Caesar a more inspired sketch comic. Kovacs' contribution lay elsewhere. No performer, for one thing, was more at ease in front of the TV camera or treated it with such relaxed irreverence. Kovacs' live shows were an engaging mix of scripted bits (with such recurring characters as the lisping poet Percy Dovetonsils) and raucous improvisation (to fill an extra minute at the end of one show, Kovacs tossed a big balloon into the audience).

Kovacs loved music and used it wonderfully, from his catchy ragtime theme song to such precursors of music videos as a "dance" of office furniture to Sentimental Journey or a poker game played to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Perhaps his most famous creation was the Nairobi Trio, a pantomime band of musicians in ape costumes, derbies and overcoats who mechanically plunked out a nonsensical tune like figures on a music box. The laboriously articulated joke came when one ape bopped another on the head at crucial points in the tune. The humor was too bizarre to explain, but the bit had the grace and precision of a comic sonata.

Then there was Kovacs the video experimenter. In his hallucinatory world, illusion and reality were frequently confused. Paintings came to life or "leaked" into the real world; a man removed a candle from a table, and the flame remained suspended in midair. In his famous silent special, Kovacs played a Chaplinesque character named Eugene, who drew a lamp and then switched it on, and visited a library where sounds emanated from the books (when he opened Camille, a woman coughed). When he sat at a table and opened his lunch box, pieces of fruit rolled inexplicably off one end. Both the table and the camera were, of course, tilted at the same angle, in one of Kovacs' most ingenious camera tricks.

Kovacs was one of TV's great originals, partly because he approached the medium as something totally new, not as an extension of radio or vaudeville. "He was really sure of what television wasn't," says Edie Adams, "and was trying to find out what it was." In the course of his search, he helped shape what TV has become.

With reporting by William Tynan/New York