The Ernie Kovacs Show

In January 2019, Turner  Classic Movies aired several episodes of The  Ernie Kovacs Show, sketch comedy that clearly influenced later shows such as Saturday Night Live and, most directly, Monty Python's Flying Circus.  The two programs that I saw were originally broadcast on ABC in the Fall of 1961 and January 1962, sponsored by Dutch Masters' cigars.  (The black and white video is hazy, as if the scenes were filmed underwater or through a dense haze of cigar smoke.)  Watching these programs as an old man, I am engaging in an archaeological excavation of my childhood.  My father admired Ernie Kovacs and thought that he was a great artist -- my father was a great aficionado of all things TV.  Growing up in the early1950's, TV was the medium of the future for my father's generation -- he liked movies but always suspected that they were a little antiquated:  for him, the box in the living room was the harbinger of great things, the first truly democratic medium, Shakespeare and Matisse for the middle-class.  I probably sat on the floor at my father's feet and watched these programs when they were brand-new, but, of course, my memory of originally seeing these 27 minutes shows is forever lost.  (I would have been six years old.)  Rather, my recollection of these programs is remote and second-hand:  clearly I am remembering a memory of a memory.  From time to time during my adolescence, the Kovacs' shows resurfaced as curiosities, memoirs of the early days of TV and, when these programs were re-broadcast, I believe I saw them, again with my father, and, perhaps, this stirred memories of my first, and childish, memories of these shows.  Like Laurel and Hardy, the Kovacs' shows inspired some sort of holy awe and terror in me.  Seeing Laurel and Hardy on TV from time to time, I find it hard to reconstruct what originally frightened me about those programs -- most recently, I think I have maintained it was probably my identification of Oliver Hardy with my father, the great lawgiver and disciplinarian.  The basis for my fear of the Kovacs' shows is much easier to ascertain.  The programs are, in fact, objectively horrifying.  Most of the skits performed by Kovacs' company are silent, often accompanied by voices singing in a foreign language -- I now know the signature piece is "Mackie Messer" or "Mack the Knife" sung is shrill, harsh German.  (To add to the viewer's disorientation, an oscilloscope wave-form translating the music into an abstract, wobbly white line is often shown in the black-outs between sketches or running along the inky bottom of the frame.)  Kovacs' stock-in-trade is masks, ridiculously flimsy cardboard sets, tiny apertures through which action is filmed, and nightmarish camera angles.  His repertoire company are also masked, although without the benefit of actually pulling anything over their features -- the actors are so utterly impassive, indeed, even catatonic, that they make Buster Keaton look histrionic.  When the actors are not staring blandly into the camera, lit starkly and in huge unflattering close-ups, they mug obscenely.  (The procession of big ugly close-ups sometimes resembles images in a Guy Madden film.)  It's bizarre and many of the images are truly remarkable but it isn't exactly funny -- rather it is a brand of surreal analysis, a kind of meta-critique of TV and its discontents, that is startling, absurd, and grotesque.  In one sequence, Kovacs analyzes TV westerns, beginning with iterations of gunfights that become increasingly weird -- at first, the gunfights, each about five seconds long, are merely filmed from strange camera angles, but, then, the imagery becomes increasingly delirious -- we see shoot-outs on Mars, shoot-outs involving Bavarian cowboys, and, finally, a shoot-out involving a colossal cowboy and his tiny adversary. By the end of the sketch, bullet holes shot through the characters frame the gunmen.  Then, at last, we see a gunslinger on an analyst's couch.  The psychiatrist, who speaks with heavy Viennese accent, interrogates the gunfighter.  The gunfighter says:  "Every one ordered me around -- it was always 'Slim slop the hogs' or 'Slim break those broncos' or 'Slim get on the posse and hunt the bad guys."  The shrink asks:  "So you felt people were dominating you?"  "Yes," the gunfighter says, "And my name isn't even 'Slim' -- it's Sam."  The show is packed with nightmarish effects:  a spidery hand playing ragtime piano is multiplied into dozens of shadowy beasts with five fingers.  Masks are pulled off to reveal other masks.  The zombie-like Nairobi Trio plays a jazz tune -- the musician are robot gorillas, often filmed in scary close-ups:  at the chorus of each tune, the drummer rotates to rap out a tattoo on the head of the central ape.  We see the ape's hideous face contorted in rage.  The skits fly by at high speed and many of them are hard to understand -- I didn't get the point of about a fourth of the sketches.  There are arcane jokes:  a Teutonic version of a cowboy show is called Der Einsam Aufseher -- a  phrase I didn't recognize until the familiar overture to William Tell translated for me:  "the lone Ranger."  In a strangely prescient image, Kovacs chomps on his cigar and mourns the fact that he has four Tv sets but only three networks -- in those days, having two TV sets was an astonishing luxury.  People are always being mangled or horribly injured:  a little man (he looks a bit like Laugh-In's Henry Gibson) approaches Kovacs wearing a grotesque mask.  Kovacs cuts off his head and is shown turning a drill embedded in the little man's skull so that his mask rotates like a  rotisserie chicken.  In the next scene, Kovacs sticks a tee in a reclining woman's mouth, sets his golf ball there and swings -- we hear a sickening thud.  Even Kovacs pastoral imagery is peculiar and disquieting:  one episode, scored to Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kije Suite follows a single drop of rain down from the stormy skies into a stream presided over by curiously robotic automaton animals, then, descending over a waterfall, through a hydroelectric turbine, into a pipe, then, a tea pot, then, rising as steam, but falling again into the tea pot to be poured into a drain.  The drop of water then goes underground into an elaborate mock-up of a plumbing system directly beneath a sidewalk on which we see people's legs and ankles passing by, some of them hopping along, others dragging their feet as if marching to their own doom.  At last the little droplet emerges into the stream where it is pecked-up by a bird that flies up into the sky returning to the initial panorama of grandiose clouds.  One sequence shows a poet drawling with a pronounced southern accent -- the poet recites two of his poems which are total gibberish and, then, laughs serenely at his own wit:  I don't know who is being spoofed here, but the sketch is quietly lethal.  Next, we see an abstract artist who happens to be a rural farm house-wife -- she crows about killing 85 pigs just before the interview.  She points to one portrait of a favorite pig -- it's a triangle and rectangle and oval shape all intersecting:  "I painted this a couple years ago," she says, "of course, he looks quite different now."  Next, we see an artist who seems to be imitating Henry Moore -- he's stuck through a doughnut hole in his sculpture.  "You seem to like holes," the interlocutor says.  "No," the artist replies in a Parisian accent, "this is obviously a mistake you fool."  Like Monty Python, the skits sometimes connect to one another:  in one episode, a mad doctor has miniaturized a motorcycle:  only he can see it.  When he touches the palm of Kovacs' hand, the motorcycle starts up and shoots off onto the floor where it zips away.  At the end of the episode, we see the mad scientist creeping about the ground looking for the lost motorcycle which he can hear but not see -- he searches the floor of a house, then, a bar, then, crawls along a sidewalk outside (it's the set with plumbing mock-up below), and, then, is flailing about on the bottom of the sea.  In the last shot, the scientist is wearing a space-suit and staggering across the plains of Mars in search of the motorcycle.

Casting an eerie light over the shows is the fact that the last program, the one featuring the life of the water droplet, was broadcast posthumously. Ten days before ABC aired the show, Kovacs was killed in a car wreck while returning from the christening of Milton Berle's child -- it was January 23,1962 and Kovacs' 43rd birthday.