Originally published at: TV's forgotten genius: Ernie Kovacs | Boing Boing
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Is it me or is the video completely unsynchronized from the audio?
Man, I do love me some Ernie Kovacs.
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no, it’s completely wrong for me, too. i thought i was just not getting the humor for a second there.
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Sadly, some of Kovacs’ early work was not preserved. He started at a time when little thought was given to that, and technically it was difficult in the live medium.
And while some of his jokes haven’t aged well, it’s still remarkable the speed with which he adapted to the new medium and set about trying to push the boundaries of the form.
And what was groundbreaking about Citizen Kane wasn’t so much that it invented new techniques, but synthesized a lot of threads that had been developing in cinema production into one cohesive form.
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I watched Kovacs religiously as a kid, and was looking forward to watching this. But the soundtrack goes in and out of synch, ruining the video.
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Watched this series, or a very similar compilation, on PBS many decades ago.
There is something deeply mesmerizing about the Nairobi Trio pieces, and the surreal sketches that play behind the nasal Mack the Knife performances are like a low-grade fever dream.
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@dnealy
I would also look at Benny Hill as a great pioneer of the TV format. A revolutionary when it comes to using the medium as a source of humor and a means of producing it!!
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Kovacs was indeed an incomparable genius. The Nairobi Trio gets me every time. Turns out a Mr Frank Sinatra was a member of the Trio in one of their performances.
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I’m old enough to have watched them in the 50s, and they were really mind-bending, particularly the tilted-camera-and-set routine where the guy opens his lunch box, takes out an apple, and it rolls away.
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Timing is everything with comedy.
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When I was a kid I had the pleasure of meeting him and Edie Adams at the (now defunct) train station in Pasadena traveling from Chicago on the way to my grandma’s.
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I thought Jeff Goldblum did a pretty good job of capturing Kovacs. Hey, remember that Goldblum guy? I assume he went on to other things.
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He was a fine actor; I can’t think of anyone else in his supporting roles in Our Man in Havana or Bell Book and Candle.
His wife, Edie Adams, was a fine comic actor in her own right, and a wonderful singer. She devoted much of her later life to trying to preserve Kovacs’s work, funded in part by her cigar commercials, which were often a hoot.
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My mom told me he left a lot of debts when he died, and his friends offered to pay them off, but Edie insisted on doing it herself.
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I gave TBHS a proper go during the time I was already into SNL. The contrast was… interesting, and slapstick doesn’t always work for me. Too each his own, and all that. I’m pretty sure the last time I watched it was when BH put on one of his ‘big production’ musical numbers. For some reason that one focused on Liza Minnelli. The sung punchline near the end of the number was, “Ugliness spells success”. As one might imagine, that left a bad taste in my mouth.
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Yeah, he had tax issues (of his own creation). He also had child custody issues with his 1st wife, so Adams had to deal with the fallout from that as well. She worked like crazy. When I was a kid she seemed to be on every TV show.
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TBHS was never my cuppa. An awful lot of what he did was offensive in its time, let alone “not aging well.”
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