Ernie in Kovacsland
Josh Mills, Ben Model, Pat Thomas
Fantagraphics
There is a staple of television comedy today that relishes in breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging that they are indeed a television show. They will have characters speak directly to the audience or to on-screen or off-screen crew members, complain about the network brass, employ often surreal visual gags, and joyously flaunt the conventions of the medium. These shows create glorious tension with the audience. Going backward from Family Guy and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, through Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, there is one common thread: the work of 1950s TV legend Ernie Kovacs. Kovacs, in a decade of TV work, never had a hit show, but was so revolutionary he continues to delight audiences and inspire comedy performers and writers, decades after his fatal car wreck in 1962.
Kovacs started breaking the fourth wall among other stodgy TV conventions as early as 1951 with his local Philadelphia TV show It’s Time for Ernie. Even with a simple, short-format talk show format, Ernie found ways to push back against the “radio with pictures” style that populated early TV and continues to this day, with the 3-camera sitcom and the omnipresent news/talk desk. On his various shows, including the delightfully bizarre Kovacs on the Corner, Kovacs continued to lay waste to standard television show formats. Soon, his mad genius was unleashed upon unsuspecting prime-time viewers across the nation. One can only imagine someone trying to explain what they saw to baffled co-workers the day after one of his specials.
There have been several Kovacs biographies written over the years. Fantagraphics’ new book, Ernie in Kovacsland, takes a different path and unleashes a book as curious and unconventional as the man the book celebrates. Ernie in Kovacsland is neither traditional biography nor is it simply a collection of Kovacs ephemera, but it is a celebration of all things Ernie. Curated by Kovacs’ widow Edie Adams’ son, Josh Mills, Kovacs archivist Ben Model, and musician/writer/archivist Pat Thomas, the multitude of ephemera, photos, and writings collected creates an often touching look into the man, both on and off-screen. Mills, Model, and Thomas all provide essays for the book along with introductions from performance artist/actress Ann Magnuson and Ron Mael from the band Sparks. The book is jammed full of previously unseen notes, photos, drawings, and excerpts from Kovacs’ writing, stitched together with contemporaneous magazine profiles, his wife’s memoir, and the recollections and tributes of those his work inspired, giving a surprising depth of insight into the man and his work and reminding us all of why he still matters 60 years after his death.
Among the artifacts in this collection are thousands of words written about Kovacs during his life. Lengthy magazine pieces discussing his family and his opulent lifestyle (especially the cost of his cigars), but virtually nothing from the man himself about his craft. It speaks more to the style of celebrity journalism in the 1950s than anything else. If Kovacs had not died at 43, we surely would have gotten long-form interviews with Dick Cavett on his process. We do get some glimpses into his creative psyche from Edie Adams’ writings, Comedy without Angst and an excerpt from her 1990 autobiography Sing a Pretty Song… The “Offbeat” Life of Edie Adams (Including the Kovacs Years). Her love for the man and his work is infectious, and the writing of her son Josh Mills, who grew up with Ernie’s ghost, gives Ernie in Kovacsland far more heart than these ephemera-collection-style books tend to offer. Some personal joys in the book are the realization that pioneering film director Barbara Loden (Wanda) was a regular member of the Kovacs troupe, and verification that indeed Frank Sinatra donned an ape mask for a version of “The Nairobi Trio” sketch.
Kovacs was an enigma. He never really had a hit show, but was the king of the TV special. When the network needed to fill a few nights in a time slot during a summer hiatus, Ernie could be counted on to produce a show that was never ordinary. The fact that Kovacs never had a signature series may be the secret to his success. Not having to grind out an hour on prime time 35 times a year freed him to explore the medium with reckless abandon. His infrequency on TV also made a Kovacs special, well, special. I can only imagine the electricity of delight and confusion during one of his specials following a Jerry Lewis talk show.
Mere written descriptions do no justice to the genius timing of “The Nairobi Trio,” the affected splendor of “Percy Dovetonsils,” or the madness of an increasingly surreal montage of visual gags and puns played out to the tune of “Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife)” from The Threepenny Opera. I would be hard-pressed to call Kovacs self-deprecating, but he was certainly not above letting others do the work. Even early in his career, his local TV shows would start with the disclaimer that the show was “short, it just seems long.” This was all masterminded by the mustachioed, cigar-chomping Ernie Kovacs, who never played down to the audience and never seemed to care if a joke would play in Toledo or not. By not working to please the masses he created a body of work that influenced generations of comedians and writers, and his DNA still flows not only through live-action and animated television, but films and even TikTok videos.
Ernie Kovacs’ wife, Edie Adams, looms large in any discussion of Kovacs. As his muse and on-screen partner, the two are forever connected. She stoked his fertile imagination and afforded him the space to create while keeping him, at least relatively, grounded. Ernie’s only real vices were his trademark cigars and cards, both of which he indulged in passionately — it doesn’t appear the man ever did anything dispassionately. In the book, there are some annotated script pages with copious notes and corrected word spellings that would never be seen off the page and stand as testament to the precision of his work.
Ernie in Kovacsland gives a glimpse into what might have been. Ernie was already working in movies, including memorable turns in the John Wayne western, North to Alaska, and the classic supernatural comedy Bell, Book, and Candle, starring Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart. Ernie had plans bigger than character roles and was working on a feature film version of his Eugene silent TV specials, essentially making a silent movie in the early 1960s.
A curious thing happens as you get toward the end of Ernie in Kovacsland: the book has no narrative and could have been merely a beautiful scrapbook of rare Kovacs mementos, which would be a worthy endeavor, but instead, the book builds into an insightful portrait of the man and his art. The book is quirky, like the man it celebrates, and it also functions as a love letter, not only to the genius of Ernie Kovacs, but also to the generations of performers and fans whose imaginations he kindled.
