Mash Note Dept. : Ernie Kovacs

 

 

 
I have the dubious distinction of being two types of person in one goofy package:  I am both an early adopter and a late adopter of trends, technology and general goods. 

Never at the same time, of course.

It’s equivalent to being the annoying friend who shows up an hour early to your party when your still in the shower, which is one type of person, and also being the friend who cancels at the last minute, with lots of apologies and a real, actual emergency, which is another type of person all together.

So, I fall on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to discovering trends, technology, and artists of all stripes.  I’m either early or late, but never quite on time.

This bowlegged extended metaphor is my hackneyed way of saying, “I’m so very sorry Ernie Kovacs, that I never knew you existed until four months ago when your rare footage was released on Netflix Instant via Roku.”

(And here is a great case of The Husband and I accidentally being early adopters by accident. My mother got The Husband a first generation Roku for his birthday.  Four years ago.  No one knew what Roku was then.  Even though I kept explaining how fantastic it was, everyone said: “Uh-huh?” and went on TiVoing everything for a few more years. I’m not exactly persuasive, even though I am ebullient. Oh well.)

 
Back to my apologies in fake beat-poet form:  “Ernie Kovacs!  You are the king!  Of modern television, both comedy and technology!  We owe!  A great debt!  To your freewheeling genius! And I’m sorry!  That!  I just! Found out!  About youuuuuu!”

On a whim one day, I added The Ernie Kovacs collection to our Netflix Instant Queue and let it sit there for a few months.  Right before Thanksgiving, when everything gains the gloss of pre-Christmas stress, I turned on this show after dinner because we both needed to not be additionally freaked out by our TV entertainment choices on top of looming holiday fun-time.

Within minutes of watching Kovacs glide his way through some great deadpan jokes on a grainy copy of a then-local morning show, I had fallen in love with him.

He was funny and lovely on television, a new medium at that time for Americans.  When a joke went splat, Kovacs shrugged, and threw another one at the camera.  That one might  fall flat too.  But, the third one, my friends, will hit you with the flaming arrow of spastic laughter.  It’s hard to imagine what I felt like watching this mustachioed grinning man talking to the camera (and the cameraman, an unusual comedic trick, even now) with the playfulness of a professional dancer.

He makes it look easy, this brand-new-at-the-time television comedy, and he makes it look fun to do.

And that, by anyone’s standards, is really, really hard.

When I was learning to dance and started to do solos, I was told, “Your job is to make dance look effortless.  As if it were nothing.  That’s the real trick.  It will take everything you have, and require stuff you don’t even know you have, yet.”

The rest of my artistic life has been in pursuit of this ideal:  the appearance of effortlessness.  And Ernie Kovacs has this quality of effortlessness naturally.  Or he makes it appear effortless.

And, in art, one is the same thing as another.  Because art is gestural playfulness and practiced illusion in a blazing package wrapped in a pretty bow, just for you, you, you.

 
Did I mention he’s television’s premier pioneer of comedy? 

If you watch SNL from the beginning of its inception, you’ll see the Kovacs influence.  Bringing out all the players at the end to wave at the cameras?  Kovacs.  The trope of talking to the producers and camera people like they do on late night talk shows?  Kovacs.  Playing around with the technical aspects of the medium such as adjusting the horizontal and vertical ratios and doing theme-based shows?  Kovacs.

Go and watch a little of the genius himself, that playful man, and you’ll come away wondering how you ever lived without him before now.

And we almost didn’t have any of his TV work at all.  His second wife took what little money she had after he passed away unexpectedly in a car accident, and did a smart land grab of every bit of footage of every show she could find because his work was getting erased to make space for other, more contemporary shows.   (Edie Adams was an amazing, amazing singer, comedic artist, and person in her own right. You should look her up when you get a chance.)
 
 

Here are the magical tricks and techniques I took from Kovac’s too-short  life and career:

You can never hit a moving target.

If one TV show wasn’t working out, he pitched another.  When that was in hiatus, he wrote a brilliant piece for early Mad Magazine.  Failure was about as normal as his eloquent, comedic shrug at a failed joke.

If you’re going to fail, fail as big as possible.

And don’t whine about it.   If no one got his jokes or his TV show got yanked off of the air, he moved on and didn’t look back.  His life is a walking example of “Small people talk about each other.  Great people discuss ideas.”  Or something of that sort.

Everything will teach you what you need to know.

I make it sound as though there was this great mysterious quality about the appearance of naturalness in his work.  Don’t be fooled.  He paid attention to everything was around him, and absorbed it, which leads to:

Play to your strengths and know who you are.

He described himself and a “sound and sight man.”  And his jokes and gags are based off of sound and sight riffs, piled on top of one another like a delicious arrangement of falling dominoes.  Had he spent all his time trying to make jokes off of something that wasn’t his natural bent, pushing himself in areas that weren’t his native language, he would have gotten bogged down in  the details.

Keep trying new things.

Although he played to his strengths, Kovacs was always, always trying something that he had not done before.  And he paid close attention to what he was creating behind the scenes.  He was always trying a trick you wouldn’t expect, and sometimes those tricks bombed in his face— which, with his panache, was even funnier than the original idea.

 
 
And Kovacs didn’t take himself too seriously.  He did his thing, which was comedy and early television, and he didn’t make a huge deal of his fame.  Kovacs was bigger than TV and TV comedy, and we know that, and he probably knew that, so there was no reason to mention this foregone conclusion.  And that makes me love Ernie Kovacs all the more.
 
 
An Ernie Kovacs Primer:

There are two premier, made-with-love fan websites that have been on the Internet for a long, long time.  Ernie Kovacs Dot Net is one of them, and Kovacsland Online is the other.

Ernie Kovacs is the official website. It is very, very nice!

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I actually had seen Ernie Kovacs in old issues and reprints of Mad Magazine from the early days. Here’s a short and sweet essay with pictures on his Mad articles.

You can find The Ernie Kovacs Collection, released in 2011 on Amazon or Netflix. But, here for your pleasure is a little snippet of Kovacs’ special magic:

 

 

 
One blogger who has written brilliantly about being unintentionally behind trends is Never Done It That Way Before. Her essay heavily informed my thinking in the introduction of the Kovacs’ Mash Note. (I remember mulling as I was reading her essay: “Yeah, I’m late on trends also, but I do tend to be early on other stuff. So, existentially, what does that mean?”) She’s a great writer, and a thoughtful one. Also, she’s up tempo in tone, which I respect a lot.

You can find her discussion on this phenomenon in her essay The Everybody Loves Raymond Effect.
 

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