TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Three Clips of Ernie Kovacs (1950s/early-1960s)

All three posted to YouTube by user 'Kovacs Corner'

Ernie Kovacs was an acknowledged pioneer of television comedy, one of the first comedians to utilize the characteristics of the medium to create visual comedy. For this week's Monochrome Monday we feature three brief clips of some of that comedy.

The first clip above (undated, but probably from sometime in the late-1950s) is very short and in it Kovacs attempts to assist those viewers who haven't yet got a color television set. (You'll have to watch it to see what that means!)

The second clip is an early example (from 1957) of what became one of Kovacs' most enduring bits--the Nairobi Trio. The Nairobi Trio is a great example of the plain old silly nature of some of Kovacs' humor; there's really nothing more to it other than three guys in gorilla masks doing rhythmic movements to music (with Kovacs as the middle gorilla).

Finally, the third and last clip, "A Kovacs Kitchen", is a fantastic example of another of Kovacs' trademarks--an elaborate and precisely-timed suite of themed visual gags that would have involved a great deal of planning, choreography, and skilled execution. Kovacs mounted quite a few of these, always taking advantage of the visual nature of the TV image to create comedy. This one, from an ABC special in 1962, must have been one of his last, as it was the same year that Kovacs died in an auto accident. Because of his premature death in the early-1960s, all of Ernie Kovacs' comedy was done in monochrome black and white.