TFTP's Monochrome March: Ernie Kovacs as Wolfgang von Sauerbraten (1950s)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Kovac Corner'
Length - 2:46

College basketball has March Madness. TFTP: Television from the Past has Monochrome March! 

For the entire month of March, TFTP brings you posts featuring monochrome programs and clips in glorious black-and-white!

Ernie Kovacs is a favorite at TFTP (see here, here, and here) so this is a Monochrome March special look at another of Ernie's classic characters, Wolfgang von Sauerbraten. Kovacs combined the German Oktoberfest-inspired costume (and moustache) and a mostly indecipherable German accent with the shtick of being a disc jockey to create some farcical humor.

Kovacs did this at a time when Germany was just re-emerging after the horrors of World War II, and he probably helped to re-establish some of these elements of a more benign image for German culture. Although the lampooning of ethnic characteristics can be seen as questionable today, seeing Kovacs portraying von Sauerbraten is a great window into his style of comedy.

TFTP's Monochrome Monday: Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils (c. 1959)

Posted to YouTube by user 'Kovacs Corner'
Length - 2:10

TFTP's Monochrome Monday brings you a classic black & white TV program or clip every Monday morning to kick off the week....

Ernie Kovacs is a TFTP favorite (see earlier TFTP posts featuring Kovacs here and here), as his groundbreaking comedy from early television is fascinating even today. Here is a late appearance (probably in a segment from Kovacs' game show "Take a Good Look" which aired 1959-1961) of one of Kovacs' most well-known characters, Percy Dovetonsils.

Kovacs created Dovetonsils in circa 1950 for his local Philadelphia program "Three to Get Ready" (a pioneering early morning show). The character is a take-off of a type of character that appeared on a number of programs in the earliest era of TV--an effete and eccentric high-culture maven that was also a likely spoof of homosexuality in that less enlightened period. Here, Kovacs/Dovetonsils recites a short poem (Dovetonsils was usually introduced, as he is here, as a "poet laureate") that is referred to as a "clue"--most likely for the game play of the "Take a Good Look" episode it appeared in.

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.

TFTP Comedy: "Kovacs on the Corner" (1952)

Posted to Internet Archive

Ernie Kovacs was one of the great geniuses of early television comedy. He had a relatively brief but wide-ranging career--as a talk-show host, game-show panelist and host, morning-show host, and comedian--before dying prematurely in a car accident in 1962. This clip is a complete episode of a very short-lived Kovacs series called "Kovacs on the Corner", which was on NBC on weekday mornings for just three months in early-1952.

"Kovacs on the Corner" featured Kovacs in a slightly more laid-back style than that for which he is best known. Kovacs' pioneered a style of visual comedy on television that was not seen before or much since, utilizing sight gags, technical tricks unique to TV, and absurdism to create comedy. Here, in "Kovacs on the Corner", he is much more subtle and situational in his comedy. The "corner" of the title is a city neighborhood corner that comprises the show's sole set and on which Kovacs--assisted by singer and future wife Edie Adams--encounters different characters of the type one might meet on a street corner (policemen, street sweepers). Several musical numbers are featured, showing the easy facility with which early TV comedy shows crossed over into musical variety and back again.

Kovacs does show glimpses of his legendary humor here. A segment called "Swap Time" in which two ordinary people swap odd items (a torn bowler hat for an eight-pound block of ice) offers Kovacs the opportunity for some clever ad-libbing. An advertisement spoof in which Kovacs and Adams pitch "food" (holding a brown sack with the word "food" written on it) is a trenchant critique of TV commercials that foreshadows his later comedy. Although this episode is not typical of Kovacs' later comedy, it is both a good peek into his early career and a good example of a particular type of early musical/comedy variety show.