{"id":17080,"date":"2019-08-26T05:30:57","date_gmt":"2019-08-26T09:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=17080"},"modified":"2019-08-27T09:03:52","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T13:03:52","slug":"televisionary-josh-mills-discusses-tv-comedy-pioneer-ernie-kovacs-part-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2019\/08\/26\/televisionary-josh-mills-discusses-tv-comedy-pioneer-ernie-kovacs-part-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Televisionary: Josh Mills discusses TV Comedy Pioneer Ernie Kovacs (Part One)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"There was no precedent for the comedy of Ernie Kovacs. A pioneering figure in the early days of television, Kovacs brought a bizarre kind of comedy \u2013 mostly verbal, but with a visual component as well \u2013 to the black-and-white screens of the 1950s. A half century-plus later, his material is still bizarre. Recently, Omnivore Recordings worked with Josh Mills \u2013 son of Kovacs’ widow Edie Adams, a TV star in her own right \u2013 to reissue a 1970s-era compilation of some of Ernie Kovacs’ most memorable bits. The new CD (The Ernie Kovacs Album: Centennial Edition<\/i>) collects those and adds some additional material that Mills found while digging through the family archives. Though he never knew Kovacs \u2013 the TV star died many years before he was born \u2013 Mills is the foremost scholar\/expert on Kovacs’ legacy and body of work.<\/p>\n

Even though Ernie Kovacs has long had a reputation of visual comedy, these pieces \u2013 originally broadcast on television \u2013 work without the visual component, almost as if they were designed to be audio only. Did he consciously develop material that was designed to work with or without visuals, or was it just part of his particular genius that they worked that way?<\/b><\/p>\n

Very interesting question. Because while I don\u2019t know if he initially thought of these particular bits as stand-alone audio pieces, he had been on radio for years. So, there definitely is a part of him that was trying to tell a story without visuals. And I\u2019m sure there is some connection between the two. There were times in Ernie’s career when he was employed, then not employed, then employed, then not employed. And frequently, when he was not on television, he was on radio. We found a bunch of acetates of radio airchecks, and on those we can hear skits and things that he didn\u2019t do on television. So, I\u2019m sure there was a connection somewhere.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s such an off-the-wall character to these things that they almost feel like stream-of-consciousness. But to my mind, there\u2019s absolutely no way they could be. Because the stories hold together; you might not realize it until the end, but he knew where he was going with each one from the start, through the middle, to the end \u2026 even if we don\u2019t. Did he routine this stuff? Or did he ever do any sort of traditional standup comedy?<\/b><\/p>\n

No. In fact, my mom was always saying that Ernie was so out-there; his whole idea wasn\u2019t from Vaudeville or standup or performing onstage. Just theater stuff in school and things like that. But his was purely off-the-cuff, top-of-the-head type of wackiness. One of his quotes was that, \u201cSome of my best material is when it\u2019s 15 minutes before air and I\u2019ve gotta come up with something.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did think improvisationally or extemporaneously, almost in a jazz kind of way. Often it went very well and sometimes it went completely off the rails. And it\u2019s actually kind of fun when it doesn\u2019t<\/i> do well because, then, Ernie kind of makes these weird comments about stuff. He\u2019s incredibly relaxed for the pressure of whatever radio show or television show he was on right then. He\u2019s totally<\/i> relaxed. So, I think some of the stuff might have even been last minute kind of things that he threw together.<\/p>\n

His wordplay is often very sophisticated. It\u2019s hard to imagine that all of that stuff would have landed with audiences of the day. Some of it, I imagine, probably went over their head. I suppose they were just caught up in the sheer weirdness of it \u2026 ?<\/b><\/p>\n

For years, he was a columnist for a paper in his hometown of Trenton, New Jersey called The Trentonian.<\/i> So he definitely wrote well because he did it for many years even before he went on radio. I have poems that he wrote and things like that that are very erudite; they\u2019re super weird and dark. It\u2019s really weird stuff.<\/p>\n

We have scripts of Ernie\u2019s that will say, \u201cErnie improvises for 10 minutes,\u201d and then it\u2019ll go on to the next part. It was literally like, \u201cWe don\u2019t know what he\u2019s gonna say, but we have to type something up and this is what everybody\u2019s going to get. Ernie\u2019s just going to talk.\u201d So, I think that that kind of stuff either came from the top of his head or through his experience as a columnist at The Trentonian<\/i>.<\/p>\n

One of the first things I thought of when I was listening \u2013 especially that very first piece on the original album, the \u201cTom Swift\u201d piece \u2013 was Firesign Theater. Even though he predates them by many years, I wouldn\u2019t be at all surprised that he was an influence on them. Although, I\u2019ve never read specifically anywhere that that\u2019s the case. Do you know of anybody in any medium who has gone on record as saying that he influenced their work?<\/b><\/p>\n

Oh, yeah. I mean, specifically I don\u2019t know about the Firesign Theater. Specifically, Joel Hodgson from Mystery Science Theater 3000<\/i>. Terry Gilliam from Monty Python<\/i> has said some really nice things about Ernie. Paul Reubens’ Peewee Herman character, for sure. Kids in the Hall.<\/i><\/p>\n

And everybody asks about Letterman. Letterman says he was more of a fan of Steve Allen, but the writers for the original Late Night with David Letterman<\/i> were fans of Ernie\u2019s. I think that a lot of things like Stupid Dog Tricks and weird things like that got on the air because it was a very Ernie thing to do. The throwing the pencil at the camera and breaking the fourth wall, that was very Ernie. So, there\u2019s a ton of different people.<\/p>\n

When the first box set came out, I sent a mailing out to Jon Stewart and Jimmy Kimmel just so they had it. And I got a really nice note back from Jimmy Kimmel on his letterhead: \u201cI\u2019m a huge fan, and my grandfather and I used to watch him together. I have such great memories, and your mom was amazing.\u201d I thought that was really cool that he actually took the time and wrote me a personal handwritten letter.<\/p>\n

Click here to continue<\/a> \u2026<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was no precedent for the comedy of Ernie Kovacs. A pioneering figure in the early days of television, Kovacs brought a bizarre kind of comedy \u2013 mostly verbal, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17081,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,41,64],"tags":[791,3898,1622],"class_list":["post-17080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedy","category-interview","category-reissue","tag-ernie-kovacs","tag-josh-mills","tag-omnivore-recordings","cat-18-id","cat-41-id","cat-64-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17080"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17418,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17080\/revisions\/17418"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}