Today in Pop Culture: Ernie Kovacs Exits, Stage Left

By Jeffery X Martin

A rainy morning in Los Angeles. A man loses control of his Chevrolet Corvair and hits a telephone pole. He is thrown halfway out of the passenger side, dying almost instantly from the impact. The year is 1962, and the man is Ernie Kovacs.

Kovacs was the first comic to fully understand the power of television as a medium. Sure, Milton Berle had all the stars; Sid Caesar and his gang perfected sketch comedy as we know it. But Kovacs had a vision. He had a way of playing with the audience’s perceptions that nobody else could match.

He started off hosting daytime television shows. Those programs invariably got canceled because housewives in the markets he was broadcast in didn’t grasp his surreal sense of humor, his weird timing, and dry wit.

Kovacs was at his best when he combined music with visuals. He didn’t even need dialogue to make something funny. He could challenge and entertain an audience without saying a word. One of his most famous bits involved a musical group called the Nairobi Trio. If you think three musicians, all wearing garish gorilla masks while playing the song “Solfeggio” sounds mildly frightening, you’re thinkin’ right, because that bit is weird. It used to scare the crap out of my son when he was little, but he never forgot it. Trauma leaves scars like that.

Jerry Lewis was a huge star back then, and NBC offered him his own 90-minute long special. Lewis, being Lewis, only wanted to do an hour. Kovacs jumped at the chance to fill that abandoned half-hour, and he did so with style. He produced a show called Eugene, which was completely devoid of dialogue. A constant stream of visual humor, the show broke new ground in television comedy. Eugene proved you didn’t need a bunch of one-liners to make the audience laugh.

Kovacs influenced a lot of comedians, particularly ones who ended up hosting late-night shows. If you’ve ever seen Dave Letterman smash things for the hell of it, that’s directly influenced by Ernie Kovacs. People don’t talk about him much anymore. He seems too far removed from us, having died before most of the people reading this were born. But he’s still here, his legacy influencing comedians and artists all over the world.

Ernie Kovacs is buried in the Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills Cemetary. His tombstone reads, in part, “Nothing in moderation.”

Words to live by, kids. Words to live by.