Ernie Kovacs
Ernie Kovacs was a pioneering American television comedian known for his innovative approach to visual comedy and his irreverent humor. Born to immigrant parents in 1919, he began his career in radio before transitioning to television in the late 1940s, where he gained fame with his unique characters such as Uncle Gruesome and Percy Dovetonsils. Kovacs became a national figure in 1952 after joining NBC, and he is particularly remembered for his groundbreaking "silent show" in 1957, which featured no dialogue and relied solely on visual storytelling. His creative use of special effects, along with unconventional techniques like breaking the fourth wall, expanded the possibilities of television comedy. Despite being more critically acclaimed than commercially successful, Kovacs left a lasting impact on the medium, influencing future generations of comedians and television producers. He married singer Edie Adams in 1954, and they remained together until his untimely death in a car accident in 1962. Kovacs's distinctive style and memorable skits, including those featuring the Nairobi Trio, have continued to resonate in the world of entertainment.
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Ernie Kovacs
- Born: January 23, 1919
- Birthplace: Trenton, New Jersey
- Died: January 13, 1962
- Place of death: Beverly Hills, California
Ernie Kovacs was one of the first performers to see the unique comedic possibilities in the television medium, and he used innovative video and photography techniques to develop popular, if unorthodox, programs during the 1950’s.
Ernie Kovacs was born to Mary Chebonick and Andrew J. Kovacs, a Hungarian-born policeman and bootlegger. In 1941, he got an announcing job with a Trenton, New Jersey, radio station and began displaying the wit and irreverence for which he would later become famous.
In 1949, Kovacs’s success as host of a cooking show on Philadelphia television station WPTZ inspired the station to give him a morning show, Three to Get Ready. In it, he created new characters, such as the creepy Uncle Gruesome and Percy Dovetonsils, an effeminate but heterosexual avant-garde poet. He was noted more for his visual imagination, and with the assistance of WPTZ engineer Karl Weger, he pioneered new visual tricks with special effects photography.
In 1952, Kovacs moved to national television with the NBC network. In September of 1954, he married Edie Adams, a singer on several of his shows. They had one child and remained married until his death. In January, 1957, Kovacs put on perhaps his most successful show, a thirty-minute program that used no dialogue and was performed in pantomime; it became known as “the silent show.”
Kovacs was always more a critical than a popular success. During the late 1950’s, he decided to abandon the frenetic world of television to become a writer and actor. His one novel, Zoomar (1957), a sardonic look at show business, amused readers but was considered a minor contribution to the literary world. Kovacs’s distinctive appearance—with his thick mustache and omnipresent cigar—limited his movie roles, though he gave a memorable performance as the cynical Cuban police captain Segura in the 1959 film adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1958 novel Our Man in Havana.
Impact
Kovacs expanded the visual range of the television studio with his use of video and photography and used numerous techniques previously considered off limits, including dialogue with the camera crew and audiences and forays into the studio corridor. He was perhaps best known for his skits involving the Nairobi Trio, which used a bit of performance art by depicting three people, dressed in formal clothing worn over gorilla suits, who play chamber music.
Bibliography
Rico, Diana. Kovacsland: Biography of Ernie Kovacs. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1990. A biography of Kovacs that also details his influence on subsequent television programming.
Walley, David. The Ernie Kovacs Phile. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. A revision and expansion of Kovacs’s 1975 biography, Nothing in Moderation.