‘The Best of Ernie Kovacs’ Offers a Primer for Offbeat TV Comedy

“The Best of Ernie Kovacs,” along with the recently released “Sid Caesar Collection,” is indispensable for anyone interested in the history of television comedy. Distributed by Kultur Video, this two-DVD set is a six-hour guided tour through Kovacsland, and a more surreal or cockeyed landscape was never broadcast over “the orthicon tube.”

Originally broadcast on PBS in 1977, “The Best of Ernie Kovacs” offers a generous sampling of more than 100 blackouts, musical diversions, character sketches and technological dalliances from the 1950s that changed the way unsuspecting viewers watched television. His influence could be seen on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” Chevy Chase acknowledged Kovacs upon receiving an Emmy for “Saturday Night Live.” “The Late Show With David Letterman” is a kindred spirit.

Kovacs, who died in a car wreck in 1962, was one of the fledgling medium’s pioneers. He turned staid television convention on its ear and satirized TV itself. In a series of spoofs on the then-popular TV western, he states, “There is currently a formula for success in the entertainment medium: that is, beat it to death if it succeeds.”

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Kovacs was a life force, Henri Bollinger, Kovacs’ publicist for the last three years of his life, recalled in a phone interview. “He was a man who literally lived life for the moment. That was both his secret as well as his charm. We hear of people who say we should live for the moment, but I don’t think there are too many in this world who are willing to actually do so.”

Kovacs, Bollinger mused, “didn’t talk about taking risks. He just did.”

Kovacs and crew created eye-boggling special effects that had never been attempted. Production meetings, he recalled, consisted of Kovacs conceiving a surreal gag and then asking his crew, “Tell me how I can do that.” To kill time during one show, he attached a kaleidoscope to an orange juice can and then taped the contraption to the camera.

One highlight of “The Best of Ernie Kovacs” is the complete 1961 broadcast “Eugene,” in which not a word is spoken. In one classic segment, Kovacs’ character tries to enjoy a gravity-challenged lunch. Milk, for example, pours not down, but to the right, missing his cup. In one of a series of bathtub gags, a beautiful woman is surprised in her tub by the emergence of a submarine periscope.

Kovacs had a macabre sense of humor, as witness the blood-soaked game show spoof “Whom Dunnit,” in which a panel must determine the identity of the mystery guest who has wounded an unfortunate studio audience member. This was strong stuff for the 1950s.

Kovacs, Bollinger said, was often hassled by the networks and was leery of sponsors.

“The sponsors would be up in arms about some of the things he did,” Bollinger said, laughing. “When he did his show for ABC, Ernie would stop taping if a sponsor came on the set. He said, ‘When the sponsor leaves, production will resume.’ The sponsor would have to sit in a room and watch [the proceedings] on a monitor.”

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This collection contains all of Kovacs’s signature bits and characters, such as poet Percy Dovetonsils and the gorilla-costumed Nairobi Trio. Kovacs, a noted music lover, conducts himself brilliantly in one episode devoted to what he called “illustrated music”; for example, a rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” synchronized to the movements of toy monkeys and other bizarre objects.

‘The Best of Ernie Kovacs” was previously released as a five-volume VHS box set. What this DVD edition brings to the party are a few noteworthy additions, including a clip from Kovacs’ 1959 quiz show, “Take a Good Look.”

In another memorable clip, Edie Adams, Kovacs’ wife, performs her definitive impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, singing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.”

“She was in my class at the Actors Studio,” Adams recalled in a phone interview. “When I saw her doing a sketch with Groucho Marx or Jack Benny, I thought she was brilliant and the funniest woman I had ever seen in my life. She liked [my impression], and we became friendly. She came to several of our parties. She came to one with Frank Sinatra. One of the guests looked at them and said, ‘What a wonderful piece of Americana.’

“But once I got to know her, I couldn’t do it anymore. In this business, you need the soul of a butterfly and the hide of a rhinoceros, and she just didn’t have that hide.”

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Kovacs, Adams said, “was always brilliant, always funny and ahead of his time.” And he helped transform the self-described “Juilliard girl” into a more confident comedic actress. In one sketch, Adams suffers a number of indignities as an opera singer appearing on an Italian TV station’s ill-fated inaugural broadcast.

“I would have been perfectly happy all my life if I sang a pretty song and wore a pretty dress,” she said. “But he would say, ‘Just do it,’ and that gave me confidence.”

Of all the bits in “The Best of Ernie Kovacs,” Adams professes a special fondness for “The Clutching Hand,” in which an off-screen Kovacs “directs” the action in a series of film clips, and for a blackout in which a duck in a carnival shooting gallery suddenly shoots back. “That’s so Kovacs,” she said, laughing.

* “The Best of Ernie Kovacs” retails for $50 on DVD and $40 on VHS. To order, call (800) 718-1300.