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You didn't have to live in the 1950's to once enjoy the brilliant and innovative material of Ernie Kovacs on TV. I'm a product of the 70's and 80's, but I remember growing up seeing reruns of Ernie Kovacs' old shows on PBS around 1977 when his widow, Edie Adams, repackaged some of his best work into a brief multi-part series called "The Best of Ernie Kovacs." You can still get that series on a DVD box set now, but other than a brief re-running of that same basic material on Comedy Central in the 90's (or Comedy Channel back then), you won't find any Ernie Kovacs reruns anywhere on TV today. Why that's the case is almost inexplicable when you consider how many comedians and future TV shows he influenced.

Just what was it that made Kovacs so innovative? Well, he was the first TV comedian to bring a sense of the surreal to network television back when it might have been considered avant-garde. And you could almost argue that some of Kovacs' material was much too sophisticated for network TV despite network execs having the guts in those days to keep him going in various incarnations of his shows.

Even from his earliest days on TV in the late 40's-early 50's when he had a local show on an NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, he employed a lot of creative ingenuity with the primitive TV equipment of the day to create some surrealistic special effects. A lot of these techniques he'd refine in the coming decade when he started hosting shows directly on NBC and when he'd have a slightly bigger budget. Many of those techniques he refined included blackout sketches, superimpositions and anything else he could drum up to turn the technical side of television upside-down. He also was one of the first people on TV to bring a sense of improvisation to sketches that ultimately led to funnier situations.

His approach behind doing a comedy sketch was also quite different from the usual, sometimes creating a topic that might be a little bit taboo for the times. This is where "Saturday Night Live" managed to learn from Kovacs and still employs the same procedure today. Back in the 50's or early 60's, if you had a sketch involving an insinuation of a sexual situation or someone inciting violence (something Kovacs would explore in his final TV specials), it turned some people off. In fact, most of his shows were very low-rated and he only survived on TV because the suits knew he was doing something different that would probably change the way we see broadcasting.

They were right, because just about every aspect of sketch comedy today employs techniques Kovacs created. "Saturday Night Live" still has the stamp of Kovacs written all over it. David Letterman has long been accused of copying the same routines Kovacs did. For a brief time, Kovacs even hosted "The Tonight Show" in-between the time Steve Allen left and while waiting for Jack Paar to come in. On that show, Kovacs continued his trend of also breaking the fourth wall where all the cameramen, crew and the audience would be involved in some kind of comedy bit. All of this was done while Kovacs would concoct offbeat (or even off-the-cuff) situations not unlike what Letterman's been doing for years. You can see the same influence on Conan O'Brien who does his show probably in the same studio where Kovacs once hosted some of his shows at NBC.

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Most fans of Kovacs' material, though, will tell you that while his older material is great, a group of early 60's specials he did for ABC (all shot on black and white video) were his highest achievements. These were his last shows before tragically dying in a car accident in January of 1962. And this is the material that was compiled for the PBS specials in the 70's and usually rerun over the years. However, it's amazing that people can see these, because a number of the videoed specials were erased along with some of his earliest kinescopes from the early 50's. When Kovacs' widow, Edie Adams, found out that was happening back in the mid 1970's, she bought up the rights to the remaining material and restored an important part of TV history.

Undoubtedly Edie Adams (who's still living and always performed with Kovacs on his old shows) isn't happy now when you realize a whole generation has gone by who probably hasn't even seen one single Kovacs show since Comedy Central gave the reruns the boot over a decade ago. Perhaps the reruns were also victims of low ratings and fell to the vagaries of television giving the axe to anything that doesn't register at least a modest profit for a particular network.

As I mentioned earlier, though, you can acquire that old PBS compilation of Kovacs' best work on DVD--and it appears that it'll never go out of print. If it does, something isn't right when one of the most innovative TV comedians of all time gets completely eliminated from history.

Don't kid yourselves, though: You need to be in the right frame of mind and be able to get into a different frame of mind when watching Kovacs' blackout sketches, mime work (his "Eugene" character is classic) and b&w psychedelic extravaganzas that look like one giant retro dreamscape. His work is a real foray into the subconscious mind where the surreal is wide awake and making sense while perhaps initially not making any sense.

Hopefully Adams can find some inroads to getting his old shows back on TV again for a new generation to discover. When today's generations watch his old shows, they'll likely think to themselves that they seem so modern when they were done almost fifty years ago as of this writing. It's a lot of fun, too, to pick out all the things on his shows that were copied years later by Monty Python, "SNL", Letterman, the old 60's classic "Laugh In" and countless other shows to this day that employ sketch comedy...

Link to the "Best of Ernie Kovacs DVD"...

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Ernie-Kovacs/dp/B000056B07/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1221691480&sr=1-1




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