Photo: Ediad Productions
284 pgs. | $34.99 Paperback
Ernie Kovacs was a pioneer of early television and an influence on so many other comedians that it’s impossible to list them all (if you’re interested, the Wikipedia made a stab at it). Granting his importance, it’s still hard to describe exactly what made him so memorable to someone not already familiar with his work, because Kovacs brought the chaos to every situation (offscreen as well as on if you believe some of the stories about him). He also embodied the spirit of an earlier age (he worked from the 1940s until his premature death in 1962) so some of his humor is likely to offend today (case in point: The Nairobi Trio).
If you don’t know who Kovacs was, I recommend googling his name and watching some of the many clips available on YouTube and elsewhere, because a description of anyone’s art can never replace the art itself. If you’re already familiar with his work, feel free to proceed. I’m not going to defend the indefensible, but I do think it’s possible to both grant Kovacs his place as an innovative entertainer and to recognize that times have changed. That’s both for better and for worse* and some of his sketches could be cited today as textbook examples of how what was culturally acceptable 60 years ago hits quite differently today.
Ernie in Kovacsland: Writings, Drawings, and Photographs From Television’s Original Genius, compiled and edited by Josh Mills, Ben Model, and Pat Thomas, takes its name from the 1951 TV series hosted by Kovacs and does a great job capturing his anarchic spirit in print. It’s more of a collage than either a graphic novel or a conventional biography and draws heavily on the materials saved by Kovacs’ second wife, Edie Adams (not just the Muriel Cigar lady, she had a long and distinguished career in show business herself; she was also Josh Mills’ mother). There’s a few newly-written essays from the likes of Ann Magnuson and the editors of this volume, but it’s mostly a collection of stuff, to use the technical term, from Kovacs’ day—news clippings, vintage photos, sheet music, magazine articles, scripts, budget sheets for his TV shows—and they’re presented with the kind of irreverent visual panache that Kovacs himself would have loved.
This volume is described by the publisher Fantagraphics as a “coffee table book,” which no doubt would have made its subject guffaw or choke on his trademark cigar or both. Lest you be expecting something solemn and reverential, the bright bold yellow chosen as the predominant background color in this collection will quickly disabuse you of such notions and has the added benefit of making the many black and white materials included pop right off the page. It’s a celebration of Kovacs’ life and work and takes an almost uniformly positive toward both topics: this is a book meant for fans to enjoy, not a thorough consideration of Kovacs’ life or an analysis of his comedic style. Another plus: as an archival source it will also delight anyone with an interest in early television or the history of comedy. | Sarah Boslaugh
* One example of what (in my opinion) we’ve lost—the expectation that an average TV viewer would be acquainted with classical music and highbrow literature, without which some of his funniest bits fall flat.
Ernie in Kovacsland is published by Fantagraphics.
