I. Defining Post-modernism

A. A reaction against modernism (which itself was a reaction against classical realism). Modernism used disruptive aesthetic and narrative strategies in order to critique the social order.

CLIP #1: Entr’acte (Rene Clair, 1924): opening

B. Post-modernism takes these strategies and moves them from the abstract (high literature, avant-garde art movements) and popularizes them. Some critics of post-modernism say this gesture strips post-modernism of its political potential: that post-modernism is a commercial reduction of modernism. Other supporters of the post-modern project praise this popularization of modernist strategies as removing modernism’s elitism and moving critical art into the realm of everyday life.

CLIP #2: The Simpsons ("Comic book"): The Wonder Years, Treasure of the Sierra Madre

C. Ernie Kovacs engages in strategies that link him to the post-modern project: that is, he uses modernist strategies in a medium which is the most commercial in the history of culture.

Putterman produces Kovacs’ comedy in this light:

"And yet, contrary to all of the inevitable logic of history, along came Ernie Kovacs. From 1957 to 1962 Kovacs kept popping up on the networks in various unpredicatable formats and guises, like a guerrilla insurgent" (138).

"To Kovacs, ruyles were made to be examined, not followed" (138).

"The homogenizing safety of television genre rules was the prison that Kovacs’ free-form programs was trying to escape. Yet one of the lynchpins of his attack was to use a frightening, almost maniacal overkill of these mechanical repetitions so that the dehumanizing horror lurking beneath them came strongly into focus" (140).

II. Ernie Kovacs as a Post-modernist

1. Exposing the production circumstances of television itself

CLIP #4: Ernie Kovacs: Kovacs in the control room (too much sex and violence on TV)

2. Inserting himself into images of the past

CLIP #5: Ernie Kovacs: Kovacs appears in old movie footage

Compare with Mystery Science Theater

3. Play with perspective: forcing us to think about the world as multiply interpretable

CLIP #7: Ernie Kovacs: View from under the dancers

4. Referencing modernism itself

CLIP #9: Ernie Kovacs: Street Scene a la Bartok

Some would even say that television itself is the ultimate post-modern art form. This might suggest that Kovacs is more in keeping with television history that we might at first notice. That is, compare Kovacs’ parodies of the game show and the commercial with the ones we’ve seen in I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners.

CLIP #11: Ernie Kovacs: Dutch Masters commercials

5. Stripping High Culture of its privileged status

CLIP #12: Ernie Kovacs: gorilla Swan Lake

--> Putterman seems to want to privilege Kovacs’ modernist potential, seeing subsequent post-modernist television as a reduction of what Kovacs was up to: "But even more horrifying is the retrospective realization that today’s hip "visual" culture has managed to unlearn all of Kovacs’ analysis and now presents totally straight-faced informational versions of this technique, particularly in sports coverage" (140). Example: MTV

III. Kovacs and the History of Comedy

A. Sources

1. Early television itself

CLIP #14: Ernie Kovacs: The Nairobi Trio

2. Charles Chaplin and the distrust of sound

CLIP #15: City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931): opening, unveiling of the statue

Kovacs: The Eugene show (taking away television’s most important feature: the way it uses sound to hail the viewer redundantly and repetitively)

B. Kovacs’ contribution to comedy

Jazz comedy: small melodies played and replayed in slightly varied forms

The Mack the Knife skits

C. Kovacs’ influences (Putterman)

1. Laugh-In: blackout gags

2. The Muppets: the creating of a visual world around a musical number

3. David Letterman: the camera tilt, exposing the production of television

4. Just Say Julie: lousy set vs glossy music videos

5. Cable TV to us what local TV was to the 1950s

Click Here to Return to the MTA 400 ("The History of Television") Syllabus

This page was last updated on January 8, 2001

Questions or comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman