For Steve Allen, Tonight Starring Steve Allen was just a stepping stone to primetime and the culmination of a decade of hard work across radio and television. The reward was The Steve Allen Show, a Sunday evening variety show and NBC's challenge to CBS's top-rated The Ed Sullivan Show. With the workload for Allen's new program on top of the behemoth output required for Tonight, comedian and fellow television pioneer Ernie Kovacs signed on to share the load by hosting Tonight on Mondays and Tuesdays in 1956. Before and after his Tonight run, Kovacs was the star and creative impetus for several iterations of the skit-driven The Ernie Kovacs Show. Some of the more aural-friendly skits from The Ernie Kovacs Show are collected on The Ernie Kovacs Album released in 1976 on Columbia Records.
Ernie Kovacs seemingly never turned down an opportunity in television and, no matter the job, always found a way to play with the new medium and infuse into the work his unique brand of comedy. Dry, absurdist, satirical, irreverent, anarchic, experimental, subversive, antiestablishment aren't enough adjectives to pin down Ernie's comic energy. With his experimentation, he's more of a visual artist than his contemporaries and with his experience in radio, he's more of a an aural artist than his contemporaries. In short, where his fellow television pioneers were satisfied remaking vaudeville, Ernie Kovacs was a comic artist.
As a compilation of some of his best TV skits, The Ernie Kovacs Album can't help but only show half an art form. Although the experimentation is still present in some of the sound collages, the album favors character sketches and satirical bits. The most common subject of his comic criticism is television itself: both its advertising and its stodgy and already calcifying tropes and formats. Under his focus, Ernie captures the human element to get the most laughs whether through the natural or performed awkwardness that television inspires. The record is a dry delivery that multiplies the humor as the straight-faced absurdities layer upon themselves incessantly. "Tom Swift" in particular could go on forever and you really want it to because...will good ol' Tom lead his "feetsball" team (as Tom called it), down 210-to-nothing, to a comeback in the Big Game with only four seconds left to play?
Here is the discography surrounding Ernie Kovac's first album:
Hot Cakes & Sausage (1954 single with the Tony DeSimone Trio)
The Ernie Kovacs Album
The Ernie Kovacs Album (Centennial Edition) (2019 reissue)
"J. Walter Puppybreath / Albert Gridley"
The Ernie Kovacs Show
"Eugene"
"Kitchen Symphony"
Kovacs on the Corner Episode
"Hot Cakes & Sausage" by Ernie Kovacs with Tony DeSimone Trio
Pass the Headphones!!
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