The World’s First YouTube Style Comedian Never Saw the Channel
The pioneer of humor — endemic on YouTube, Vines and TikTok
The world’s first YouTube style comedian died long before the parents of the founders and even the stars of the channel imagined their offspring. He never heard of YouTube, never saw it, but he lived it long ago. Who am I talking about? Ernie Kovacs.
Kovacs was a television comedian in the early days of the medium. This was a time when screens were small and slowly got bigger. TV’s all over America received the black and white signal transmitted over the air. His program, like most at the time, was live.
Television in those days was often just radio with pictures. Sitcoms and dramas actually left radio or continued simultaneously on radio and also started on television. They used the same style only adding a visual medium to the story lines. If you just closed your eyes, you could have a good understanding of what was happening despite seeing nothing. This is also what made I Love Lucy so unique because Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance used a lot of visual humor that would not work on radio. (Think back to the famous sketch on the candy assembly line.)
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Kovacs went another step because he chose to explore the limits of the live television medium in unique ways that would not be matched until YouTube. Likewise early, amateur YouTubers similarly explored the medium and pushed its limits in a unique style. Many may not even know the name or the works of this pioneer of their style of comedy.
Using short visual silent comedy skits lasting seconds he chose material that could only work in a visual medium. Granted he also had longer bits that would have done better on radio such as Mr. Answer Man which was a comedy answer skit. Kovacs’ visual bits became his trademark style.
Specifically, one part of his show used the song Mack the Knife in, what sounds like, Yiddish (I am guessing, I don’t speak that language) as a soundtrack for different visual comedy skits fading in and then out, all done live on the air.
You can see them today on YouTube or purchase them online as a series of videos originally produced for WTTW in Chicago in 1977 and aired on PBS .
The nature of his comedy, which for the most part he wrote himself, was visual surprise.
Little skits like the wall painting of the skier going downhill, who actually skis down hill and breaks through the frame of the painting to continue along the wall to the floor. The painting of the tree in Spring in which leaves fall off when Autumn arrives in the real world. The woman bathing and the camera pans to show her feet sticking out the end of the tub.
However, what made Kovacs different is he then explores the video medium to its limits. There is the man who is trying to pour a glass of milk from a thermos only to see the milk come out at an angle and spill onto the table and then the floor.
The trick to the skit was to tilt the set and the camera so he appeared to be sitting upright but was at an angle, hence the bizarre milk flow on live TV.
Another featured him smoking a cigar underwater. (This is one of those do not try this at home skits.) Where underwater he takes a puff of his cigar and smoke comes out of his mouth. Actually, it is my understanding Kovacs used milk which gave a great image of cigar smoke in this stunt.
He also perfected the use of inanimate objects and music background to make it appear that water faucets, cake mixers, coffee pots and other kitchen appliances could operate to the sounds of music symphony. He did the same with office furniture and devices like a file cabinet, pencil sharpener, typewriter and water cooler. Granted Disney created this style in animation movies, but this was live from a New York TV studio.
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When you compare his work to the pioneers on YouTube such as Ryan Higa and his team — a group of some of the most brilliant visual comedians, you see just how much amazing talent blossomed on YouTube in such a Kovacesque style. I do not know if any of today’s video comedians ever knew the work of Kovacs at all.
Another pioneer YouTuber, Kevin Nalty — aka Nalts — expanded the video medium as well especially with one of the most Kovacesque comedy bits: in an interview with himself as a boastful artist, he discovers at the end of the video that the off camera interviewer is also himself who accuses him of arrogance for interviewing himself. Angrily, he storms off the set. It is a master example of the strength of the medium. I do not see how that would have worked elsewhere.
The list of great comedians and comedy exploded with the creation of Vines that then became a new medium of comedy and led to TikTok. Even shorter than YouTube videos they matched the length of the little skits that Kovacs presented with the Yiddish Mack the Knife soundtrack. They also allowed for a form of humor that expanded beyond the vision of network programming executives
Kovacs would have celebrated this medium because essentially his comedy, using the studio equipment of 1950’s television was the same style that later appeared on YouTube and the evolving platforms: a camera, talent, imagination and a low budget.
I heard many say over the years that Kovacs was a man ahead of his time. When you look at this work in light of the great talent on video today, you realize that in fact he was. He was a YouTuber long before the channel existed, long before the founders and many of the great video comedians were even born.
Ernie Kovacs died in 1962. According to published reports, an avid smoker, it appeared that he lost control of his car trying to light a cigar. He was just ten days shy of his 43rd Birthday.
It is 58 years later and during that time, Kovacs’ style comedy later entertained on shows like Laugh-in, David Allen and Monty Python. Then it fell away to a new more political and intellectual style pioneered by programs like Saturday Night Live. It now flourishes through creative talent who, like Kovacs, discovered the power of exploring to the limits of the medium beginning with little money and much imagination.
