Yeah, I know, it's The Sorrow And The Pity all over again.

Simps is posing and eating up the scenery because in a hastily thrown off comment made in the heat of the day,  I mixed up Ernie Kovacs death with, no doubt, some other show biz guy who died about the same time of a heart attack from eating your typical affluent American male diet of the early post-war years and smoking the cigars that Kovacs' wife peddled.  I wonder which show biz figure I'm mixing up his untimely death with.  But not very hard. 

If I did that whenever Simps gets a detail wrong I'd have torn out all my hair in melodramatic acting style.  Hey, maybe that's why Simps wears that stupid looking Groucho beret!  Anything for attention,  hey, Simps?  

Ernie Kovacs was an innovative comic actor and rather brilliant at coming up with sight gags based on TV and movie technology in the early years of TV.  But if he just kept repeating the same old stuff over and over again - Simps got upset when I pointed out that once the novelty wears off something that is funny the first time it ceases to be funny - he'd have become the kind of hack that so many successful comedians have become.   His death at the age of 42 may have ended what would have continued to be brilliant or it could have saved him from the typical later career of a comedian, going out of fashion due to a lack of innovation.  Being funny is hard work, so that leaves Simps out, right there.

I would never accuse Simps of stealing his material from the best.  He steals it from the ones who stole it from the best after the best were done with it.  He knows it once worked and is respectfully mounted in the imaginary museum of jokes which means it's a dead specimen of what once was alive, mounted for display and  to be treated with that thing most deadly to comedy, veneration.  

Edie Adams had a hand in that with her late husband's material, the gal knew how to buy it up and market it, she's probably most responsible for why those who never were alive to see Ernie Kovacs on live TV even heard of him.   But as they wear out his stuff, it's not funny anymore. Kovacs would have known that, or he'd have stopped being funny. 

Update:  This reminds me of a story the director Jonathan Miller once told of a production of The Merchant of Venice in which they got the just brilliant idea of hiring two actors from the Yiddish theater to play Shylock and Tubal.  The story goes that those two actors whose theater practiced a high degree of improvisation were driven nuts by having to give only the same set lines over and over on stage and one night in the infamous conspiracy scene where Shylock tells his friend his plans for revenge Tubal started out in accented dialect, "So, Shylock, I hear your daughter ran off and married a gentile.  What?  She couldn't find some nice Yiddischer boy to marry?" and they went on with an improvised comedy schtick for 20 minutes that had the audience howling with laughter.  According to Miller, they were told in notes not to do it again.  

Apparently Simps lost out on that tradition that understands that. Happens when you value status above art, as is so typical of the mid-brow New Yorker, the kind of person who the great comic actor Margaret Dumont parodied with such brilliant comic timing.  But, then, even Groucho apparently didn't appreciate her work as she set him up so well.  I thought she was great. 

Update 2:  Oh, and in case anyone is worried about it,  Unlike some, I've got a full head of very thick, very wavy silver gray hair.  I've never had to cover a bald spot up with a hat and would never wear a stupid looking beret.