Percy Dovetonsils

Video Find of the Day

The only video out there I could find of Percival Dovetonsils, one of my great poetry heroes. I hope it isn't pulled too soon.

The date is somewhere during the Kennedy administration. I was 10 or 11, allowed to stay up late precisely until the end of the Ernie Kovacs show. I had already tried writing poetry before seeing this. Watching Dovetonsils, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I was being WAY too serious.

Ernie Kovacs as Percy Dovetonsils

Timing is Everything

In the role of Percy Dovetonsils, back in the late 50s and early 60s, Ernie Kovacs inspired some of my past bad poesizing. Percy's the one on the top, second from the left in the montage below. Today's Video Find deals with the role depicted below that one.


Ernie Kovacs created the Nairobi Trio after hearing the song Solfeggio by Robert Maxwell. Solfeggio basically means Sol Fa. It's a song about singing scales. Kovacs turned it into a recurring gag, based on an image of mechanical monkeys, evolved into mechanical men-in-gorilla-suits. It is the one of the greatest examples of the slow burn. I think the song was performed by the Ray Charles Singers. Kovacs was always the one in the middle.

My Early Humor(s)

As you all should know, the word humor comes from the ancient Greek word for bodily fluids. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. That is why they allowed that different people could have different bodily fluids, or that any one person might have several bodily fluids at once, and that all that was alright.

At first, the Greeks recognized seven basic kinds of humors, or bodily fluids, namely Sanguine (blood), Choleric (yellow bile), Phlegmatic (phlegm), Melancholic (black bile), Pissy (urine), Spunky (jizm), and Mammary (milk). But right from the start political correctness reared its ugly butt, and ruled that the last two were too gender-specific, and had to be replaced by Emissions. That was subsumed into Pissy, even though everyone but the Germans knew Pissy and Spunky were totally unrelated. Yes, they did too have Germans back then. The Greeks called them mounts.

Finally, Pissy was eliminated altogether by the post-Socratic theorists, who said Piss is yellow, Cholera is yellow -- so they're the same, see? Yeah, and like Bush is shitty, and my shit is shitty -- so Bush comes out of my ass, see? I'll talk more about theory, and theorists, and how much I love theory and theorists, later. Right now I'm talking about humor(s) (see title).
Here is a rare photo of my emotional state at age four. As you can see, my Father was still asserting that our family would never in a million years own a television, or wake up out of the Dark Ages, or stop beating me bloody and leaving me in ditches. My main humor at this age is the Phlegm humor. I am cold and moist, sluggish and pallid.

This is a snapshot of my emotional state just one year later. To the untrained eye there is virtually no change, except that I have now divided into a fat man and a weird black cat. But if you look very closely you will see that the Army-McCarthy Hearings have come and gone in the background , and my Father got a TV so he could scream at McCarthy in real-time. Having a TV and watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings changed my main humor to Sanguine. I became hot and moist, amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, and irresponsible. Still moist, but a hot moist. I sought out girls to play "house" with. These were generally imaginary girls, as the nearest house with a real girl in it was a mile away, at the time.

As I began school we moved closer to civilization and I encountered actual other humans and their spawn. Among these were religious bigots. I have since come to understand that Christian religious bigots fall neatly into two distinct classes, and that this is all you need to know about them. The two classes consist of 1) Puritans and their ilk, who don't want anyone to laugh, because amusement springs from the Devil, and 2) Evangelicals and their ilk, who expect everyone to have a big fuckin smiley face and laugh and be joyous because "Haven't you heard the Good News? Christ is here!" -- Halle-fuckin-lujah.

My attitude was and is the pagan attitude of I'll laugh when the Laugh God moves me to laugh and I won't laugh when the Laugh God wants a smoke break. Get your religions off my bodily fluids.

A study of my early humor(s) is not complete without a reference to the man pictured below, Percy Dovetonsils.

This man is wearing funny glasses to view the world. That does not mean he does not see the world. It means he sees the world through funny glasses, as opposed to rose-colored glasses, say. Metaphorically, he uses humor to see and understand reality, get it?

I want to end this post on that note, combined, or amalgamated, with this additional one, said by some guy played by Jack Nicholson, which I would like to place with the first note in a sack, so they can fight each other and roll around the floor for my entertainment: "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."