My morning name for 11/28: The Nairobi Trio (TNT). An instant trip back to my teenage years, the 1950s, when my friends and I were wildly entertained by Ernie Kovacs’s TNT skits on television. Today I’ll give you something like the basic facts about TNT (which involves three people in gorilla suits moving in sync with the tune “Solfeggio”) and its creator. But then I’ll ask the question: why is TNT funny? And eventually the question: why does TNT make many people feel uneasy? (One writer has declared it to be “incredibly controversial” and “completely unacceptable by today’s standards”.)
On this last question, I’ll look ahead and suggest that the twinges would vanish if the skit were called, say, “The Solfeggio Players” — no Nairobi reference — and the gorilla suits were replaced by, say, chicken suits or frog suits. Observations that take us into facts about Africa and gorillas, tons of beliefs and attitudes from common culture, assorted tropes from popular culture, and written and filmed works of imaginative fiction (King Kong! Tarzan!). I’m not sure I can do justice to all of this, but I’ll try to at least skim the surface. Just not today.
The sketch comedy. From Wikipedia:
The Nairobi Trio was a sketch comedy skit that Ernie Kovacs performed many times for his TV shows. It combined several existing concepts and visuals in a novel and creative way.
People in gorilla suits had long been a comedy staple. The ploy of well-known, predictable music pieces gone awry had been practiced by artists as diverse as Stan Freberg, Spike Jones, and P. D. Q. Bach. The “slow burn” of one character being annoyed by another, resulting in eventual retaliation, was not new. But the combination of all of those ingredients, combined with impeccable timing, produced a unique and memorable result.
The skit was a live-action version of a child’s animatronic wind-up music box, performed to the tune “Solfeggio” by Robert Maxwell. According to an interview with Edie Adams in John Barbour’s 1982 documentary Ernie Kovacs: Television’s Original Genius, Barry Shear, Kovacs’s director at DuMont Television Network, brought the tune to Kovacs’s attention in 1954.
… “Solfeggio” became the permanent theme song for the sketch. The Nairobi Trio became so popular that M-G-M Records reissued the Maxwell record of “Solfeggio” as “Song of the Nairobi Trio” in 1957. Composer Maxwell recorded a new, lyrics-free version of the melody, now known as “Song of the Nairobi Trio,” in 1961, billing his ensemble as “The Fortune Tellers.” In 1966, as “Robert Maxwell, His Harp and Orchestra,” he recorded yet a third arrangement of the melody.
Of the three gorillas shown, all wearing hats, long coats, and white gloves, the middle gorilla, always played by Kovacs with a cigar, conducted the musicians with either a baton or a banana. To the viewer’s left stood a gorilla holding two oversized timpani mallets. The identity of this ape varied, but among Kovacs’s celebrity friends both Jack Lemmon and Frank Sinatra are known to have performed the character. Seated at a piano at screen right was a female simian, variously played by Barbara Loden, Jolene Brand, and Kovacs’s wife, Edie Adams, who robotically thumped her hands up and down on the keys.
Nearly all of the Nairobi Trio skits operated in the same fashion. As “Solfeggio” plays, the gorilla with the mallets repeatedly uses the center gorilla’s (Kovacs’s) head like a drum at the end of every phrase, punctuating the song’s sharp “ba-da-BUM” bongo riff. Every time this happens it brings a slightly changed and escalating response from the victim, who eventually tries to anticipate the mallet assaults and outwit the perpetrator. Ultimately staring him down, Kovacs, in the gorilla suit, is eventually distracted by the third gorilla, which allows the drummer to give him three final blows. The victimized gorilla then stands up and smashes a prop vase over the percussionist’s head.
You can watch an ABC Television Network videotape of Ernie Kovacs / The Nairobi Trio in “Solfeggio” on YouTube here.
Ernie Kovacs. From Wikipedia:
Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was an American comedian, actor, and writer.
Kovacs’s visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death.[In the early 1950s] At WPTZ [the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia], Kovacs began using the ad-libbed and experimental style that would become his reputation, including video effects, superimpositions, reverse polarities and scanning, and quick blackouts. He was also noted for abstraction and carefully timed non-sequitur gags and for allowing the fourth wall to be breached. … He frequently made use of accidents and happenstance, incorporating the unexpected into his shows.
… He also developed such routines as an all-gorilla version of Swan Lake, a poker game set to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the skit Silent Show, in which [his character] Eugene interacts with the world accompanied solely by music and sound effects, parodies of typical television commercials and movie genres, and various musical segments with everyday items (such as kitchen appliances or office equipment) moving in sync to music. A popular recurring skit was The Nairobi Trio …
It’s hard to convey EK’s manic intensity and his ability to spool out a constant stream of fresh comic ideas. The full Wikipedia entry gives some feel for both. Here I’ll just note that gorillas and cigars were frequent elements in his comedy.
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