Jonathan Winters and His Purple Owl

If you watch TV, and we don't necessarily recommend this as a general thing, you've probably already become acquainted with Jonathan Winters, a splendid young comic with a love of the ridiculous and an incredible arsenal of voices and vocal sound effects.

Jonathan, who spent a good deal of the past summer filling in for George Gobel on a program called And Here's The Show, boasts a career which closely parallels Gobel's own. Both Gobel and Winters won initial recognition from other performers, both have a flair for whimsy and commendable dislike of the simple "gag" -- the kind that writers string together for "machine gun" delivery -- and both got their first real big push as summer replacements. However, there's such a vast difference in the styles of the two geniuses, a word we can use advisedly, that Mr. Winters need have no fear of being put down as "another George Gobel."

Winters' entry into the big time reads more like a poorly planned exit. Scraping around from one New York booking agency to another in '53, playing to the lousiest audiences any comic can get -- a series of cynical, ulcer-ridden, cigar-chomping booking agents -- he finally got the big call: "Winters, I think I got just the spot for you on Studio One." Jonathan, who had neither the time nor the money to be sitting around watching TV, wasn't familiar with Studio One, but imagined a variety show that would capitalize on one or more of his comic routines. In order to sharpen up the right sketch he asked if that particular night the show would have any special theme, and was informed that it had something to do with submarines. Having no particular submarine bits ready, and dismissing his own natural misgivings about the idea of building a variety show around same, he set to work preparing a spanking new comic discourse that would fit.

Before reporting for work he had assembled a fiendishly clever routine called "The U-365." Like all of Jonathan's masterpieces, this one has about four characters with distinctively different voices, and an array of complementing noises that would challenge a completely equipped sound effects studio, not to mention one human larnyx.

The skit opens with Commander Hans Winkler (pronounced Vinkler) of the German Navy peering through his periscope while the submarine cruises along making chubba-chubba-chubba noises. The Commander surveys the scene and announces matter-of-factly, "Vell, it zhure is a lousy day for zinking ships!" There follows a zany sequence of events ranging from members of the crew being summarily executed for evidences of homesickness, to the Commander's careful "zinking" of one of his own ships, an oversight which is reported to him by an obsequious member of the crew in this fashion: "Commander, I hate to bother you, but at vas da Horst Wessel." The entire routine is punctuated by the Commander's repeated reminder to the crew members to "Lay off dat rye bread!"

Winters showed up at CBS and did his original piece for the director of the show, who was fractured by the rendition, and similarly amused by Winters misunderstanding of the nature of his own assignment. Studio One, it was patiently explained, is not a variety show, and furthermore Winters was not to be on the show proper, anyway. All he had to do was come on during the commercial dressed up like Santa Claus and bellow, "Ho, ho, ho! You can be sure if it's Westinghouse!"

Jonathan looks back on the whole episode philosophically. "It's not many a performer who can say they made their TV debut playing opposite a big name star like Betty Furness."

The choice of Jonathan as a commercialized stand-in for Father Christmas wasn't so far fetched. He's a hefty young man with that apple-cheeked look that is so closely identified with the old reindeer wrangler. There's a really uncanny resemblance to a young Babe Ruth, too. As far as is known, Winters has never tried to make use of these similarities for check-passing purposes.

Winters tried out for the Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts program during a period when Garry Moore was pinch hitting for Artha. Winters didn't win that evening, but Moore, whose taste is perhaps a little more cultivated than the folks who compose an average television studio audience, was smitten with Winters' bizarre routines and signed him for twenty guest appearances on his own show.

That sort of approbation has a way of being rather contagious, and led to acceptance on other fronts. The Blue Angel and Le Ruban Bleu, two of New (concluded on page 24) Jonathan Winters (continued from page 15) York's "smahtest" nighteries, put in bids for his services, and he subsequently did stints at both. Along the way he also found time to replace Orson Bean, another member of the Brooks Brothers school of low pressure humor, in John Murray Anderson's last Broadway revue, Almanac.

All of these hilarious doings had their start with Jonathan's free-lance cartooning while he was working as a commercial artist in the old home town, Dayton. The best thing about these cartoons was Jonathan's personal readings of the punch lines. Unfortunately, no publishers were at that time planning any cartoon books to be accompanied by a phonograph record album of the artist's personally delivered captions.

Divorcing the art work from the gags and expanding the latter into brief monologues, Jonathan made his debut as a comic on a local theatre's amateur show. He won a wrist watch and a chance as a disc jockey on Dayton radio station WING.

Virtually all of Winters' material is Winters-written. Turning out his own vignettes is second nature to the ex-cartoonist, and he frequently extemporizes entire routines for the benefit of friends at a party, or backstage at a supper club to amuse the band during breaks. His fantastic facility at this sort of thing is demonstrated by his taking a random subject, suggested by someone in the crowd, and working it immediately into a full blown comic skit. In just this manner, many items in his permanent repertoire were born.

Radio is one medium which is not too well suited to Winters' special brand of nonsense. Audiences are very skeptical and when Jonathan would work in sound effects such as the very realistic noise that a boa constrictor might make as it swallowed a human being, people at home tended to yawn and figure that the station probably had a boa constrictor on the premises swallowing some expendable employee. Other Winters-made noises (car doors, machine guns, mortar fire, horses, howling dogs, and a variety of other contraptions and wildlife) were even more easily explained away by the unseeing audience, though he disdains the use of any props or sound effects assistance.

An offer to take all of this vocal equipment to a TV station in Columbus, WBNS-TV, where the skeptics could see just where all these voices and noises originated, was hastily accepted.

New York, of course, offered the ultimate challenge and in January of '53 the entire menagerie, cast, and mechanical rigamarole that are housed in the T-Zone of Jonathan Winters descended upon the big city and took lodging in an inexpensive theatrical hotel, where the guests would be unlikely to complain about even his efforts to perfect a realistic A-Bomb Sound.

Jonathan's stints as a guest artiste on Steve Allen's Tonight, Jack Parr's recently deceased Morning Show, The Garry Moore Show, Omnibus, and several of NBC's spectaculars won him a long term contract with the National Broadcasting Company last February, which assures his fans more regular portions of his efforts. NBC execs indicate a show of his own will become a reality in the not too distant future.

The unusual vignettes which have won him such attention are very carefully balanced flights of satire and whimsy, which include just enough absurdity and strokes of the macabre to be consistently delightful. His famous and most frequently repeated bit, called "The Cut Rate Pet Shop," goes all out for nonsense, as there is nothing particularly amusing about the idea of a pet shop per se. On the other hand, his satire on movies about the Marine Corps is a pretty realistic recreation of a number of standard armed forces types. Jonathan knows, from a long stretch in the Marines during W.W. II. that you can stick pretty close to the facts about military life and still be very, very funny.

The Marine Corps bit includes such stereotypes as the officious young lieutenant who announces, after briefing his men on a landing operation. "I had hoped to go with you, but they need me here. However I shall be observing from 5000 yards through heavy lenses;" an incredibly gruff sergeant with a hideous sense of humor ("Well, you heard what he said, we gotta get in on that island and wipe out the Japs, the monkeys, the coconuts, and the Seabees -- Yaha, ha ha!!"); a Colonel who is suffering from severe gastric disturbances; a meek mannered company clerk; a farm boy who insists on playing that "gawdawful geetar;" and a candidly frightened wise guy who responds to the top sergeant's inquiry as to whether "You sick or sumthin?" with "Man, I been sick since the day I knowed I was drafted." All of these, a few more, and the noises of a troopship creaking on a glassy sea, a guitar twanging, gates being lowered, LST's being launched, machine gun fire, grenades exploding, and mortar shells whistling through the air, are fitted into a six-minute one-man sketch. It would be a pretty remarkable performance even if it weren't killingly funny, which it is.

Jonathan's other celebrated discourses include a recreation of Custer's Last Stand in which the general is consistently hampered in his efforts to save his group by a nagging old lady who keeps interrupting the preparations for the battle with "Gineral, Gineral, what are they going to do to us?" The "Gineral's" last words for posterity are, "Get that woman away from me!"

In "The Gasoline Station" an unbelievably eager-to-please novice attendant suffers a series of major injuries from a new car driven by a lady beginner. The battered and bashed employee continues to employ his best service-with-a-smile manners after successively being run over, having his head caught under the hood, his fingers caught in the "nice new fangled electric windows you got here, lady ... Ouch!" and finally seeing the station demolished by the departing customer.

Some of Jonathan's best bits are sheer pantomime save for the sound effects department. He does a great thing concerning the tribulations of a bungling baseball pitcher named Elmo Sugg, and another on the slow-motion demonstration of correct golfing technique, which ends hideously as the pro manages to hit himself in the leg with the imaginary driver.

Jonathan Winters, his wife and child, live in suburban Westchester County, New York. He collects beer steins.

1 "I don't mean to be corny," says the cigar smoking customer in Jonathan Winters' Cut Rate Pet Shop routine, "but how much is that doggy in the window?"

2 "Why, that dog'll run yuh a dollar," says the proprietor. "Yes, sir, just a dollar. You see, that dog ain't got no claws on his front paws. That makes him a sort of conversation piece though."

3 "How 'bout a owl? Wouldn't know that was a owl would ya? Ain't got no feathers on him. They flew him in by plane and all his feathers blowed off."

4 "I can give you feathers for him ... oh, yeah ... there's purple and green and yellow. You just paste 'em on his body."

5 "There, again, you got yourself a conversation piece. Lot's of times when folks are over, and they're settin' around, and the conversation's dying or it's dead, you can say, "Look at my purple owl!"

6 "Oh, don't ... don't put your finger in that bowl! Oh, oh, you put your finger in the bowl. Took your finger off, didn't it? Didn't you see that sign that says 'Piranha'? That's them little South American fish. They'll eat anything."

7 "Yep, we never have to feed that fish. There's always some clown like you puttin' his finger in the bowl. Umboy, I bet that smarts, don't it? Ooowee! Took it clean off, didn't he?"

8 "Say, I got a thing over here, a kangaroo. He'll run yuh ten dollars and fifty cents. Yep, that's what this is, a cut rate pet shop. 'Course, you got to lean him against somethin'."

9 "I don't know whether you ever noticed, but most of 'em sit back on their tails. This one fell off a flat car during shipping an' broke his tail, so you gotta lean him against somethin'."

10 "Ooowee, boy, I'll bet that finger smarts. Nasty. Well, say, I know you're feelin' bad and that thing's killin' yuh, but I've got a boa constrictor here. I'll give you that--and a dozen white rats."

11 "Wanna see it? Here, I'll just let it out and ... oh, oh, watch out! ... Aw, pshaw! Oh, Maw, Maw ... that dang snake up and swallowed one of the customers again."