The Barney-Buster postulate

This blog is starting to read like the obit page. But I must give this man his due.

When I auditioned for the role of the buffoon constable Dogberry in a college production of Much Ado About Nothing, the director gave me two words of direction: “Barney Fife.”

Don Knotts was a hero. Without him, The Andy Griffith Show would never have gotten out of the gate. Three's Company would never have survived the mid-series departures of three of its five stars. The Apple Dumpling Gang would never have ridden, nor ridden again. And the Nazis would have won the war. (“Das boot? Nien! Das Limpet!”)

Knotts's bread and butter, of course, were his nervous twitches and facial contortions, which overshadow the fact that he also had a fantastic stone face:











Which is why I've long felt that Knotts could have played Buster Keaton in a heartbeat. Keaton's deadpan was never a sign of passivity — it was containment. There were tremendous energies bottled up in him, trying to force their way out. And when Don Knotts held a straight face (in his case, usually under duress or extreme confusion) you could sense that he was trying very, very hard not to explode.

Both Keaton and Knotts were reactive comedians, though Knotts was usually overreactive. For him to play Keaton's style of contained reaction (done almost entirely with the eyes — see also Paul Giamatti in Sideways) would have been out of his oeuvre, but easily within his ability. That we never got to see Knotts play a tighter, more compressed style of comedy is certainly our loss.