Don Knotts and Andy Griffith Hated Sitcoms
Don Knotts made the Emmy Award for Supporting Funny Guy his personal trophy during the 1960s, going five-for-five to cement The Andy Griffith Show’s Barney Fife as one of the greatest sitcom characters of all time. But it’s a distinction Knotts might not have appreciated — he and Andy Griffith hated sitcoms.
“Andy and I have a pet hate — situation comedy,” Knotts told The Oregonian, as reported by MeTV. “So we try to imitate real people and forget the plot as much as possible.”
How can two of the greatest sitcom stars hate situation comedy? Knotts explained — sort of. “What we try to do is make use of those conversational habits people have,” he said. “Like Barney telling a joke, hearing laughter and then telling the joke over again. You’ve seen people do that. It’s terrible, but some can’t help it after hearing the laughter — it’s a compulsion and it’s funny.”
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Aha. So Don Knotts didn’t hate situation comedies, as many of the greatest sitcoms feature a style just like the one Knotts described. Instead, Knotts stuck his nose up when he smelled comedy based on outrageous situations — Lucy and Ethel working the chocolate conveyor belt on I Love Lucy or Urkel breaking out the transformation chamber on Family Matters or another case of mistaken identity on Frasier.
Those kinds of storylines were rare on The Andy Griffith Show, a comic meditation on small-town life in which a plot might center around the local drugstore hiring a lady pharmacist or Aunt Bee going away for a long weekend. The show was long on character, short of zany plot machinations.
As for Barney? “He thought he was a good cop,” Knotts told the Archive of American Television. “Thought he was the best cop in the world, I guess. (But) apparently not too effective.”
Essentially, Barney was a boy trapped in a deputy's body. “If you watch kids, you’ll see them react immediately. They don’t hide anything,” Knotts told the Oregonian. “The same thing happens with Barney. He expresses himself right there. If anything, he overdoes it."
Fife’s character was so effective that Griffith made a conscious choice to dial back Andy Taylor’s exaggerated Southern accent, deciding that he wasn’t the funny guy after all. “It was Barney who was the funny guy and the other characters,” Knotts explained. “So he said, ‘My job is to play straight.’ That’s what he did. He pulled the character way down and just played him as a normal guy.”
A normal guy finding the comedy in normal situations.
