The Overlooked Comedy That Deserved an Oscar, According to Conan O’Brien
We’re less than a week away from the 97th annual Academy Awards, and host Conan O’Brien has been doing tons of promotion for the big day, conducting interviews and starring in at least one short film in which he’s trapped in a loveless marriage with a giant Oscar statuette.
In one behind-the-scenes video posted to the Oscars’ official YouTube account, O’Brien name-checked some of his all-time favorite hosts (Johnny Carson and Bob Hope) and noted that one of his earliest memories of the Academy Awards was the time a streaker ran across the stage in 1974, teeing up a dick joke from David Niven.
Conan was also asked if he could give “any movie in history that was overlooked” by the Academy an Oscar, which would it be? Instead of singling out, say, one of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces, he suggested that he would honor a 1960s comedy starring Barney Fife himself, Don Knotts.
“It would The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” O’Brien explained. “It’s a movie starring Don Knotts. He’s live action, and he falls into the water and he becomes an animated fish. That old story. I just wish that that movie had gotten an Oscar, and I wish I could have handed that Oscar to Don Knotts as an animated fish.”
Conan may have been underselling the abject lunacy of The Incredible Mr. Limpet slightly. Not only does Knotts turn into a bespectacled cartoon fish, he then uses his newfound aquatic powers to help the U.S. Navy destroy Nazi submarines.
The opening credits playfully thanked the Department of Defense for allowing the film to divulge their “military secret.”
And we haven’t even mentioned that Mr. Limpet comes shockingly close to cheating on his wife with another fish — but don’t worry, at the end of the story (spoiler alert for a 60-year-old Don Knotts comedy), Mr. Limpet returns to his wife, but only briefly, and just to inform her that he’s a fish now and she needs to just get on with her life.
It may have seemed like Conan was kidding when he suggested retroactively giving an Oscar to the cartoon fish versus Nazi movie, but the former Late Night host was genuinely a big fan of Knotts. During an episode of WTF, he told Marc Maron all about how, during one of his very first trips to Los Angeles, he spotted Knotts eating a Cobb salad with a “very attractive woman” at the Four Seasons. And he flipped out. “Tom Cruise could have been at the next table and I wouldn’t have cared,” O’Brien recalled. “But it was Don Knotts. It’s Barney Fife. It’s Mr. Limpet.”
And when Knotts appeared as a guest on Late Night, Conan told the Andy Griffith Show star: “I think you made being nervous funnier than any other performer I’ve ever seen.”
Hopefully, Conan will end this year’s ceremony by wrestling an Oscar away from one the winners and taking it straight to Knotts’ grave.
