Television: On the Cob

The pone is the lowest form of humor.

But in five short weeks, country corn sent CBS’s The Beverly Hillbillies to the top of Old Smoky in Nielsen ratings. Its climb was one of the swiftest in the history of television. Scheduled opposite the supposedly invincible Perry Como, it shot him daid.

Plow Tomorrow. Como tumbled before a program that is dedicated to finding out how many times the same joke can be repeated. Mountaineer Jed Clampett and his family, worth $25 million because oil was found in their swamp back in the Ozarks, have moved to Beverly Hills to live among the polychrome celebrities of show biz. Pa bought a house built by John Barrymore, and the place is easily large enough to be mistaken for a university. Pa takes an appreciative look at the smooth and gorgeous sweep of lawn and says, “Fine, we’ll commence plowing tomorrow.”

“But this is Beverly Hills!” says a shocked Angeleno banker.

“Dirt is dirt,” says Pa.

Thin Hog. First things first: got to find water. Pa is in the habit of drilling wells with a shotgun. First he walks the lawn with a forked stick. The stick goes crazy because the lawn has a buried sprinkler grid. Pa fires a load into the sod just as the gardener turns on the system. “I ain’t never missed yet,” crows Pa. Granny peers into the deep freeze and complains that all the vittles is froze. “People ought to know better’n to store food up against a north wall,” says Pa, who has all the good lines.

Jowls & Shanks. Pa is nicely played by Buddy Ebsen, 54, the ex-hoofer who last scored on TV as George Russell, constant companion of Davy Crockett. Pa has an oafishly agreeable young cousin named Jethro, who is a l’il weak-minded and has spent a dozen years in the fifth grade at Oxford. Oxford where? No one wonders except the thick-witted Hollywood types who want to know if Jethro went to Eton as a boy. “If I know Jethro, he went to eatin’ when he was a baby,” says Pa. Jethro is played by Max Baer Jr., the suitably muscled son of the onetime heavyweight champion.

Old steel-rimmed-glasses granny (Irene Ryan) is cordon bluegrass when it comes to cooking hawg jowls, fat back, corn pone, mustard greens, salted-down possum belly, squirrel shanks, crow gizzards, and boiled toad. Her granddaughter Elly May resembles Al Capp’s Daisy Mae from head to toes, notably in profile. She is a tomboy, but she somehow wears Levi’s as if they were a bikini. Actress Donna Douglas is typecast in the part. A few years ago she was the best hot-pepper eater in Baywood, La., where she also played boys’ football, pitched in softball, called and slopped hogs, milked cows, and walked through fields eating sugar cane. She can whistle through her teeth loud enough to split the bark off a pine.

Deeds & Rumblings. The show is directed by Broadway’s Richard Whorf and written by Paul Henning, whose jokes and routines have at various times fueled Fibber McGee, Rudy Vallee and Bob Cummings. The characters are engaging people even if they are called Beverly Hillbillies, and this is one time 35 million people aren’t wrong. Like ABC’s I’m Dickens—He’s Fenster. the show is supplying an apparent demand for straightforward, unsophisticated, skillfully performed humor. “It’s my kind of corn.” says Director Whorf—”right on the cob.”