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Feb. 26-March 4, 2006

     Saturday night, when I returned from calling one of the great thriller college basketball TV games I've ever had the joy of describing, an e-mail was on my computer from correspondent Chris Tufts.  When I saw the topic line "Don Knotts," I knew.  Barney Fife---the deputy who couldn't sing a lick, who perpetually locked himself in a cell, who was singularly outfoxed by every sobriety test he ever offered to Otis Campbell and who genuinely loved Thelma Lou but enjoyed sneaking around on the side with Juanita Beasley---was gone.  Who cares if Knotts had a paltry few game shows on his resume.  A genuine giant from my childhood, adolescence, adulthood and semi-twilight years has passed and I am compelled to write about him.

     If William Frawley and Art Carney pioneered in the art form of the situation comedy supporting actor, Don Knotts penned the textbook.  From the moment in 1960 when he thanked his "cousin Andy" for hiring him to the week eight years later when he arranged a Russian-American summit in Mayberry, Barney was Can't Miss Television 30 years before NBC coined the phrase Must See TV.

     That Barney was allowed to flourish into a television legend was a combination of Knotts' genius and Andy Griffith's keen perception and unselfishness.  The Andy Griffith Show was originally intended as a showcase for Griffith's broad, near-caricatured, long-drawling Southern humor crafted on the Broadway stage and in comedy albums of the late fifties.  Shortly after the classic Christmas episode with Will Wright portraying department store owner Ben Weaver as Ebenezer Scrooge, Griffith scaled back on the accent and morphed Andy Taylor into the town sage and perpetual straight man for Barney.  Griffith's shrewd recognition that the audience would likely grow weary of two leading broadly-drawn characters was the move which turned his series into one of television's all-time classics and made Mayberry a place where we always wanted to live.

     Has ever a more hilarious scene in television history occurred than when Barney attempts to recite the preamble to the Constitution from memory to Andy?  "WE.......THE.......PEOPLE" erupts into the signature Knotts action of mussing his hair into a concoction more bizarre than Dagwood Bumstead's locks.

     Watching Andy Taylor attempt to stifle Andy Griffith laughter at Barney deputizing a trio of Mayberryites, including the incomparable Howard McNear (Floyd Lawson), is one of television's priceless moments.

     Some of the exchanges between Knotts and the young Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle were near-genius.  The downtown sequence when Gomer strikes revenge on Barney after Deputy Fife gave the mechanic a ticket for a U-turn is a tour de force.  Barney reverts to his childhood when he tells Andy:  "Ol' Nutsy here starts yelling, 'Citizen's ar-RAY-ust, Citizen's ar-RAY-ust!"  We were collectively on the floor all over America.

     My family background always returns me to "The Sermon for Today" as my favorite Andy episode.  Barney (and assorted members of All Souls Church in Mayberry) snoozes through the morning message from the visiting Rev. Breen, a serious treatise on how we are constantly rushing and ending with the theme, "What's your hurry?"   Afterward, Barney joins Andy, Opie, Aunt Bee and Clara Edwards in greeting the guest minister.  "You just can't go wrong with a subject like that----sin," proudly chants Barney.  As he and Andy walked away, Sheriff Taylor snaps:  "He didn't preach on sin!"

      Knotts was incredible in "Barney and the Choir."  No Mayberry visitor fails to remember the episode in which town choir director John Masters (Olan Soule) always nods to Hazel to begin her piano accompaniment.  Barney, whose braggadocio was forever creating self-perpetuating trouble, hinted about his earlier lessons from his voice teacher.  Masters proceeds to give him the solo for the feature concert selection, "Welcome, Sweet Springtime" (known to any Griffith Show devotee as "good ol' 14-A").  You know the drill.  By the time, he reaches the lyrics "we greet thee in soooooooooong," Barney is enough off key to make one's hair hurt.  Even his inamorata admits Barney can't sing.  "Not a lick," Thelma Lou repeatedly tells Andy.  On performance night, Barney---accepting Andy's plea to soften his tones to less than a whisper---barrels out facial expressions of Pavarotti when Glenn Cripe (where did they get those names in Mayberry?) is sneaked backstage to deliver the solo on mike.  Only Knotts could have made the pieces to that puzzle come alive.

      Oh, for those moments when Barney would pick up the phone to do a "troublecheck" at The Mayberry Diner for "Ms. Beasley" (the forever-unseen Juanita).  Or the mornings he phoned to crow "cock-a-doodle-doooooooooo" to Juanita behind Thelma Lou's back.  Another gem was later in the same show when Andy sneaked into the courthouse and asked Barney to stand up.  "I want to see if there's a-egg in that chair," the sheriff laughed.

      I wholeheartedly agree with the assessment of Dr. Richard Kelly, who wrote the original book "The Andy Griffith Show," of "The Return of Barney Fife" as the most painful episode of the 249 in the eight-year series.  In one scene, we see Barney return from Raleigh for his high school reunion and his hopes lift beyond sky-high when Thelma Lou wires to say she will also attend.  The two meet again and engage in a romantic dance, only to be interrupted by the irritating Floss.  Moments later, Thelma Lou returns with a tall, good-looking man and introduces him to Andy and Barney as her husband of six weeks.  Barney is crushed, heartbroken, humiliated.  We are likewise crushed.  Barney may have been an inept deputy and still a man-child but we don't want him hurt.  He represented the underdog in all of us, the guy who we all knew----and perhaps were at times----who would exaggerate his talents and abilities but would never deliberately hurt another human being.  How dare Thelma Lou, of all people, do that to Barney!  Fortunately, 21 years later, she saw the error of her ways and, as a divorcee, finally married Deputy Fife.

       The Emmy voters gave Knotts another statuette for that episode, as they did a year later for "Barney Returns to Mayberry."  That one is almost as painful in the climax.  Assigned to escort former classmate, Mayberry native and now Hollywood actress Tina Andrews to the "world premiere" of her newest film in Mayberry, Barney again builds an infatuation into high hopes for a permanent relationship.  Expecting to meet Tina for what he anticipates may be an opportunity to propose, Barney is greeted with a devastating phone call.  Tina has returned early to California to be with her fiancee.  Barney makes an abrupt return to Raleigh where the pictures of his evening with Tina make the newspapers.  The two office workers in the Raleigh Police Department who previously considered Detective Fife a pain in the neck suddenly want to be added to his weekend social calendar.  We wanted to scream at Barney not to bother.  Neither of them were worth his time.  What, we wondered, happened to Juanita, since Thelma Lou ditched him?

       Perhaps no greater evidence of the depth of Knotts' acting ability is on display in "Andy on Trial."  The episode features Roy Roberts and later High Rollers co-host Ruta Lee as a newspaper publisher and his shady female reporter.  Andy travels to serve a warrant for Roberts, who attempts to bribe Andy into forgiving a delinquent ticket.  Lee comes to Mayberry under false pretenses and eggs an exaggerating Barney into revealing dirt on Andy.  Ultimately, charges of malfeasance are leveled against Sheriff Taylor and a state hearing called which could lead to Andy's removal from office.  After admitting on the witness stand to his comments about Andy, Barney employs a rare moment of sincere bravado and refuses to leave the witness chair.  We suspend our disbelief to the point of actually feeling we are in that hearing room when Barney says, "Don't you see?  Andy's been trying to teach me for years, you do a lot better job when you go by the heart, rather than by the book."  Knotts not only acted that scene powerfully with his heart but with his eyes.

       Andy Griffith later admitted to Kelly that the worst mistake was in attempting to replace Barney with a new deputy.  The experiment with Jack Burns as Warren Ferguson only lasted half a season and Burns was paid off for the remainder of the year.  "It was our fault, not his," Griffith said in Kelly's book.  "We were giving him Don Knotts material and it wasn't working."  In many of those episodes, one can tell Andy Griffith is much more tense and irritable as Andy Taylor because the chemistry is all wrong and Burns' nightclub comic rejoinders of "Huh?....yeah....Huh?.....yeah....Huh?" just don't work in Mayberry.

       The Andy Griffith Show may ultimately turn out to be the most enduring series in television history.  If Andy Griffith as Andy Taylor was the glue, Don Knotts as Barney Fife was the adhesive.  They made Mayberry place we enjoyed dropping in on once a week for a little bit of gossip.  Barney was a little like Wile E. Coyote of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons.  He may be clobbered one week, embarrassed another, and occasionally crushed.  Yet, until he moved to Raleigh, he always kept coming back for more.  Even then, he always came back home for a visit.

       When today's entertainment analysts, many of whom have about as much of a grasp on television history as a dry washrag, talk about performers from the Cheers-Seinfeld-Friends era as the defining comedy actors in television history, I not only beg to differ but differ loudly.  As talented as those people may be, none of them can hold a candle to Don Knotts.  He never had to utter a profanity, nor resort to an insult or a bodily-function joke in character.  His craftsmanship of a signature role is on a par with the finest tailored suit or the most elegant home.

        Somewhere tonight, the Mayberry gang and those of us who wish we were residents of that mythical village of North Carolina are singing one more time in that slightly off-key harmony of Barney's:  "Proud wave your banner in the sky.........Mayberry Union High."   Rest in peace, Barney.  Rest in peace, Don Knotts.

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