by Ethan Thompson
about Ethan Thompson
Ethan Thompson is Professor of Media Arts at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. He is the author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture and co-editor with Jeffrey P. Jones and Lucas Hatlen of Television History, The Peabody Archive, and Cultural Memory and with Jonathan Gray and Jeffrey P. Jones of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era. He directed the documentary TV Family about a forgotten forerunner to reality television.
Foreword
To avoid confusion, we, the writers of the foreword, wish to clarify one thing up front: the title of this book, How to Play Video Games, is a joke.
Introduction
Imagine that you just purchased a brand new television, and inside the box, along with the remote, the Styrofoam packaging, and various cables, was this book: How to Watch Television. Would you bother to open the cellophane wrapper and read it? Sure, you might scan through the “quick start” guide for help with the connections, and the new remote control may take some getting used to, but who needs instructions for how to watch what’s on screen? Do-it-yourself manuals abound for virtually every topic, but TV content is overwhelmingly regarded as self-explanatory, as most people assume that we all just know how to watch television. We disagree. Thus, this is your owner’s manual for how to watch TV.
The Ernie Kovacs Show
Abstract: Ernie Kovacs was a one-of-a-kind television comedian who enjoys cult status today, though he died at the height of his popularity in the early 1960s. In this essay, Ethan Thompson models how to historicize television, drawing upon articles in the press, as well as archival production materials and fan letters, to make sense of how Kovacs made comedy and how viewers made sense of him.