From his “nervous man” to Barney Fife to Ralph Furley and beyond, Don Knotts was Morgantownís gift to American comedy.
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The best medicine
Jesse Donald Knotts was just three days old when the Met opened on July 24, 1924. Built by brothers George and John Comuntzis, who ran Comuntzis restaurant across the street, it was billed as “West Virginia’s Most Beautiful Playhouse.” Opening night was scaled to match. A High Street parade featured live tigers and lions, and the evening’s performances, McEwuen says, included acrobats, comedians, a magician, and a vaudeville production of The Carnival of Venice. It was a fitting spectacle for the city’s new center of entertainment.
Knotts was by far the youngest of four—his brothers were already 14, 16, and 18 when he was born. The family lived in Westover. But his parents soon leased a big house on University Avenue in Sunnyside, and his mother rented rooms to college students for extra income during the Great Depression.
Knotts tells of some rough childhood years in his autobiography, Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known. His father suffered a mental breakdown before he was born, eventually becoming unable to work and, occasionally, violent. His brother Earl, who went by “Shadow,” was Knotts’ first comedic inspiration. Shadow kept things light through humor, especially at family meals. “The clowning would begin with Shadow buttering his bread as if it were a violin, tucking it under his chin and using the butter knife for a bow,” Knotts wrote. “Sometimes the dinner hour would become complete mayhem, and I would laugh so hard I would have to leave the table, and the tears would run down the cheeks of my dear mother.”
Radio was another source of inspiration. The Amos ’n’ Andy comedy show aired nightly, and Knotts practiced Jack Benny’s famously flawless timing.
Family life eased after Knotts’ dad died in 1937. His mother, Elsie Knotts, encouraged his inexpert magic tricks and his pilfered jokes, and community groups would pay him a little to perform. So, full of confidence, he headed to New York after graduating from Morgantown High School in 1942. He returned, discouraged, before the summer was out, and enrolled at WVU—only to be drafted into the Army after his freshman year.
That tour of duty turned out to be the best thing for Knotts’ career. He spent the war as the ventriloquist member of a company of entertainers who performed the revue Stars & Gripes for troops in the Pacific. Several were seasoned professional comedians, and the aspiring actor learned everything he could from them. By the time he returned to WVU in 1945, he had his confidence back. He married fellow WVU student Kathryn “Kay” Metz in 1947 and, not long after graduating in 1948, headed with his wife to New York to make it for real this time.
The view from Morgantown
The new mass media of radio and television meant family and friends in Morgantown could follow Knotts’ successes from their very own living rooms.
Starting in 1949, kids might have heard him on WAJR voicing old-timer Windy Wales on the popular radio program Bobby Benson and the Bar-B-Bar Riders. More and more homes had televisions and, from 1953 to 1955, housewives who made time to watch Search for Tomorrow weekdays at 12:30 could have seen him occasionally as janitor Wilbur Peterson.
Morgantown didn’t get to see Knotts in the 1955–’57 Broadway production No Time for Sergeants, where he and fellow cast member Andy Griffith found instant camaraderie on-stage and off. But lucky residents who switched on NBC’s Tonight Show on November 8, 1956, would have seen him debut his “nervous man”—the first character that he felt was entirely his own invention. It earned him a spot as a regular on The Steve Allen Show. It’s easy to imagine Elsie Knotts settling in front of the TV after dinner Sunday evenings with her eldest son, Ralph, and his family to watch her youngest son cutting up in the show’s Man on the Street sketches.
In early 1960, Knotts happened to catch the pilot episode of a show his old friend Andy Griffith from No Time for Sergeants was working on. He called Griffith the next day and suggested, “Don’t you think Sheriff Andy Taylor ought to have a deputy?” Griffith loved the idea, and the executive producer was soon persuaded, too. On October 3, 1960, CBS aired the first episode of The Andy Griffith Show, with Knotts as the bumbling, lovable Deputy Barney Fife: pure TV magic.
Our hometown funnyman
The quirky mix of vulnerability and bravado that became Knotts’ trademark was fully formed by this time, and it propelled Knotts to quick fame. In May 1961, the end of the Griffith Show’s first season, he won its first Emmy Award, for outstanding supporting performance in a series.
Morgantown burst with pride. In the summer of 1961, the WVU alumni magazine featured its celebrated alum. And Monongalia County Sheriff Clarence Johnson hatched a plan, all in good fun. He had a history with Knotts: A one-time amateur magician himself, he’d performed with Knotts in front of school and community groups a couple decades earlier. So Johnson had a plaque made out of West Virginia walnut with a six-pointed star. In May 1962, when the second Griffith Show season finished taping, Johnson flew to New York “to get his man,” according to a tongue-in-cheek story in The Dominion-News. He recruited Knotts as one of the nation’s highest-paid sheriff’s deputies in the country, the paper joked—at a cost to the county payroll of just $1 a year.
Later that month, Knotts appeared on the cover of TV Guide. And then he won his second Emmy.
The following year, downtown Morgantown undertook a months-long spiffing up called Project 63 to look its best for West Virginia’s centennial on June 20, 1963. At the same time, the mayor proclaimed June 1, 1963, Don Knotts Day. Fresh off of the third Griffith season—and his third Emmy—Knotts was treated to an all-out small-town jamboree, including receptions planned “so that everyone will have the opportunity to see him, hear him, or shake hands with him”—a tall order in a town of more than 20,000 people. It was also Memorial Day weekend in the state’s centennial year, so the festivities were extra spectacular.
Don Knotts Day got an early start, with Sheriff Johnson hosting a coffee hour for Knotts and law enforcement officers from counties all around. The University High School marching band kicked off a parade down High Street, followed by a float, a couple of tanks, and the mayors of all four Morgantown-area towns as well as cars for Knotts and his family, all accompanied by a marching unit of deputy sheriffs. U.S. Senator Jennings Randolph and West Virginia Governor William Barron spoke at Courthouse Square, where Knotts was presented with keys to the city. It was a good thing Morgantown had spruced itself up: TV cameras from news markets as far away as New York took it all in. Knotts later toured the WVU medical center, met business professionals at Lakeview Country Club, and addressed the Alumni Centennial Banquet at the Hotel Morgan.
Quite a reception for a boy who grew up in a boarding house.
Going bigger
The TV screen wasn’t big enough for Knotts’ talent. He’d already had several roles in movies—It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, among others—and he liked it better than TV. As a perfectionist who rehearsed his lines every which way until he got the delivery just right—Griffith compared him to a concert pianist—the longer timeline of film work suited him. Griffith had only set out to do The Andy Griffith Show for five years anyway so, as that time played out, Knotts shifted his career.
He started appearing on the big screen regularly. On March 20, 1964, the Warner Theatre made a “whoop-de-doo” of the regional premiere of Warner Bros.’ The Incredible Mr. Limpet, according to a front-page story in The Dominion-News. Elsie Knotts was the guest
of honor.
Knotts then signed a five-film contract with Universal Pictures—it was around that time that he bought a house for his mom on Louise Avenue. When The Ghost and Mr. Chicken opened at the Met in January 1966, Gus Comuntzis—son of George Comuntzis and now owner of the restaurant and theater—took Mrs. Knotts to dinner and the film’s first showing. That would become one of Knotts’ best-loved films, and the hapless hero Luther Heggs one of his best-loved characters. It was followed by The Reluctant Astronaut in 1967, The Shakiest Gun in the West in 1968, The Love God? in 1969, and How to Frame a Figg in 1971.
Great-nephew Bill Knotts lived with Don Knotts for two years while he went to acting school in the 1970s. He remembers his famous family member as down to earth, unlike many actors. “He never tried to cut in line at restaurants,” Bill Knotts says. “He always waited his turn and nodded when people smiled at him. When they were out for dinner and he was asked for autographs, it was his family who would say, ‘You know, we’re having dinner right now, if you could wait until we’re done.’ Because he would never say no. It was cool to see a guy that recognizable who was humble.”
Knotts worked all the time, and all across the entertainment spectrum. In 1972, for example, he appeared in the film The Man Who Came to Dinner with Orson Welles and did his first voice-overs in two episodes of the animated New Scooby Doo Movies. In 1974, he did touring regional theater, as he often did in summer, in the play The Mind with the Dirty Man, then started filming The Apple Dumpling Gang with Tim Conway in California, one of a long series of films for Disney Studios. He also appeared regularly on variety shows and had guest appearances on TV series.
So in 1979, when Knotts was invited to play the awkward swinger landlord Ralph Furley on the ABC sitcom Three’s Company, he was an actor who required no audition. Co-stars John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt couldn’t believe their luck—when he showed up at the studio to read lines, DeWitt told one Knotts biographer, she and Ritter kept pinching each other. The first time he walked onto the soundstage, the live studio audience applauded for “what seemed to be about 10 minutes,” a producer told the biographer.
A legend in his own time
At an age when many would retire, Knotts continued to work. In the 1980s and ’90s, he appeared in a TV episode here and there, including as the regular character Les Calhoun on lifelong friend Andy Griffith’s crime series Matlock and in an increasing number of voice-overs in animated films. Fans of the 1998 film Pleasantville will remember him as the TV repairman.
Knotts didn’t return to Morgantown as often after his mom died in 1969, but he did visit in 1998 for the renaming of South University Avenue as Don Knotts Boulevard.
He was in his mid-70s when he met the comedian Jim Carrey, a huge Don Knotts fan who does a great impression of him. There’s a story Ron Howard likes to tell—he’s the actor who played young Opie on the Griffith Show and later became an Oscar–winning filmmaker. When he was directing the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Carrey, in the lead role, was increasingly burned out by the big fur costume and the yellow contact lenses and the oppressive green makeup. One day, to cheer him up, Howard arranged for Knotts to visit the set. Carrey was high up at the mouth of Grinch’s cave when he spotted Knotts below, and he launched directly into his Don Knotts impersonation. “I only wish the cameras were rolling,” Howard told CNN’s Larry King in 2006, “because here he was in the Grinch costume doing Barney Fife, you know, and it was—it was hilarious.” The two comedians spent the afternoon together, and Carrey later told The Los Angeles Times that he felt giddy. He thanked Knotts for making him smile, and especially for The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
Together again
Don Knotts died in Los Angeles on February 24, 2006, at the age of 81. He worked right up until the end, appearing in an episode of That ’70s Show in 2005 and doing voice-overs for numerous films in 2005 and 2006, including the kid-favorite Mayor Turkey Lurkey in Chicken Little.
Andy Griffith delivered the eulogies at private and public services. Newspapers across the nation ran retrospectives on Knotts’ career. “Mr. Knotts, over and over, was willing to play the desperate, pathetic low-man-on-every-pole,” read a New York Times appreciation on his death. “His talent for abasement became a source, paradoxically, of great authority.”
Knotts and the Metropolitan Theatre came together again in meaningful and indelible ways twice in the early 2000s. In 2005, a bronze star was set in the sidewalk in front of the theater in his honor. And in 2016, a bronze sculpture of Knotts created by Morgantown sculptor Jamie Lester was placed near the star. The statue depicts Knotts holding a deputy sheriff’s hat and a script for The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, an open-hearted grin on his face. “It’s long overdue,” project organizer John Pyles, who remembered Knotts visiting his school with his ventriloquist dummy, said at the unveiling. “It’s just a happy occasion to have this great statue of Don, remembering him.”
There may be no parallel, in our age of individualistic streaming services, to a star who is as universally recognized as Don Knotts was in 20th century entertainment. Knotts’ five prime-time Emmys make him one of the top 20 awardees of all time. His 87 credits on IMDB span half a century. And his wholesome demeanor made him appealing for family-friendly movies, which put him in front of young people generation after generation. “He probably had one of the most iconic characters in the history of television,” great-nephew Bill Knotts says of Barney Fife, who can still pretty much always be seen in re-runs. “That’s a good legacy to have.”
Knotts’ brand of funny can seem quaint, today. But when you watch him, pay attention to how he makes you feel. Unlike a lot of humor, the chuckles he’ll inspire in you feel wholesome. The plaque on his grave says it best: “He saw the poignancy in people’s pride and pain and turned it into something hilarious and endearing.”
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