As Second Banana, Best of the Bunch

In a Broadway musical about burlesque called "Top Banana," back in the early 1950s, the title tune's lyrics advised, "If you want to be the top banana, you've got to start at the bottom of the bunch." It was a fruity restating of an old American maxim.

And what if you didn't want to be top banana? Pop-culture history is filled with illustrious "second bananas," usually in comedy acts, and they also served who stood there and fed straight lines. (Somehow third bananas, however many there were, remain mired in obscurity.)

Ed McMahon, who died yesterday at age 86, was called over the course of his career the best second banana ever and helped define the term for the TV age; he sat at Johnny Carson's side laughing loyally at all the jokes and delivering set-ups in such well-worn comedy bits as "Carnac, the Magnificent" and "Aunt Blabby." Carson let McMahon get laughs now and then, as during the Carnac segments when McMahon spouted babble about answers to questions supposedly "kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls' porch since noon today."

Any job can be done with distinction and a certain amount of flair; the trick with being a second banana is not to have too much flair. McMahon usually knew just how far he could go in supporting Carson without ever upstaging him. At this delicate part, he was a master. A second banana must know his limitations and McMahon had plenty, but then if he'd been in any way the equal of his boss, he would have had his own top show.

For a while, the late Phil Hartman's impression of McMahon on "Saturday Night Live" was approximately as famous as McMahon himself. Hartman used McMahon's trademark "Hey-O!" but added the exquisitely sycophantic phrase, "You are correct, sir!" If McMahon was bothered by the impression, he never let on, though Carson was known to find Dana Carvey's impersonation of him fitfully offensive, especially when Carson was made to look old and un-hip.

There's more to being a great second banana than doing what you are told. It takes a certain amount of invention and a large amount of discretion. It's a little like knowing precisely when to leave a party -- not too soon, and not too late. Second bananism is all about not wearing out one's welcome.

Although Jay Leno never really had a sidekick, preferring to bounce jokes off his bandleader or announcer, new "Tonight Show" host Conan O'Brien is adhering to the Carson-McMahon model, with Andy Richter serving as second banana from his post standing at a microphone in front of the studio audience. Richter previously played a similar role on O'Brien's "Late Night" show.

Previous "Tonight" hosts had sidekicks at their -- where else? -- sides. The great Jack Paar, known for his unabashed emotionalism and sentimentality, cleverly used stuffy smarty-pants Hugh Downs as a foil during Paar's five uproarious years as "Tonight's" host. Steve Allen had no sidekick but didn't exactly go it alone, having developed a troupe of regulars that included Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Don Knotts.

Knotts, who died in 2006 at 81, would later distinguish himself splendidly as second banana to Andy Griffith on "The Andy Griffith Show," playing blissfully bumbling deputy sheriff Barney Fife, a role that became easily as much a part of American folklore as Griffith's Andy Taylor did. Knotts's character wasn't even part of the pilot for the show, but Griffith, who had worked with Knotts in the play and film versions of "No Time for Sergeants," thought the sheriff needed a deputy and that Griffith himself needed a stooge.

In time, Knotts became the principal laugh-getter on the show and Griffith almost a sidekick to him. When Knotts unwisely left the show in 1965, none of the subsequent colorful characters who were added to the cast (among them Gomer Pyle) approached Knotts for endearing klutziness and faked frisson.

Cultural historians trace second bananas and sidekicks back to Don Quixote's Sancho Panza and Sherlock Holmes's extremely faithful Dr. Watson, as in "Elementary, my dear Watson," one of those lines of dialogue that everybody knows. In 2003, a trio of old-time vaudeville and TV comics collaborated on a CD called "The Second Banana Symphony: Singing Comedians From TV's Golden Age." A second banana didn't necessarily sing, but then the term has been stretched and squeezed over the years.

The numbers include the "Ho Ho Song," which was Buttons's theme: "Ho ho, hee hee, strange things are happening." For obvious reasons, it is never revived today. Songs such as "Va Va Va Voom" and "Sheesh, What a Grouch!" on the album could only have been performed by Art Carney, since they used signature catch phrases of his heard by millions every week on CBS.