Post by TheGoodMan19 on Jul 6, 2020 19:58:53 GMT
Everyone quickly realized how funny Don Knotts could make the Fife character, and to Andy Griffith's credit, decided to kind of switch it to where Andy played his character more straight and Knotts being the funny one.
To be fair, when Knotts gets really goofy, he goes far too over the edge for my liking (I'm not a fan of slapstick and he verges into that territory while being far too loud). But that was the style back then.
Andy Griffith made his career playing a goofy country bumpkin. Kind of a precursor to Jed Clampett. He had a very funny routine called "What it was was football". He took the character into movies with No Time For Sergeants, a Gomer Pyle precursor. Don Knotts played a role as an Army psychologist driven nuts by Griffith's character, Then he took the bumpkin down a dark path in Elie Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. He might have had a very good film career if not for the Andy Griffith Show. And I don't think that TAGS would have been as good as it was if Griffith had played for the laughs and Knotts played the straight man. Knotts won umpteen Emmy's and Griffith was never even nominated.