I've decided to extend our "Festival of Great Moments in Sitcom Humor" a few more days so this is not the end of it. Today's clip is from one of the funniest half-hours ever done for TV, and you really need to see the whole half-hour. It's available on this DVD which I highly recommend.
It's an episode of a show known at various times as You'll Never Get Rich, The Phil Silvers Show and Sgt. Bilko. By any name, it was Phil Silvers giving a glorious performance as M/Sgt. Ernest T. Bilko, flim-flamming all who could be flim-flammed. This installment was called either (depending on what you read) "The Court-Martial" or "The Trial of Harry Speakup" or "The Case of Harry Speakup" or "The Court-Martial of Harry Speakup." I've seen it every which way. It first aired on March 6, 1956 and the writing was credited to Nat Hiken (creator of the series and its main director and head writer), Arnie Rosen and Coleman Jacoby. I actually worked with Arnie Rosen on one of my first TV writing jobs and was somehow then unaware that he'd worked on Sgt. Bilko. Wish I'd known because I'd have asked him about it. Then again, he was more interested in pressing matters like writing the show we were doing and having me fired.
The premise of the episode is that Bilko's Army Base is trying out some new techniques to speed up the process by which new inductees receive their physicals, take their written tests and get sworn in as soldiers. Via a plot twist you'll learn about when you see the whole show, a chimpanzee gets into the assembly line and before anyone notices, he is inducted. He also somehow gets a name. When someone tells him to "Hurry! Speak up!", another person thinks the recruit has said his name is Harry Speakup.
This will be humiliating to the officers if it isn't hushed up fast. The trouble is that due to red tape, the only way to get rid of the Harry Speakup problem is to court-martial the chimp and throw him out of the Army. Bilko is appointed to serve as Private Speakup's counsel in the trial that you're about to see.
One of the many interesting things about the Bilko program was that even though it was done on film, they tried to treat it as much as possible like a live performance. They barely stopped filming between scenes and often, if someone bobbled a line or things went wrong, they left it in. There are a number of instances when actors — most notably Paul Ford, who was otherwise so good as Colonel Hall — forgot important lines and someone else — usually Silvers, who had a fast mind and a great memory — would ad-lib around the problem. Silvers often improvised during the show and he had to ad-lib a lot in this scene because the trained chimp didn't always do what he was supposed to. At one point, Mr. Speakup ran over to grab a prop telephone and Phil came up with a terrific explanation right on the spot. (His quick wit caused a few of the actors to almost break up. At several points in the scene, you can see some of them trying to stifle or hide laughter. Especially watch the kid at left playing a guard.)
If you're interested in understanding how much the actors ad-libbed and paraphrased, we have a link for you. Many of the scripts, including this one, were published in paperback form in 1957. One website has scanned the relevant pages of that paperback and posted them here. You'll need something that can read an Adobe PDF file but you probably have just such a program on your computer already.
Okay…so the Army inducted a monkey and now they're trying to have a trial so they can kick the monkey out of the Army, and Bilko is the monkey's lawyer. Perfectly logical. Here's the scene…
