Don Knotts, who kept generations of TV audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on “The Andy Griffith Show” and would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on “Three’s Company,” has died. He was 81.
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at a Los Angeles hospital, said Paul Ward, a spokesman for the cable network TV Land, which airs his two signature shows.
Griffith, who remained close friends with Knotts, said he had a brilliant comedic mind and wrote some of the show’s best scenes.
“Don was a small man … but everything else about him was large: his mind, his expressions,” Griffith told The Associated Press on Saturday. “Don was special. There’s nobody like him. “I loved him very much,” Griffith added. “We had a long and wonderful life together.”
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The West Virginia-born actor’s half-century career included seven TV series and more than 25 films, but it was the Griffith show that brought him TV immortality and five Emmys.
The show ran from 1960-68, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series in TV history to bow out at the top: The others are “I Love Lucy” and “Seinfeld.” The 249 episodes have appeared frequently in reruns and have spawned a large, active network of fan clubs.
I have almost no recollection of “The Andy Griffith Show,” so Knotts to me will be remembered as the flamboyant would-be stud from “Three’s Company.” Mr. Furley’s leisure suits and jokes about Jack Tripper’s faux homosexuality were hilarious, and that show stands as an interesting snapshot of a strange era in American sociopolitical culture.
Update James Joyner: Sad news, indeed. I’m older than Stotch but even I didn’t watch Don Knotts play Barney Fife when the show was on. Indeed, he played the character from 1960-1965, before I was born. Still, I have probably seen every episode numerous times in the intervening years.
I have often said that “The Andy Griffith Show” was the best television show of any genre ever made. My wife, growing up as she did in New England, did not have the cultural advantages that I did and had never seen the show. We are currently rectifying that situation and watching every episode, in order, on DVD via Netflix.
Knotts won an Emmy as Best Supporting Actor each of the five years he played Barney Fife. If there was ever a better sitcom character over a sustained period, I haven’t seen it. Andy Griffith, already a well-established comedic actor and stand-up comic when the show began, quickly realized that Knotts was stealing the show. Rather than try to grab the best lines for himself, he became the straight man and let Knotts have even more camera time. The result is the best five year run of any sitcom, ever. The three subsequent seasons, all in color rather than the black and white of the Knotts era, were fine but nowhere near as good.
Here’s a much more recent photo of Griffith and Knotts, taken for the “TV Land Awards,” 7 March 2004:
After being a regular performer in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow from 1953 to 1955, he gained additional exposure in 1956 on Steve Allen’s variety show, appearing in Allen’s mock “Man in the Street” interviews, always as a man obviously very nervous about being on camera.
Knotts’s portrayal of Deputy Barney Fife on the American television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show earned him five Emmy Awards. After leaving the series in 1965, Knotts starred in a series of film comedies: The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964), The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), The Reluctant Astronaut (1967), The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) and The Love God? (1969).
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he served as the spokesman for Dodge trucks and was featured prominently in a series of print ads and dealer brochures.
In the 1970s, Knotts and Tim Conway starred together in a series of slapstick movies, including the 1975 Disney film The Apple Dumpling Gang, and its 1979 sequel, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again.
Knotts returned to series television in the late 1970s, appearing as landlord Ralph Furley on Three’s Company, after Audra Lindley and Norman Fell left the show to star in a short-lived spinoff series (”The Ropers”). Knotts remained on the show from 1979 until it ended in 1984. In 1986, he reunited with Andy Griffith in the 1986 made for television movie Return to Mayberry, where he reprised his role as “Barney Fife”. From 1989 to 1992, Knotts again co-starred with Grittith, playing a recurring role as pesky neighbor Les Calhoun on Matlock.
In 1998, Knotts made a cameo as the mysterious TV repairman in Pleasantville, and seven years later performed as the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in Chicken Little (2005) (his first Disney movie since 1979).
My understanding is that Griffith and Knotts met when they starred in the 1955 Broadway hit “No Time for Sergeants.” They reprised their roles in the 1958 film of the same name. If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to do so. Like most films about the military, the basic training (or, technically, in this case Air Force recruit induction center) sequence was much better than the rest of the picture. Still, when you see Griffith’s terrific comedic performance as Will Stockdale and then realize that Don Knotts stole his own show away from him two years later, you really appreciate Knotts’ unique talent.
SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) — South Dakota became the first U.S. state to pass a law banning abortion in virtually all cases, with the intention of forcing the Supreme Court to reconsider its 1973 decision legalizing the procedure.
The law, which would punish doctors who perform the operation with a five-year prison term and a $5,000 fine, awaits the signature of Republican Gov. Michael Rounds and people on both sides of the issue say he is unlikely to veto it.
Obviously this is an indication that a major political battle is afoot, assuming the law passes and is challenged in federal court. Unfortunately for all thinking people, it will be a battle that will be based more on emotions, partisan rhetoric, and religious dogma than on biology or issues of embryonic development.
I just finished listening to an 11/8/05 “interview” with counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke [bio], and he seems more interested in pleasing the audience with one-liners and Bush-bashing (thereby selling books) than he is with giving an honest analysis of what we know and don’t know about terrorism. That he completely subscribes to Robert Pape’s simplistic, mono-causal notion of suicide terrorism as the product of colonization proves that this man is not a serious thinker, regardless of his resume.
He may be well spoken and speak authoritatively, but then again so is America’s biggest fool: Noam Chomsky. God help us if we listen to these people just because they tell us what we want to hear.
The Washington Examiner today announced the creation of a national news position — senior White House correspondent — and filled it with award-winning journalist Bill Sammon.
Sammon has been the senior White House correspondent for the Washington Times since 1998, and in that role has traveled extensively throughout the country and abroad with the president and other White House officials. He was with the president on Sept. 11, affording him an exceptional window into this nation’s sudden transformation into a society dealing with terrorism.
Before being assigned to the White House, Sammon served as the national investigative reporter for the Times. He also traveled overseas for several years, reporting on the civil war in Bosnia and critical events in the Middle East for Stars and Stripes.
I’m a big fan of The Examiner, and my assumption is that this is an indication that the paper is solvent — something that I was unsure of — and that its politics are in line with my own. The paper’s editorials are getting more pointed, and while its content still relies heavily on wire reports, staff reporting is increasing and its quality is getting better. And it’s free and readily available in the city, which is nice.
The detestable cartoon portrayals of Muhammad, Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him) by Danish and later by Norwegian, French, German and many other European newspapers is nothing less than emotional torture and intellectual terrorism.
Uh, no. To equate the publication of mostly innocuous cartoons to torture and terrorism is beyond disingenuous and crosses over into the realm of asinine stupidity. A cartoon is not equal to a beheading or a hijacked plane flying into a building. It’s a cartoon.
In universities, European and American journalists are often taught that freedom of speech ends where the sensitivities of people begin. Seemingly, they have failed to implement this most ethical and moral lesson. A newspaper, whether Danish or Portuguese, that indulges in opinionated reporting by making fun of a major religious figure revered by a global community is an exercise in emotional torture.
I hope to God that this isn’t what is being taught in any university on the planet. Abdullah seems to think that my rights end at the point where his feelings get hurt, an idea which of course negates freedom of speech and subjugates it to the most easily offended. (note: freedom is good, subjugation is bad)
If this is the most enlightened argument Muslim intellectuals can come up with, we’re in for a bumpy ride.
Rusty Shackleford over at The Jawa Report has a facetiously-titled post claiming that moderate Muslims are speaking out against the cartoon jihad, but posts pictures of the tens of thousands of Muslims who are threatening violence over a series of cartoons.
His post made me harken back to a column written by Dennis Prager in response to Muslim rioting in France last November. Among his “Five Questions Non-Muslims Would Like Answered,” Prager asks:
(2) Why is the Muslim population so quiet?
Since Muslim terrorists blowing themselves up in the name of Allah and Palestinian nationalism, I have been praying to see Muslim demonstrations against these atrocities. Last week’s protests in Jordan against the bombings, while welcome, were a rarity. What I have seen more often is mainstream Muslim spokesmen implicitly defending this terror on the grounds that Israel occupies Palestinian lands. We see torture and murder in the name of Allah, but we see no anti-torture and anti-murder demonstrations in the name of Allah. (please re-read question 1 and answer it accordingly)
There are a billion Muslims in the world. How is it possible that essentially none (bar the recent Jordanian initiative) have demonstrated against evils perpetrated by Muslims in the name of Islam? This is true even of the millions of Muslims living in free Western societies. What are non-Muslims of goodwill supposed to conclude? When the Israelis massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, great crowds of Israeli Jews gathered to protest their country’s moral failing. Why has there been no comparable public demonstration by Palestinians or other Muslims to morally condemn Palestinian or other Muslim-committed terror?
The question remains unanswered. What’s worse is that when moderate Muslims do address Islamic violence they always qualify their statements with a justification — i.e., “I condemn this violence, but …” or “Islam is a religion of peace, but …”
Unless and until Muslims make universal and emphatic declarations against violence perpetrated by fellow Muslims, it’s going to remain difficult to believe that a moderate wing of this religion actually exists.
The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of “cherry-picking” intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies’ mistakes in concluding that Hussein’s government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration’s decision to invade.
“Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war,” Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration “went to war without requesting — and evidently without being influenced by — any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq.”
“It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community’s own work was politicized,” Pillar wrote.
Aside from his CIA career, Pillar is a Princeton Ph.D. and author of Terrorism and US Foreign Policy, so his credentials are unimpeachable. However, his argument here is not.
Like it or not, the intelligence community is a giant bureaucracy, so any President must rely on the highest-level advice he receives — in this case that was CIA Director George Tenet stating emphatically that the case for WMDs in Iraq was a “slam dunk.” Tenet was a Clinton administration holdover, so certainly no neocon lackey. When the director of the CIA says slam dunk, why would a President refuse to believe him? Furthermore, Clinton’s first CIA director, James Woolsey, had been making the argument that while no intel was perfect, there was a pattern of facts that pointed to Saddam Hussein either possessing or seeking to obtain WMDs (the latter has been clearly proven, in both the Duelfer Report as well as in Joe Wilson’s testimony to the Senate Select Committe on Intelligence).
But what Pillar suggests, as have countless others, is that there was ample evidence refuting the WMD intel but the Bush administration “cherry picked” that which pointed in the direction to war. There seems to be some truth to the notion that the administration listened more closely to intel that suggested a threat, but we can’t ignore that this occurred in the aftermath of September 11 — when the intelligence community (Pillar included) had ample information but failed to “connect the dots.”
In this light, the “rush” to go to war in Iraq was less a case of selectively using unreliable intel as it was the result of erring on the side of national security. Pillar may see that differently because he was a CIA insider, but his analysis here fails to recognize this broader national security lens through which the administration would have based its decisions.
Ok, I know this is two days after the funeral political rally commemorating exploiting the death of Martin Luther King’s wife for partisan gain, but I wonder if any of our readers can think of an individual who is less qualified to comment on how the American government should deal with Islamic extremism than former president Jimmy Carter.
(Note: the original title of this post was Operation Eagle Carter, a bit-too abstract reference to Operation Eagle Claw — the code name for the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian embassy hostages in 1980.)
If this connection has been made, I havent seen it: there are many people in America and elsewhere in the West are making statements about how the media should self-censor and not publish the Danish cartoons that have sparked several days of Muslim rioting. Thats fine, and their argument isnt completely without merit.
However, it seems to me that these same people are precisely those who said that censoring the Abu Ghraib prison photos would be an unacceptable restriction on freedom of speech and a betrayal of the medias allegiance to the truth.
I recognize that theres a distinction between a photo and an editorial cartoon, but isnt the gist of the argument that if the speech in question paints a bad picture of the West, its fair game and must come to light — but if it calls into question the violent behavior of Muslims, then it must be hidden?
The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet keeps women from getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet had no effect.
The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women aged 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attack and stroke as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.
“These are three totally negative studies,” said Dr. David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, who is not connected with the study but has written books on clinical trial design and analysis. And, he said, the results should be taken seriously for what they are a rigorous attempt that failed to confirm a popular hypothesis that a low-fat diet can prevent three major diseases in women.
And the studies were so large and so expensive that they are “the Rolls Royce of studies,” said Dr. Michael Thun, who directs epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. As such, he said, they are likely to be the final word.
We’ll have to wait and see if the results will be replicated in a study of fat consumption in males, but this study points at an interesting phenomenon: accepting on its face any assertion that what we enjoy has got to be bad for our health. Having recently read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, this has me wondering whether in a few years we’ll still simply choose to believe that low-fat diets will prevent what this study says they do not.
Update James Joyner: Sad news, indeed. I’m older than Stotch but even I didn’t watch Don Knotts play Barney Fife when the show was on. Indeed, he played the character from 1960-1965, before I was born. Still, I have probably seen every episode numerous times in the intervening years. 
