Monday, May 22, 2006

Dennis Rogers: Saluting Inimitable Barney

The News & Observer
May 20, 2006

How good was Don Knotts? Try this telling experiment: Next time you're watching his brilliant portrayal of Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show," turn off the sound.

You'll see a master of physical comedy at work. His ability to communicate with that rubber face and that wiry body rivals the talents of such acknowledged comedy geniuses as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Lucille Ball. Knotts' delivery of some of the funniest lines ever written for television was just frosting on the comedy cake.

Knotts, who died this year at age 81, was so good he could make you laugh out loud with a painful attempt to recite the preamble to the United States Constitution.

His work also makes you realize how mundane most of today's comics are. People like Chris Rock and Steve Martin are amusing, but I don't know another performer dead or alive who could get laughs with words written more than 200 years ago. Don Knotts and Barney Fife were the perfect marriage of man and material.

Nowhere are actors and characters from "The Andy Griffith Show" so beloved as in Mount Airy. It was Griffith's hometown, the inspiration for the TV town of Mayberry and the site each September of a sweetly bizarre gathering of seriously devoted fans of a show that never seems to grow old.

It is also the perfect place for a well-deserved and long overdue statue of Knotts as Barney Fife, aka "Fast Gun Fife," "Barney the Beast," "Fife the Fierce" and "Crazy Gun Barney."

Two Mount Airy folks, Tom Hellebrand and Neal Shelton, have joined forces to commission a statue of Knotts/Fife. It would join the the town's existing statue of Andy Griffith and Ron Howard as Sheriff Andy Taylor and his son Opie donated by the TV Land network.

Barney's statue, unlike the one of Griffith and Howard, is not some TV network promotion. It's a fan-inspired effort to remember the man and the character most responsible for keeping the show on television for 46 years since its debut.

Although the show ran for 249 episodes between 1961 and 1968, fans divide it into two phases. First were the black and white years from 1961 to 1965 when Barney kept the peace in Mayberry.

Then came the color years and a misguided effort to replace Knotts with the woefully miscast Jack Burns as Deputy Warren Ferguson. The less said about that ugliness the better.

Preliminary sketches for the life-size statue, expected to cost $35,000, show Barney Fife doing what he does best, exerting his self-anointed authority as a traffic cop. As Barney himself would no doubt say, "Aw, big ain't the word for it."

Fans who kick in $100 will not only have their names put on a plaque, they will also be entered in a drawing for a beautifully restored 1963 Mayberry Sheriff's Department squad car and a golf cart made up to look like a squad car.

As Knotts would likely prefer, any money left over once the statue is paid for will go to a charity approved by his widow, Francey Yarborough. The effort has also been endorsed by Knotts' daughter, Karen.

If you'd like more information, surf the internet to www.donknottsstatue.com.

Welcome home, Barney.

Dennis Rogers can be reached at 829-4750 or drogers@newsobserver.com.

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