A real-life Barney Fife would be…interesting, to say the least.
When watching television shows, we often suspend our understanding of reality in the name of entertainment. Maybe a town like Mayberry is too perfect to ever exist in the real world, but viewers are willing to pretend it’s real for a few short minutes when watching The Andy Griffith Show.
Sure, maybe what makes the town so sweet and endearing may become grating on the nerves if you were ever exposed to it in your day-to-day life, but Griffith himself never claimed that the show was based on reality. Rather, it’s based on a seemingly idealized version of life that you can enjoy from time to time when you want to get away from the hardships of real life. We could all use a bit of Mayberry in ourselves, even if the characters are closer to fiction than fact.
Griffith himself was the first to admit this. In fact, he didn’t mince words about the character of Barney Fife in an interview with The Atlanta Journal. Specifically, Griffith stated, “If you really lived with Barney, you’d kill him in the second week.” The words may seem harsh, but they ring true. Let’s be honest, if someone like Barney Fife was deputy sheriff, we’re not even sure he’d stay employed until the end of his second week on the job. Still, Griffith was quick to praise his costar Don Knotts in his portrayal of the character, and said, “Don Knotts as Barney Fife was brilliant.”
While a real-life Barney Fife would undoubtedly have his flaws, Griffith seemed to understand that the success of the series didn’t come at the expense of other people, as many jokes today do. He commented, “We never made fun. Our fun came out of our characters.”
Knotts had often claimed that his depiction of Barney was based on a child. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Knotts once said, “Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they’re thinking, if they’re happy or sad. That’s what I tried to do with Barney. It’s very identifiable.”
