Trying to explain why Don Knotts and Andy Griffith were the perfect comedic duo is no easy feat. They had a history together before The Andy Griffith Show in the film No Time For Sergeants, where the two were able to get familiar with each other. Andy Griffith understood that the perfect combat against Knotts’ comedic nervous man was for Grififith to play straight man against it.
There’s a myriad of reasons to explain why the two work so well together, each just as compelling as the last.
But one possible explanation may be that the reason the duo of Barney Fife and Andy Griffith were so funny together might have been that Don Knotts and Andy Griffith knew how to make each other laugh. In Tied Up In Knotts: My Dad and Me, written by Karen Knotts, Don’s daughter, she explores her father’s work throughout his life, with special care and focus on his time in The Andy Griffith Show.
It might please you to know that, in addition to making viewers laugh across the world, Knotts was also hard at work making the cast and crew of The Andy Griffith Show laugh out loud as well.
Karen recounted a memory of watching her father film a scene. She wrote, “At the end of the dialogue, everyone stayed mouse-quiet until the director yelled, ‘Cut!’ Then a roar of laughter erupted from the crew – they were laughing at Dad’s performance!
Griffith himself wasn’t exempt from a wicked case of the giggles at the hands of Knotts. Don Knotts used to make Andy Griffith laugh so hard, that Griffith actually got physical. Karen Knotts wrote, “Andy went into hysterics at just about everything Dad did. I’ve never seen anyone laugh like Andy; it was an event. First, he’d throw his head back and laugh, ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha!!’ Then, he’d start to stomp around. I was shocked at his next move — he punched a hole in a set wall.”
Karen learned that this was a regular practice on the set of the series. She wrote, “When I mentioned it to Dad, he said, ‘You know who really loves Andy’s laugh? The grips on set who make overtime pay patching up those holes.”
