Hank Kimball
Henry Wadsworth "Hank" Kimball is the county agent in the 1965–71 American television comedy Green Acres. The show is about a rich Manhattan couple, Oliver and Lisa Douglas, who decide to buy and run a farm in the wacky and surreal town of Hooterville.
Hank Kimball (played by Alvy Moore) is an unusual, perhaps unique, comic creation. He is friendly and eager-to-please, but he is highly scatterbrained and appears to have been educated beyond his intelligence. He has an unusual self-correcting manner where he makes a statement, then qualifies it, then corrects it, then corrects it further, and finally loses track of what he was saying entirely. The Encyclopedia of Television states that Kimball "personifies a kind of infinite regress, where every empirical statement branches into multiple statements that in turn preclude it, spiraling each new observation back and away from itself like an inductive Ecsherism." [1]
Hank Kimball was a more straightforward character when Green Acres first began. Over the course of the first season, however, he gradually changes into a scatterbrained flake who cannot seem to remember anything, unless, as Oliver Douglas figures out, you specifically tell him not to remember it. He frequently forgets Oliver's name while he is talking to him and has to ask him his name. Although Kimball is supposedly a farming expert, his advice is usually worthless. For example, in one episode, Oliver has children visiting his farm from New York City. He lets each one plant a small garden. Kimball comes and tells them he is the county agent and can tell them anything they would like to know about farming. A child asks how seeds know what to grow into. Kimball replies that the seeds just look at the pictures on the seed packs.
NOTE: Alvy Moore played the same character type in an episode of the Virginian two years earlier!
Same type of idiotic conversation. Season 1 Episode 29 April 24 1963
References
- ↑ Encyclopedia of Television Newcomb, Horace ed. p. 1030