Interviewer: “Werner, people still talk about the physical comedy on the show, but I’ve always wondered about the monocle. It was such a signature part of Colonel Klink. Was it ever a struggle to keep that thing in while you were yelling at the boys?”

Werner Klemperer: (laughs) “Oh, you have no idea. That little piece of glass was my best friend and my worst enemy. You have to understand the dynamic we had on that set. It was 1967, and we were hitting our stride. But we were also exhausted.

Sitcom schedules are grueling, and when you are filming a show about a POW camp, you are often stuck in these gray, dusty sets for fourteen hours a day. We had to find the humor wherever we could just to stay sane.

I remember one particular morning. It was freezing on the Paramount lot. We were filming a scene in the commissary. The script was standard Hogan fare—I was supposed to be berating John Banner, our wonderful Schultz, for some security lapse.

John was a dear man, but he was also a very large man who loved his food, both on and off camera. In this scene, he was supposed to be sitting at a table, frantically eating a bowl of very greasy, very hot potato soup while I hovered over him like a vulture.

The director, Gene Reynolds, wanted me to be especially ‘Prussian’ that day. He told me, ‘Werner, I want you to get so close to him that he can feel the starch on your collar.’ I was leaning in, my face inches from his, screaming about the inefficiency of the Luftwaffe guards.

John was doing his best to look terrified, his cheeks full of soup, eyes darting back and forth. I felt the tension building in the room. The crew was silent. The cameras were rolling. I took a deep, dramatic breath to deliver the final, crushing insult of the scene.

I leaned forward even further, my face hovering directly over his steaming bowl. I squeezed my eye muscles to give him that cold, steely Klink stare.

And that’s when it happened.

The monocle didn’t just fall out. It didn’t simply tumble down my cheek like it usually did during a botched take. Because of the heat from the soup and the sweat on my face from the studio lights, the suction completely failed in a spectacular, pressurized burst.

That tiny circle of glass shot out of my eye socket like a torpedo launched from a U-boat. It traveled through the air with unbelievable precision and landed with a perfect, sickening ‘plop’ right in the dead center of John Banner’s bowl of potato soup.

A localized tidal wave of lukewarm broth erupted, splashing directly onto John’s nose and his mustache. The entire set went deathly quiet. You could have heard a pin drop on the soundstage.

Now, usually, when a prop fails like that, the director yells ‘Cut’ immediately. But Gene stayed silent. He wanted to see what would happen. And John… John was a comedic genius of the highest order.

He didn’t break character for a second. He just sat there, soup dripping off his nose, looking down into his bowl where my monocle was slowly sinking into the depths of the potatoes.

He looked at the bowl. He looked at me. He looked back at the bowl. Then, with the most delicate, refined movement I have ever seen from a man of his size, he picked up his spoon. He carefully fished the monocle out of the broth, held it up to the light as if he were a jeweler inspecting a rare sapphire, and wiped a bit of leek off the lens.

He looked me straight in the eye, gave that iconic, innocent Schultz shrug, and said, ‘Herr Kommandant, I believe you have lost your perspective. I see it, but… I see nothing!’

The dam broke. It started with a snort from the camera operator. Then the lighting crew started. Within five seconds, the entire soundstage was erupting in the kind of laughter that makes your ribs ache.

I completely lost my composure. I had to lean against the table because my knees were buckling. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. John just sat there with that enormous, beaming smile, still holding my soup-covered monocle out to me like a gift.

Robert Clary and Richard Dawson, who were standing off-camera waiting for their cue, came running over. Richard was doubled over, pointing at the soup on John’s face.

The director was literally falling out of his chair. He kept trying to say something, but every time he looked at John’s mustache dripping with potato broth, he would start howling all over again. We had to shut down production for nearly twenty minutes because no one could look at me or John without losing it.

The makeup department was in a panic because my face was red from laughing and John needed a full wipe-down. But the best part was the prop master. He came over with a towel, took the monocle from John, and very seriously asked me if I wanted it ‘original or extra crispy.’

That moment changed the energy of the whole season. ‘I see nothing’ wasn’t just a line anymore; it became our internal code for when things went wrong. If a light fell over or someone forgot a line, John would just look at the mess and whisper, ‘I see nothing,’ and we’d all start giggling like schoolboys again.

It’s those moments that people don’t see when they watch the reruns. They see the uniforms and the set, but they don’t see the deep, genuine love we had for each other.

We were a bunch of Jewish actors playing Nazis in a comedy, which is an absurd thing if you think about it too long. But in those moments, when a monocle falls into a bowl of soup, all the heavy history and the pressure of the industry just vanished.

We were just friends making each other laugh in the dark. I think that’s why the show worked. You can’t fake that kind of joy, even when you’re wearing a monocle and a uniform that represents the worst of history.

John taught me that day that the best way to handle a mistake is to embrace it. If your eye falls into the soup, you might as well offer the Kommandant a spoon.

Humor is the only thing that makes the hard days bearable, wouldn’t you agree?

What’s the funniest mistake you’ve ever had to turn into a success?