The studio lights were always a bit too bright for a man who had spent the previous night enjoying the Los Angeles nightlife, but Richard Dawson sat in the interview chair with that signature effortless poise. He leaned back, the ghost of a smile playing on his lips as he adjusted his cuffs. It was the late eighties, and while the world knew him as the sharp-tongued king of game shows, the conversation had inevitably turned back to the barracks of Stalag 13.
The host gestured toward the audience, inviting a question from a silver-haired woman in the front row. She held up an old clipping from a television guide and asked if there was ever a moment where the comedy on Hogan’s Heroes felt less like a script and more like a riot. Richard let out a dry, melodic chuckle that rumbled in his chest. He looked at the clipping, then back at the host, his eyes twinkling with the memory of a very specific afternoon in North Hollywood.
He began by explaining that after several seasons, the core cast had become a finely tuned machine of mischief. They knew each other’s rhythms better than their own heartbeats. But every so often, the network would bring in a guest director who didn’t quite understand the “Hogan’s way.” One particular director arrived on set with a background in gritty, European theater. He wanted “pathos.” He wanted the “stark reality of confinement.” He treated the comedy like it was a secondary concern to the atmospheric tension of a prisoner-of-war camp.
On this particular day, they were filming a scene in the barracks. It was a standard briefing where Bob Crane had to explain a complex plan involving a hidden radio and a stolen German codebook. The director, however, kept stopping the rehearsal. He felt the actors were being “too light.” He wanted them to feel the weight of their characters’ situation. Richard, sensing an opportunity for some high-level chaos, caught Bob Crane’s eye across the set.
I saw Bob give that tiny, almost imperceptible tilt of the head, and I knew the game was on.
The director called for a fresh take, his voice booming about “the stakes of the war” and the “shadow of the wire.” We all took our places. The cameras started rolling, and the room went silent. Bob started the scene, but instead of his usual confident, leading-man delivery, he began to whisper as if he were terrified of the walls themselves. He was leaning so far into the “gritty drama” that he was practically vibrating with fake intensity.
When it was my turn to deliver Newkirk’s line about the radio frequencies, I decided to take the director’s request for “authenticity” to a place he never expected. I didn’t just use my normal Cockney accent. I leaned in and spoke in a dialect so thick, so utterly nonsensical and peppered with fake British slang, that I might as well have been speaking a dead language. I looked the director dead in the eye and described the radio components as “the brass-bottomed wobbly-bits near the chimney-sweep’s elbow.”
I expected a “cut” immediately. Instead, the director was nodding. He was actually leaning in, mesmerized by what he thought was “deeply researched period jargon.”
I felt the air in the room change. Larry Hovis, who played Carter, saw what I was doing and immediately doubled down. When he was supposed to talk about the explosives, he started describing them using nothing but baking metaphors, but with the gravitas of a man reciting Shakespeare. He talked about “folding the flour of the TNT into the whisked eggs of the detonator” with tears practically welling in his eyes.
The best part was John Banner. Dear, wonderful John was standing near the door as Schultz. He knew the script backwards. He heard us talking about wobbly-bits and soufflé bombs, and you could see his massive frame start to shake. He wasn’t crying for the “pathos” of the scene; he was trying to prevent a literal explosion of laughter from bursting out of his chest. He turned his back to the camera, pretending to inspect a coat rack, but his shoulders were bouncing like he was on a trampoline.
The director was still silent. He was behind the monitor, whispering to the script supervisor. We kept the scene going for four minutes. Four minutes of pure, improvised gibberish delivered with the intensity of an Oscar-winning war film. We talked about secret tunnels leading to imaginary candy shops and the strategic importance of the Commandant’s hat size. We were all waiting for the hammer to fall.
Finally, the director stood up. We all froze, thinking this was the moment we’d get the lecture of a lifetime. He looked at us with genuine awe and said, “That… that is the truth I was looking for. The jargon, the tension… it’s so raw. Let’s print that.”
The set went deathly quiet for about three seconds. Then, Bob Crane let out a howl that echoed off the rafters. I collapsed onto one of the bunks, gasping for air because I had been holding my breath for so long trying not to break. The crew, who had been watching this train wreck in total confusion, finally realized the director had been completely hoodwinked. They started cheering.
The poor director looked around, his face turning a shade of red that matched the Nazi flags on the set. He realized that we hadn’t been “finding the truth”; we had been finding out exactly how much nonsense he would accept as long as it looked “serious.” He didn’t find it nearly as funny as we did at first. In fact, he stormed off to his trailer for an hour to “re-evaluate the tone of the production.”
But that was the beauty of that cast. We weren’t just making a show; we were a family that lived to keep each other sane through the absurdity of our jobs. Eventually, even that director had to laugh. He came back out, apologized for being a bit too “theatrical,” and we filmed the scene the right way. But for the rest of the week, every time he walked past me, I’d whisper something about “wobbly-bits,” and he’d just shake his head and keep walking.
It remains one of my favorite memories because it reminded me that in the middle of a high-pressure Hollywood production, the most important thing you can have is a group of friends who aren’t afraid to turn the whole world upside down just for a laugh. We were a bunch of grown men in costumes playing war, and we never forgot how lucky we were to be doing it together.
It makes me wonder if people realize how much of that show was built on us just trying to make each other crack.
Do you think modern TV sets still have that kind of rebellious, family-style humor behind the scenes?
