The studio lights were a bit warmer than Werner Klemperer usually liked, but he sat there with the same straight-backed poise that had defined his career. He was in his late seventies now, looking more like the distinguished conductor’s son he was than the bumbling commandant of Stalag 13. The audience was quiet, hanging on every word of his journey from a refugee escaping Nazi Germany to playing one of the most famous fictional Nazis in television history.

He was explaining the technicality of his performance. He mentioned how he had insisted that Klink must never succeed, that he must be the fool for the show to work. Then, his eyes drifted to the third row. A young man was sitting there, grinning ear to ear, holding up a small, circular piece of glass on a string. It was a monocle.

Werner let out a sharp, joyful bark of a laugh that filled the room. He pointed a long, elegant finger at the fan and shook his head. He told the host that people always asked if the monocle was glued to his face or if it was held by a special wire attached to his ear. It wasn’t. It was all muscle, a constant, grueling tension held in the orbit of his eye for hours of filming.

He began to describe a hot Tuesday afternoon on the Paramount lot. They were filming a scene in Klink’s office, and the script called for a very tense, very high-stakes confrontation with John Banner. John, of course, played the beloved Sergeant Schultz.

The scene was long. It was one of those three-page dialogues where Klink had to berate Schultz for a security lapse while simultaneously trying to hide his own incompetence from a visiting General. The set was sweltering under the lamps. John Banner was sweating, Werner was sweating, and the monocle was starting to feel like a greasy fish trying to escape its bowl.

Werner described how he felt his facial muscles starting to twitch from the strain of holding that piece of glass while shouting his lines at the top of his lungs. He was leaning right into John’s face, looming over him to show the General how disciplined the camp was.

Everything was perfect until the exact moment the tension reached its breaking point.

The monocle didn’t just slip. It performed a literal somersault off Werner’s cheekbone.

In the middle of a particularly fierce sentence about the efficiency of the Third Reich, the glass popped out with the velocity of a champagne cork. Because Werner was leaning so far forward, the monocle bypassed the floor entirely. It took a direct, guided trajectory straight into the cavernous, open collar of John Banner’s heavy wool Luftwaffe tunic.

There was a half-second of absolute, vacuum-sealed silence on the set. Werner stood there, one eye squinting as if he still had the glass in place, his mouth still open to finish the word “discipline.”

John Banner, being the ultimate professional, didn’t move at first. He just stood there like a mountain of blue wool. But then, everyone saw it. A tiny, silver-rimmed circle began to travel. Because of the way the tunic was cut and the way John was standing, the monocle began a slow, rhythmic descent down the inside of his shirt.

You could see the little bump of the glass moving past his chest, then his ribs, then his stomach. John’s eyes went wide. His eyebrows shot up to his hairline. He looked like a man who had just realized a very small, very cold mouse was exploring his torso.

Werner said he tried to keep going. He really did. He took a breath to deliver the next line, but his eye kept following the progress of the monocle behind John’s buttons. The absurdity of the situation hit him like a physical blow. He watched as John’s expression shifted from professional stoicism to a desperate, twitching need to giggle.

Suddenly, John let out a sound. It wasn’t a laugh; it was a high-pitched, strangled wheeze, the kind of sound a boiling teakettle makes right before it screams. That was the end of it. Werner collapsed. He didn’t just chuckle; he fell into his desk chair, doubling over until his forehead hit the wood.

The director, who had been watching the monitors with intense focus, didn’t even yell “cut” at first. He just dropped his headset and started slapping his knees. The camera operators were shaking so hard that the frame of the shot was vibrating.

John Banner, meanwhile, was frantically unbuttoning his tunic, jumping up and down in a sort of frantic polka, trying to shake the monocle out of his pants leg. Every time he jumped, the glass would clink against a button, and the crew would roar with fresh laughter.

Werner told the talk show host that they lost at least forty-five minutes of production time that day. Every time they tried to reset, John would look at Werner, Werner would look at John’s collar, and the cycle would start all over again.

The makeup department had to come in and fix Werner’s face because he had cried all his eye makeup off from laughing. They had to dry out John’s tunic because he was practically hyperventilating.

Even the General, the guest actor who was supposed to be the “straight man” in the scene, was found leaning against the prop safe in the corner of the office, gasping for air.

Werner recalled how John finally fished the monocle out of his boot. He held it up, dripping with the sweat of a very long day, and handed it back to Werner with that perfect, booming Schultz voice, saying, “Herr Kommandant, I think you dropped your eye.”

The crew never let Werner live it down. For weeks afterward, whenever Klink was supposed to be angry or intimidating, someone would whisper from behind a flat, “Watch out, John, he’s aiming for your pockets!”

Werner laughed as he told the audience that this was the secret of the show. People often wondered how a group of actors, many of whom were Jewish and had suffered terribly during the war, could spend years wearing those uniforms.

He explained that the laughter was their way of taking the power back. By making those characters into bumbling fools who couldn’t even keep a monocle in their eye without it ending up in someone else’s trousers, they were stripping the darkness away from the history.

He looked back at the fan in the third row and thanked him for the memory. He said that whenever he missed John Banner—who had passed away years prior—he didn’t think about the scripts or the awards. He thought about that monocle traveling down John’s belly and the way the big man’s laughter used to shake the very walls of the fake barracks.

It was a small, silly moment, but for a cast that worked in the shadow of such heavy history, those fits of uncontrollable giggling were the things that truly made them a family.

Sometimes the best way to handle a rigid situation is to let a little bit of gravity take over.

Do you have a favorite memory of the bumbling Colonel Klink?