Don Knotts and Tim Conway, side-splitting second bananas

“Why didn’t you tell me my rear end was on fire!?” “Well, you told me not to do anything that would attract attention. You got a match?” Tim Conway [Amos Tucker] and Don Knotts [Theodore Ogelvie] case the Quake City bank in director Norman Tokar’s “The Apple Dumpling Gang,” which went before the cameras on July 15, 1974, in the Disney Studios back lot in Burbank and later shot on location in the Los Padres National Forest and Deschutes National Forest. Image Credit: The Walt Disney Company

Tim Conway is forever enshrined as a vital element of Carol Burnett’s comedy-variety troupe, but his five late ’70s motion picture pairings with Don Knotts are hysterically funny and have been more widely reissued on home video. Over a five-year stretch — a Knotts idiosyncrasy going back to his Andy Griffith Show, Universal Films, and soon-to-be Three’s Company tenure— the bossy, bug-eyed Mayberry deputy and the decidedly silly McHale’s Navy ensign made three Disney features — The Apple Dumpling Gang, Gus [regrettably no scenes together], The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again — and two indies scripted by Conway for B-movie innovator Roger Corman’s New World Pictures — The Prize Fighter and The Private Eyes. Fast forward to 1984, and their orangutan-assisted cameo as highway patrolmen in the all-star Cannonball Run II proved to be one of the sole bright spots in the asinine road movie that killed Burt Reynolds’ 11-year reign in the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll. Instead of vignettes embracing cheap laughs, their humor was character-driven.

In his 2014 memoir, What’s So Funny? My Hilarious Life, Conway shed light on how he initially glimpsed Knotts on television. “I’d watched Don do his ‘Man in the Street’ interviews on The Steve Allen Show [1957–1960], and he had me doubled over with laughter,” wrote the nearly decade-younger funnyman. “Don would…