Get Smart’s Shoe Phone: How Mel Brooks Turned Spy Gadgets into Comedy
James Bond had an Aston Martin. Maxwell Smart had a telephone in his shoe.
That distinction tells you almost everything necessary about Get Smart, the television spy comedy created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry that arrived on NBC in September 1965.
The timing was impeccable. Bond was a global phenomenon, Cold War espionage occupied newspapers and popular culture had developed an apparently limitless appetite for secret agents equipped with concealed cameras, miniature transmitters and gadgets capable of doing practically anything except appearing remotely sensible.
Get Smart simply asked what happened when all that technology was issued to an idiot.
Spy Mania Needed Puncturing
Producer Daniel Melnick approached Brooks in 1964 with the idea of spoofing the fashionable spy genre. Brooks later recalled being told that Inspector Clouseau and James Bond were among the biggest characters in popular entertainment and being asked to find a television idea somewhere between them.
With Buck Henry, he created Maxwell Smart: Agent 86 of CONTROL, permanently confident, impeccably dressed and generally several minutes behind everybody else in the room.
ABC passed on the pilot. NBC did not.
Get Smart premiered on 18 September 1965 and ultimately ran for five seasons, winning seven Emmys. Brooks wanted something closer to a live-action comic strip than a conventional domestic sitcom, and the spy craze provided an ideal machinery for absurdity.
Hellwood’s Get Smart T-Shirt celebrates Agent 86 and Agent 99 at the centre of that collision between espionage and farce.
The Shoe Phone Rings
The Get Smart shoe phone is one of those comedy props that feels inevitable in retrospect.
It wasn't.
Brooks has explained that the idea arrived while he was working in an office where several telephones began ringing simultaneously. He removed his shoe and pretended to answer another call.
Then came the useful realisation: a shoe was probably the worst possible location for a secret telephone.
Max regularly had to remove it, manipulate the sole and hold the footwear against his face while attempting to conduct supposedly urgent government business. Sophisticated spy technology had been reduced to the problem of answering your brogue without attracting attention.
The gag became so closely associated with the character that Brooks recalled Don Adams being greeted for years by restaurant diners removing their shoes and saluting him.
Not every cultural legacy needs dignity.
Enter the Cone of Silence
Buck Henry supplied another masterpiece of defective espionage technology: the Cone of Silence.
The transparent dome descended over Smart and the Chief whenever conversations became particularly sensitive. Its purpose was to make their discussion impossible for outsiders to hear.
Its principal achievement was making it impossible for Smart and the Chief to hear each other.
That reversal captured the programme's approach to gadgets. In conventional spy fiction, technology establishes the hero's superiority. In Get Smart, technology introduces another opportunity for embarrassment.
The more elaborate the security procedure, the greater the chance that somebody standing outside it could hear everything perfectly.
Agent 99 Was Usually the Actual Spy
The machinery worked because Maxwell Smart was surrounded by people considerably more competent than he was.
Most importantly, there was Agent 99.
Barbara Feldon's character could shoot, investigate, improvise and recognise danger while Max confidently wandered towards it. Brooks has described 99 as the show's sane centre and specifically remembered Feldon as the sharpest performer interviewed for the role.
The relationship quietly inverted another spy convention. The male agent received the gadgets, heroic poses and grand speeches. His female partner frequently performed the work required to keep him alive.
Don Adams contributed to the programme's verbal machinery too. His stand-up routines supplied the escalating bluff that became “Would you believe...?”, while variations on “missed it by that much” and apologetic retreats from disaster became part of television's comic vocabulary.
Browse Hellwood’s Classic Comedy & Sitcom T-Shirts, Cult TV Show T-Shirts and wider TV T-Shirts collection for more programmes that survived long after their original schedules disappeared.
Bad Technology, Excellent Comedy
The shoe phone remains funny because the basic joke has aged unusually well.
Technology promises convenience. Technology then creates a completely new inconvenience nobody previously knew they needed.
Smart's shoe merely got there early.
Sixty years later, we routinely talk to watches, earbuds and household appliances. A telephone concealed in footwear no longer seems technologically impossible.
It just still seems like a terrible idea.
Mel Brooks would probably count that as vindication.
GET SMART T-SHIRT
A Hellwood tribute to Agent 86, Agent 99 and the spy comedy that proved saving the free world is considerably harder when your telephone is attached to your foot.