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Percy Dovetonsils is a fictional character created and played by television comedian Ernie Kovacs. Percy was introduced as a "poet laureate" who appeared onscreen as a bizarre effeminate "artiste" with weirdly slicked hair and extraordinarily thick eyeglasses that appeared to have eyes painted on the backsides of the lenses. He would appear seated in a chair wearing some sort of patterned smoking jacket and would have an oversize book laying open in his lap. Percy would address the audience in a syrupy lisp and then read his poems out of the book.
The poems themselves were corny/silly, with titles like "Leslie the Mean Animal Trainer" and "Ode to a Housefuly (Philosophical Ruminations on a Beastie in the Booze)". While clever, the real humor of the poems lay in the delivery, Percy's appearance, and his obvious self-satisfaction with his poems.
The character has characteristics of the stereotype of homosexuals common in the 1950s and early 1960s. In one segment, he looks up abruptly from his book and says "That cameraman has the motht muthcular legth..." - it was probably a Kovacs ad-lib because you could hear a laugh in the background and the camera shook momentarily.
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