You can spend a year developing and fine-tuning a television sitcom to the point where everything feels calibrated to hit precisely as you’ve intended, and then watch dumbstruck as viewers unexpectedly fall so hard for a supporting character that you wonder if you built the series around the wrong actor. This happened to Garry Marshall during the first two seasons of “Happy Days,” when it became clear that Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli, the motorcycle-riding tough guy written as an offbeat foil to the series’ protagonist Richie Cunningham, had become a pop culture phenomenon. As portrayed by Henry Winkler, people either wanted to be him or be with him.
ABC was so hot for Fonzie that they considered rechristening the series as “Fonzie’s Happy Days” (an idea that nearly prompted Ron Howard to walk off the show). Ultimately, Marshall figured out how to make sure no one person dominated the sitcom, but he couldn’t do anything about his audience being smitten with the Fonz. Every week when Winkler made his big entrance, he was greeted with roaring applause and whistles. And when he let loose with one of his catchphrases or fired up the jukebox with a whap of his hand, the studio audience went wild again.
While Winkler was obviously deeply dialed into his portrayal of Fonzie, you might be wondering how much credit the writers deserved for creating such a zeitgeisty character. It was actually a collaboration wherein everyone provided a bit of zest to make the Fonz such a sitcom legend.
How Henry Winkler got to Ayy from Hey
In a 2023 Access Hollywood timed to the 50th anniversary of “Happy Days” (which was almost titled “COOL”), Winkler revealed that his most popular catchphrase, “Ayy,” was scripted as “Hey.” But as he told the Television Academy Foundation in 2006, he would find a kind of verbal shorthand for these utterances. “I understood … he spoke too much sometimes,” said Winkler. “They would write paragraphs to me, and I reduced language to sound.” This is how the more staccato “Hey” became a legato “Ayy.”
As for “Whoa,” which he would use as a pump-the-brakes response to someone who’d said something stupid or simply out of bounds, Winkler claims he got that from horseback riding, which was his favorite sport at the time.
Finally, could Winkler actually turn a jukebox on or off by whacking it? “Yes, I can,” he told Access Hollywood. “But you can’t tell anybody else.” Unfortunately, the notorious nice guy Winkler cannot tell a lie – for long at least. “If there was a man named Fred in the back of the set, and he plugs it in at the same time I hit it, it goes off.”