Burnett so glad for time on TV
The “Mary Worthless” sketch, in which Carol Burnett wears an old-lady wig and lampoons the Sunday funnies’ most annoying busybody, was not as terrible as the sketch-comedy heroine recalls. It has Harvey Korman taking a cake to the face, then flinging himself out a window. And it has Burnett, sensing something has gone terribly wrong with the sketch, ad-libbing a closing line: “Don’t be surprised if I show up on your doorstep someday. Better yet, be surprised, because I’m not doing this again.”
“It wasn’t really landing well, and things were going wrong with it,” Burnett, 83, says of the 1972 sketch on her namesake TV hit. “But we were very freewheeling on our show. From the start, I never wanted to take a long time to tape it in front of an audience.
“We’d do about an hour and 15 minutes, because I’d do a lot of (audience) Q&As, which I’d then edit,” she continues in a half-hour phone interview from her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. “We did it quickly. Even if stuff went wrong, unless the scenery would fall and knock us out, we kept going.”
When it comes to “The Carol Burnett Show,” which aired from 1967 to 1978, drew an average of 30 million viewers per episode and won 25 Emmy Awards, Burnett has been in a reflective mood recently. Her live act, “Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett,” centers on a wide-ranging Carol Burnett, 83, is touring the country in a live act and has written her fourth book, due this year.
audience question-andanswer session. She’ll discuss her famous ensemble, including Korman, Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence; her post-show movie roles, including Miss Hannigan in “Annie”; and her prolific career on Broadway, perhaps peaking with an early-’70s role alongside the late Rock Hudson in “I Do! I Do!”
For her fourth book, “In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem and Fun in the Sandbox,” due out in September, Burnett rewatched all 276 show episodes. “Not straight through,” she clarifies. “I fast-forwarded it through a lot of stuff.”
It’s true that some of the “Burnett Show” sketches, preserved for eternity in a 3,720-minute boxed set two years ago and dozens of YouTube clips, seem stuck in the 1970s. But many are timeless comedy manuals, instructing the world on the art of deadpan, economic writing and physical comedy.
“So much of it was spontaneous, and we were really having a good time,” Burnett recalls.
Like many comedians, Burnett had a difficult childhood; both her parents had a drinking problem. Her grandmother raised her in Hollywood, and they attended eight movies a week.
Initially, in part because her mother aspired to interview movie stars as a journalist, Burnett enrolled at UCLA, intending to major in journalism. Wanting to write plays in college, she landed in theater arts; during a required acting class, she stood up to do a comedy scene.
“The students laughed, and I went, ‘Whoa! This is what I’ve been missing my whole 18 years! I like this feeling,’ ” she says.
She landed in the offBroadway “Once Upon a Mattress,” which pushed her in the direction of TV hit “The Garry Moore Show.” Burnett won her first Emmy there and became so well-known that CBS signed her to a 10-year deal, which eventually became “The Carol Burnett Show.”
“I look back on it, and not that I want to do it again, but I missed some of it,” she says. “When I would see certain things happening, I would say, ‘I wish we were doing the show, so I could see a takeoff on that.’ Today, I’d want to do the Kardashians.”