Burnett shares stories and laughs
Television icon brings her live show to Oakland for one nostalgic night
When Carol Burnett looks back on the beloved television variety show she headlined for 11 years, she shakes her head and wonders how she and her band of merry goofballs managed to avoid racking up a huge pile of medical bills.
“We did so much physical comedy and had so many pratfalls, but none of us ever broke a bone,” she says in amazement. “There were lots of bruises, but no breaks. Heaven must have been looking upon us.”
Burnett, now 85, put the slapstick gymnastics to rest long ago. When she appears tonight at Oakland’s Paramount Theatre, she’ll stick to the safe stuff — sharing hilarious video clips from her eponymous CBS series, telling some stories and, as she did back in the day, taking questions from the audience.
“Nothing is pre-planned. Sometimes I feel like I’m flying without a net,” Burnett says during a freewheeling phone conversation. “But it keeps the old gray matter working. I can’t be thinking about yesterday or tomorrow. I have to be totally present.”
As Burnett travels the country — she has a show in Sacramento two nights before the Oakland gig — she naturally hears many of the same questions. Fans, for example, want to know how she created that crazy Tarzan yell (“It’s really just a yodel”), and whether Tim Conway was as funny off-camera as he was on (“He certainly was”).
Every now and then, she’ll get a question that throws her for a loop, like that time in Texas about 10 years ago when a woman in the balcony asked: “If you could be a member off the opposite sex for 24 hours, who would you be and what would you do?”
“It caught me by surprise. I paused and said a little prayer under my breath, asking God to help me with the answer,” she recalled. “Then I replied: ‘I’d be Osama bin Laden and I’d kill myself.’ The crowd went crazy.”
Of course, most fans crave some behind-thescenes intel from “The Carol Burnett Show,” the iconic series that ran from 1967 to 1978 and stamped Burnett as her generation’s queen of comedy. The show, which captured 25 Emmy Awards, had her clowning around alongside Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner and Conway before closing out each hour with her trademark ear tug and leaving viewers so glad they had this time together.
Last year, CBS celebrated the iconic series with a 50th anniversary special and Burnett published a book (“In Such Good Company — Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem and Fun in the Sandbox”) in which she reminisced about some of the show’s greatest moments.
In preparing the book, Burnett rewatched all 276 episodes and was pleased to discover that most of the humor still holds up today.
“We were never really topical. We just went for the laughs,” she says. “And funny is funny.”
To wit: A cherished skit in which Korman is a patient of a bumbling — and
clueless — dentist played by Conway.
“I dare anyone to watch that and not fall over laughing,” Burnett says.
Her favorite characters? Mrs. Wiggins, an
empty-headed secretary, and Eunice, a short-tempered Southern housewife. Of the latter Burnett says, “She presented a good acting exercise. There were no jokes. It was all attitude.
She was kind of pitiful.”
Not surprisingly, some of the most fun Burnett had was hamming it up in big-screen movie spoofs, the most memorable of which surely has to be the “Gone With the Wind” take-off that had her Scarlett O’Hara in a dress made of curtains, the rod still attached.
“When I was a kid, my grandmother and I would save our pennies to go to the movies and we’d sometimes see six to eight a week with the double features,” Burnett says. “So it was a big thrill for me to be Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable and other big stars I used to watch.”
These days, there’s nothing like “The Carol Burnett Show” in prime time. Though networks have taken occasional stabs at resurrecting the variety-show genre, their efforts failed to strike ratings gold. Burnett believes that, under the right circumstances, it could still work — but probably not on the same scale as her show.
“We had a 28-piece orchestra and a dozen dancers. And we averaged about 65 Bob Mackie costumes per show,” she says. “In essence, we were doing a little Broadway musicalcomedy every week.”