TV legend Carol Burnett revives classic Q&A for Kitchener show
It’s not that she says anything edgy or provocative that impresses me during my phone interview with Carol Burnett, still plying her audience friendly brand of sketch comedy six decades after her TV debut.
I’m smart enough to know she’s answered every question I can throw at her at least 200 times, probably in the last week.
What impresses me is that for an icon of stage, screen and TV with a raft of awards longer than your grocery list, she’s so down to earth.
Oh, I know. People say that about celebrities all the time: Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt are so down to earth. Except for their billion dollar mansions, security entourages and high powered management teams, they’re just like you and me.
And let’s be clear: it takes very little effort to seduce star-struck media to ensure good press. Claiming you would have become a journalist had fame not plucked you from obscurity is but one way to endear yourself.
But I don’t get that feeling with Burnett, who comes off like a neighbour you might find yourself chatting with casually over a backyard fence.
At 85, she’s modest but forthright, her off-the-cuff candour and laid-back charm less studied than lived in, more infectious than affected.
And there’s no false modesty. She hosted “The Carol Burnett Show,” for crying out loud, the Rolls-Royce of TV variety shows, from 1967-’78, capping a powerhouse Saturday night comedy lineup that included “All in the Family,” “MASH,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”
People under 50 have no idea how big she was during Watergate/bicentennial era, when disco didn’t suck and Elvis Presley still walked the earth.
Smart, pithy, endlessly ambitious, she and her cutting edge ensemble — Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Lyle Waggoner — retooled the creaky variety format championed by vaudeville proteges like Ed Sullivan into an Emmy-winning powerhouse and created a new template for prime time.
With her endearing ear tug, boisterous Tarzan yell and witty send-ups of films like “Gone With The Wind,” the first woman to host a variety sketch show became the undisputed the Queen of Saturday Night.
Don’t expect her to back off that legacy, to pretend it was a fluke.
“Funny is funny,” she insists when I ask the secret to her show’s enduring success.
“I dare anybody to watch some old ‘All In The Family’s, or ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’s or ‘Bob Newhart’s or ‘Dick Van Dyke’s or us.
“We were never topical, so it remains just pure belly laughs without having to talk about what’s going on in the world today.”
Which is why, she insists, these shows stand the test of time.
“There’s a testament about that, because our DVDs and YouTube comments are through the roof.
“I’m getting fan mail from 10-year-olds and teenagers saying ‘Omigosh, we just discovered you through my mom, my grandmother!’ It’s amazing. We did the 50th anniversary show last year and the ratings went through the roof.”
Ironic then, and a little sad, that if this same show came along today, the chances of being picked up by a major network would be, zero?
“Nil, totally nil,” confirms Burnett from her California home.
“Because we mounted what amounted to a musical comedy review every week. It was like a Broadway show. We had a 28piece orchestra, 12 dancers, a rep company with Harvey, Vicki, Lyle and Tim, two guest stars and 65 costumes a week that Bob Mackie designed.
“Over 11 years, do the math: 279 shows, over 17,000 costumes.
“Today, no network would do that. It’s too prohibitive. And no network would allow me to hire (co-star/protégé) Vicki Lawrence.”
Why not?
“Because she had no experience. She was 18-years-old. We just saw something in her and the network left us alone. That doesn’t happen today.”
Despite her insistence that humour transcends time, it’s worth noting that in the years following her biggest success, Burnett — like Mary Tyler Moore and other TV trendsetters — was unable to repeat it.
“It was the writing,” she notes, referring to her 1990 comeback series — one of several attempts — that bore the same name.
“It just didn’t happen. I came back to do an anthology series (”Carol & Company”) for Disney, which was a hit. But because it was an anthology, each week we had a different original story, which was tantamount to writing a pilot a week.
“It was exhausting. The writers would be up all night. It was just awful on everybody, physically.
“Then CBS said, ‘Well, we’ll do another variety show with you’. But again, the writing was not there and my heart wasn’t in it. So I said ‘Why don’t you cancel it, it ain’t working.”
From there she headed back to her first love, theatre, made films with respected directors like Robert Altman and Billy Wilder and, embraced as a comedy legend, did guest spots on “The Larry Sanders Show,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Glee.”
And here she is, 40 years after her iconic Saturday night sign off, as eager and optimistic as ever.
“It’s about timing,” she says of the secret to successful comedy. “You either have it or you don’t. That’s a gift. You can improve it, but you have to have the gift in the first place.”
When I ask if TV comedy is less funny today, she considers the question carefully and for a moment I think she might do the unthinkable and take a contrarian point of view.
But she’s too honest for that. “I sound like an old fogie,” notes the native Texan with a rueful laugh. “But I find the majority of television shows today want to be edgy. They want to be crass. And I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but I get very bored when I tune into something and they use scatological terms.
“I’m tired of hearing about bodily functions. I want class. I want clever.”
Don’t get her started on the subject of network meddling.
“Back in the day, William Paley was the head of CBS and he would just say ‘OK, here’s your show. Here’s the time slot. I’m the businessman. You guys are the artists. Go put on your show,’” she recalls incredulously.
“Today no network would let you do that. They’ve gotta have upwards of 25 people telling you what to do and how to be funny and what colour you should wear in what scene.
“They don’t have an artistic bone in their body.”
Not that she’s bitter. Or she wouldn’t be coming to cities like Kitchener to revive the whimsical question-and-answer sessions from her iconic show.
“I never know what they’re gonna ask,” she notes in a bemused tone. “There are questions I get a lot like ‘Would you do the Tarzan yell?’ or ‘How did you discover Vicki Lawrence?’ or ‘Is Tim Conway that funny in real life?’ and I have stories I can tell.
“But then I’ll get some I’ve never heard before. It keeps the old grey matter ticking.”
Is that the whole show — Burnett on stage for 90 minutes, answering questions?
“I open with eight minutes of clips of the funniest questions and answers we had on my show,” she tells me enthusiastically.
“Then we bump up the lights and there are ushers with microphones. It’s all random. There are no preplanned questions. It’s more fun when it’s off the cuff.”
There is always the possibility, I suggest, that in a polite city like Kitchener, no one will ask her anything. What then?
“Well, it’ll be an early evening,” she quips with a boisterous laugh. “But that’s never happened.”
In the course of our 20-minute phone gab, Burnett also offers pithy reflections about:
• The funniest person she ever met.
“Marty Short. And way back, Tim Conway.”
• The last TV show that made her laugh out loud.
“’Schitt’s Creek’. I very seldom laugh out loud. And I did. It’s very clever.”
• Her pre-fame stint as a hat check girl in New York.
“It was a ladies tea room, but there was an oyster bar the men would go to and I would accost them before they could go downstairs — ‘Can I check your coat, Sir?’
“But I was kind of con artist ... (laughs) ... usually, they would tip you a quarter, so in order to get 35 cents — you know those little things in back of coat that you hang? Well, I would trim that and then resew it with different coloured thread.
“And then when the men came up I would say ‘Oh, this was broken, Sir, but I sewed it again for you,’ and they would give me an extra dime.”
• Not being the class clown.
“I was a nerd and editor of my high school paper. I was a good student, so when I started to get on television, I would get letters from school friends who said ‘Is that you?’”
She laughs. “They were shocked.”
• Her first love: journalism?
“I went to UCLA but they didn’t have a journalism major, so I joined the UCLA newspaper and majored in Theatre Arts and English.
“Every freshman had to take a course in acting. I was terrified and chose something very light and easy — and they laughed where they should have.
“All of the sudden my world turned upside down and I thought ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’”
• Her role as a female comedy pioneer in the days before the #MeToo movement.
“I never even considered to say ‘Omigawd, I’m the first woman to do this.’ I didn’t even occur to me.
“I was married to the producer.
We were a family. Everybody loved each other. There was never any salaciousness or anything that went on. “
• How the variety format became the unlikely ground zero for her rise to fame.
“I had a contract with CBS (after a three-year stint on “The Gary Moore Show”) that said if I wanted to do an hour-long comedy variety show, they would have to give us 30 episodes, whether they wanted to or not.
“And so I pushed that button and they went ‘No, you don’t want to do that! We’ve got a sitcom we want you to do.’ And I said ‘No thank you, but I love doing what I did on Garry’s show and that’s what I want to do on my show’, and they had to put us on the air.
“They didn’t have any faith in us. At all.”
• Her relationship with surviving “Carol Burnett Show” vets Lawrence, Waggoner and Conway. “I’m in touch with Vicki, Lyle lives out of the state, Tim I visited ... he’s not well.”
• Not well?
“From what I’ve heard, it’s water on the brain, and so they can kind of fix or adjust things. The neurologist working on his case says it’s not dementia.”
• Her ear tug sign off.
“When I got my very first job on television in New York, I called my grandmother in California and said ‘Nanny, I’m gonna be on TV on Saturday!’, and she said ‘Well, say hello to me.’
“And I said ‘I don’t think they’re gonna let me say ‘Hi Nanny,’’ so we worked out the tug on the ear.
“And I’ve been doing that, even after she died. It’s a habit.”
She laughs. “A few years ago Life Magazine measured my left ear and it was a half millimetre bigger than the right one.”
• Did it affect her hearing as well? “Hello? What?”
• Why, at 85, is she coming all the way to Kitchener?
“Why not? I love Canada. I find Canadian audiences very warm. I don’t find them any different than Florida or Texas or California. People are people.”
‘‘ We were a family. Everybody loved each other. There was never any salaciousness or anything that went on