Is it too early in the morning to go watch The Carol Burnett Show? Gosh. You brought it all back — I can just picture us all, kids sprawled on the floor, parents on the couch (Mom) and in the recliner (Dad), watching Carol fashion a gown out of velvet curtains (the curtain rods still attached) a la Scarlett O’Hara in a Gone With The Wind parody. BTW, I wish I could hang out with your wife. I wouldn’t be smart enough for her, but I bet I could get her to laugh.
That was one of the funniest bits ever on TV. When Rhett Butler compliments her gown, Carol deadpans "Oh, yes, I saw it in the window and just had to have it."
Kia would LOVE you. And yeah, sometimes I forget how the central appeal of TV was not aesthetic but as a replacement for the cave fire, around which the whole family could sit and soak up the warmth.
The episode I remember best is one I remember second-hand, in a way. My aunt, who became a nurse as an adult, had seen Dark Victory with Bette Davis as a young teen, and sobbed so uncontrollably at the ending she had to be escorted out of the theater. Then she saw the Carol Burnett version, with Vicki Lawrence as the nurse who tells the doomed Burnett, "You have... the same disease Bette Davis had in Dark Victory. It's called the movie disease, and it means you get more beautiful by the minute, until you hiccup three times and drop dead." And from that point on she kept getting seized by the temptation to tell patients, "You have..."
OMG! The Movie Disease! That's the same thing that Ali MacGraw's character in Love Story died of. I actually wrote a piece about The Movie Disease -- but I had completely forgotten that it came from the Carol Burnett Show. Need to go update my piece (!)
OMG! The Movie Disease! That's the same thing that Ali MacGraw's character in Love Story died of. I actually wrote a piece about The Movie Disease -- but I had completely forgotten that it came from the Carol Burnett Show. Need to go update my piece (!)
And the Carol Burnett Show also did a memorable Love Story. The doctor (Lyle Waggoner) examines Jenny (Burnett) and sadly tells Oliver (Korman) "she has five minutes to live. Don't tell her; let her last minutes be happy ones." So Korman says to Burnett, "hey, Funnyface, the doctor says you're gonna be fine. Is there anything you want?"
There was a long, loud roar of laughter from the audience after Burnett delivered her "three-minute egg" line, and Korman had to stand patiently through it, (mostly) straight faced, until he could deliver his.
Except for the GWTW dress-cum-curtain rod bit, the funniest thing I ever saw on American TV* was Tim Conway playing a dueling Musketeer, wildly waving a sword around as he slew various enemies including Harvey Korman (of course) and Lyle Waggoner. Then he accidentally ran himself through, pulled out the sword and looked at it, and said, "I'm down a quart."
* Funniest thing EVER on TV was Hugh Laurie in Blackadder Goes Forth, admitting that he had become engaged to General Melchett.
One of the few shows our entire family enjoyed. Tim Conway joining the show made my McHale's Navy loving dad very happy and we would set aside our Silent Generation vs Hippies differences for this one hour a week. Mom would make chocolate Jello pudding and we'd pour it over vanilla ice cream while still hot. Easily the best hour of the week.
Lordy, I remember being maybe 6 and watching (at a drive-in!) MCHALE’S NAVY JOINS THE AIR FORCE on a bill with IN HARM’S WAY. (I grew up in a military family)
MCHALE’S NAVY JOINS THE AIR FORCE is on DailyMotion! The ten minutes I saw of it are pretty damn inept. If I were six I'm sure I'd have loved it. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fp1jh
Always got the impression that she *wanted* us to kick back, relax, and laugh, on purpose. So much of CBS's early '70s programming was wrapped around Norman Lear-like "message" stuff--not that there was anything wrong with that--that by the end of the week (my memory is of the Carol Burnett Show on Saturday nights but I'm probably wrong) you needed a *break*.
You have our leave to talk about it for days. (BTW, you’re right about LAUGH-IN, but I still love Alan Sues as hungover Uncle Al: “Hi kids. Uncle Al had too much medicine last night.”)
I like Laugh-In despite its frenetic pacing. Given the format, it was extremely well written, and the ensemble they assembled proved supremely adept at short-sketch comedy. Also, too, Goldie Hawn in a bikini.
Ha ha yeah, I have to watch some more of those (for my REsearch!) I do see the talent and professionalism; maybe future viewings will alter my impression that audiences were just stunned into submission.
The failed revival of Laugh-In is a good indicator of what the original show got right, though it really is a time capsule, trying to stuff The Hippies into a Vegas review by reviving Hellzapoppin' of all things. I think most people were just stunned into liking it. And yeah, a body-painted Goldie Hawn in a bikini.
This is peripheral, but when else will I get to tell this story? In 71/72, when I was 11, I was a regular panelist on a syndicated TV show called "Kid Talk", where the bit was that some celeb would come on, talk a little about some topic they were interested in, and then ask the panel of four kids what they thought about it. (When Senator Mike Gravel came on Andy Yamamoto and I hassled him about the Alaska Pipeline and melting the permafrost until the producers came over and and told us to cut it out.). Anyway, we'd shoot two or three half hour shows in an evening at a studio at NBC Burbank, which would be mostly deserted. Sometimes there'd be long breaks and we could roam around the building. A nearby studio had the Laugh-In joke wall as a standing set and sometimes we'd climb around on the stairs and pop open the doors. (Never figured out how to work the trap-door though.). One time cast member Dennis Allen found us and very kindly escorted us out. I thnk he thought our youngest person, Mona Tera (who was six or seven when the rest of us were 11), was just adorable. I watched Laugh-In when it was on, sort of appreciated that there was some new joke along any second, didn't really get what was supposed to be funny about much of it, but enjoyed some of the proudly stupid material (like, "say goodnight, Dick" / "goodnight, Dick", which I didn't realize then was stolen from Burns & Allen). My crush, watching the show, wasn't Goldie Hawn (adorable) or Judy Carnes (strikingly talented; exact same energy as Davy Jones in the Monkees reruns I was watching) but Teresa Graves - just stunning.
Re: Burnett and Bonell--At that time, TV was not only exploring but pushing the social boundaries, especially with regard to race. Black people went from characters being portrayed by White actors in blackface to actual POC playing POC characters. Shows centered round Black characters were greenlighted and ran (Diahann Carroll, for example), and scripting changed dramatically to show Black characters as full humans struggling with day-to-day existence in the capitalist paradise of America.
So it's not too surprising that Burnett would do such a routine. There was, after all, a lot of hope that America would finally start being a land of freedom and opportunity for all regardless of race.
That Was The Week That Was was some of my favorite TV. I've never tried to find a copy because I'd hate to learn it wasn't as good as I remember (or that I don't remember the news of that day well enough to get the jokes).
I'm sure you'll get the jokes (or run to the internet for an explanation, like I do when I read Owen Jones). I saw a little TW3 as a small child and it was WAY beyond me, so much so that I didn't even have an aspirational attachment to it -- not like when I saw Playboy After Dark, which made me want to grow up to be a bachelor.
I went to YouTube and looked. Boring bit by David Frost but then a strange musical number about Mississippi that wasn't doing much for me but just as I reached to turn it off six white male dancers in straw boaters and striped coats came on stage in blackface.
Justifiable in a satirical context but it made my head hurt to think about the reaction if SNL ever tried it. I'll have to watch some more of the YouTubes another time when my head isn't full of Carol Burnett.
TW3 was a BBC show and nothing at all like the Smothers Brothers show, which was much more like an evolution from Milton Berle or Sid Cesar and a predecessor to SNL than the strange mashup of David Frost and a bunch singing and dance numbers that was TW3. I was too young to appreciate it anyway.
It's moments like this when I can see better what the Muppet Show was trying to accomplish: celebrate the glory days of the TV variety show & lament its loss.
I always worried as a kid that the Muppet show was going to fold because they couldn't pay the bills. Backstage, Kermit always had the vibe of being the only one present who was aware that they had to start doing better or never-mentioned off-screen heavies were going to close the theater. I was six so who knows how the hell I picked that up, but for all its innocence and joy, the original Muppet Show seemed to have a subversive element that got into my DNA (and that I've heard tell is not in the current incarnation). To this day I just want it to be a world where we can all get together to put on a show, and I don't fully understand the people who see money as the important thing. 70s TV raised me right.
As for Carol Burnett - I always think of the episode where she is running a lighthouse, and her neighbor from the lighthouse next door comes over to borrow a lightbulb. "I think we've got a spare," she says, and she comes out of the closet struggling to heft a bulb as big as she is. Shaped just like an ordinary 120-watt lamp bulb -- but huge. Saw that in 1976-77 and still feel giddy every time I think of it.
The Carol Burnett Show was appointment viewing when I was a kid. It’s one of those rare shows where everything comes together and you get way more than the sum of its parts. The players have great chemistry and talent to spare, the writing is sharp and the costuming and set design are spot on. The Eunice & Mama skits are IMO the best example of this but the whole show was just wonderful. And yeah I still watch the reruns whenever I can, too! Thanks for the AP tip!
Never saw those shows. We, a well off middle class family, didn’t have a TV. If we wanted to watch, we had to go upstairs to my grandmother’s, where there seemingly always was Lawrence Welk or Liberace on display. When I tell my kids that, their disbelief is obvious; like my tales of walking to school in the snow carrying my books and my sister’s. Unpossible! I was off to college before my dad broke down and bought a TV, which I think he turned on just so he could snort at whatever was on, then retreat to his study to read. Anyway, I appreciate that early TV shows are part of my generation’s social DNA and Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime can be a sort of mRNA vaccine for we few outliers, injecting pop culture retroactively. Maybe I’ll look into Carol when I’m done with Buffy and Veronica.
What Riverdale? Buffy the Vampire Killer (not as good as the movie, IMO) and Veronica Mars (smarter than I expected and proof Kristen Bell hasn’t aged - maybe she’s a vampire!).
I loved watching the Carol Burnett show back in the day. It was a laugh riot so far as I was concerned. My evangelical parents wouldn't allow Rowan and Martin's on the household TV but I'd get to watch when I was at my friend's house sometimes. I loved it!
I can see the evangelical issue with Laugh-In. First time I saw it, they had a musical number about pills -- with one who identified herself as "Little Old Me."
Falk is of course the best. He’s so good that much of my pleasure in the show comes from imagining him as the franchise player and everyone else as his flunky, which would be a rare case of justice in show biz. (Of course Levinson and Link were the producers, but without Falk they’d have shit.)
My Lampoon writing partner, Danny Abelson, grew up in Durban in South Africa. He was at Penn the same years I was (but we didn't know each other then). When we met working at the Strand bookstore, I learned that he was a huge fan of the Carol B. Show, which he watched both for the laffs, and to somehow learn more about the U.S. He said smart guys and gals growing up in S. Africa either oriented themselves toward England, or the U.S.
The Wikipedia page for the show is admirably detailed but doesn't mention ONE FUCKING WRITER. As though those actors improvised the show each week? I don't THINK so.
I think of that whenever the credits roll. Sometimes I see it in slow-motion with inserts: Died in a madhouse, cirrhosis, taught high-school English then killed himself, in prison for statutory rape... All the while the music plays.
Is it too early in the morning to go watch The Carol Burnett Show? Gosh. You brought it all back — I can just picture us all, kids sprawled on the floor, parents on the couch (Mom) and in the recliner (Dad), watching Carol fashion a gown out of velvet curtains (the curtain rods still attached) a la Scarlett O’Hara in a Gone With The Wind parody. BTW, I wish I could hang out with your wife. I wouldn’t be smart enough for her, but I bet I could get her to laugh.
It is plenty late at night to watch the Carol Burnett Show. It's not tomorrow until you've slept. I can make night last for days.
The Keith Richards approach to the diurnal cycle.
That was one of the funniest bits ever on TV. When Rhett Butler compliments her gown, Carol deadpans "Oh, yes, I saw it in the window and just had to have it."
Yes!!!!!! Gotta go watch that episode NOW
Kia would LOVE you. And yeah, sometimes I forget how the central appeal of TV was not aesthetic but as a replacement for the cave fire, around which the whole family could sit and soak up the warmth.
True! SO true. Have you written about that? (Say hi to Kia)
The episode I remember best is one I remember second-hand, in a way. My aunt, who became a nurse as an adult, had seen Dark Victory with Bette Davis as a young teen, and sobbed so uncontrollably at the ending she had to be escorted out of the theater. Then she saw the Carol Burnett version, with Vicki Lawrence as the nurse who tells the doomed Burnett, "You have... the same disease Bette Davis had in Dark Victory. It's called the movie disease, and it means you get more beautiful by the minute, until you hiccup three times and drop dead." And from that point on she kept getting seized by the temptation to tell patients, "You have..."
OMG! The Movie Disease! That's the same thing that Ali MacGraw's character in Love Story died of. I actually wrote a piece about The Movie Disease -- but I had completely forgotten that it came from the Carol Burnett Show. Need to go update my piece (!)
OMG! The Movie Disease! That's the same thing that Ali MacGraw's character in Love Story died of. I actually wrote a piece about The Movie Disease -- but I had completely forgotten that it came from the Carol Burnett Show. Need to go update my piece (!)
And the Carol Burnett Show also did a memorable Love Story. The doctor (Lyle Waggoner) examines Jenny (Burnett) and sadly tells Oliver (Korman) "she has five minutes to live. Don't tell her; let her last minutes be happy ones." So Korman says to Burnett, "hey, Funnyface, the doctor says you're gonna be fine. Is there anything you want?"
"I'd love a three-minute egg!"
"That's cutting it a little close, dear."
That joke is awesome. I lol’d!
There was a long, loud roar of laughter from the audience after Burnett delivered her "three-minute egg" line, and Korman had to stand patiently through it, (mostly) straight faced, until he could deliver his.
Except for the GWTW dress-cum-curtain rod bit, the funniest thing I ever saw on American TV* was Tim Conway playing a dueling Musketeer, wildly waving a sword around as he slew various enemies including Harvey Korman (of course) and Lyle Waggoner. Then he accidentally ran himself through, pulled out the sword and looked at it, and said, "I'm down a quart."
* Funniest thing EVER on TV was Hugh Laurie in Blackadder Goes Forth, admitting that he had become engaged to General Melchett.
I love smartly done trash entertainment; anything done with some wit.
Well you've come to the right place!
Why we're here.
You're not trash, Roy. High quality snark 'n satire with good grammar. I rely on this and Alicu to learn to write gooder.
One of the few shows our entire family enjoyed. Tim Conway joining the show made my McHale's Navy loving dad very happy and we would set aside our Silent Generation vs Hippies differences for this one hour a week. Mom would make chocolate Jello pudding and we'd pour it over vanilla ice cream while still hot. Easily the best hour of the week.
Thanks for reminding me.
"set aside our Silent Generation vs Hippies differences" Come, let us new-TV-season together!
Lordy, I remember being maybe 6 and watching (at a drive-in!) MCHALE’S NAVY JOINS THE AIR FORCE on a bill with IN HARM’S WAY. (I grew up in a military family)
Sorry about that but judging McHale's Navy by that movie would be like seeing Godfather III first then not bothering with the other two movies.
MCHALE’S NAVY JOINS THE AIR FORCE is on DailyMotion! The ten minutes I saw of it are pretty damn inept. If I were six I'm sure I'd have loved it. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fp1jh
Always got the impression that she *wanted* us to kick back, relax, and laugh, on purpose. So much of CBS's early '70s programming was wrapped around Norman Lear-like "message" stuff--not that there was anything wrong with that--that by the end of the week (my memory is of the Carol Burnett Show on Saturday nights but I'm probably wrong) you needed a *break*.
I keep thinking it was Monday -- ah, Wikipedia informs me that was the first four seasons. Funny, those are the eps I've been watching; maybe a primal memory is afoot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Carol_Burnett_Show#Nielsen_ratings/broadcast_schedule
Happy memories. And yes, Tim Conway was a great addition.
Conway could crack up a camel. His straight man was iron.
You have our leave to talk about it for days. (BTW, you’re right about LAUGH-IN, but I still love Alan Sues as hungover Uncle Al: “Hi kids. Uncle Al had too much medicine last night.”)
I like Laugh-In despite its frenetic pacing. Given the format, it was extremely well written, and the ensemble they assembled proved supremely adept at short-sketch comedy. Also, too, Goldie Hawn in a bikini.
Ha ha yeah, I have to watch some more of those (for my REsearch!) I do see the talent and professionalism; maybe future viewings will alter my impression that audiences were just stunned into submission.
The failed revival of Laugh-In is a good indicator of what the original show got right, though it really is a time capsule, trying to stuff The Hippies into a Vegas review by reviving Hellzapoppin' of all things. I think most people were just stunned into liking it. And yeah, a body-painted Goldie Hawn in a bikini.
This is peripheral, but when else will I get to tell this story? In 71/72, when I was 11, I was a regular panelist on a syndicated TV show called "Kid Talk", where the bit was that some celeb would come on, talk a little about some topic they were interested in, and then ask the panel of four kids what they thought about it. (When Senator Mike Gravel came on Andy Yamamoto and I hassled him about the Alaska Pipeline and melting the permafrost until the producers came over and and told us to cut it out.). Anyway, we'd shoot two or three half hour shows in an evening at a studio at NBC Burbank, which would be mostly deserted. Sometimes there'd be long breaks and we could roam around the building. A nearby studio had the Laugh-In joke wall as a standing set and sometimes we'd climb around on the stairs and pop open the doors. (Never figured out how to work the trap-door though.). One time cast member Dennis Allen found us and very kindly escorted us out. I thnk he thought our youngest person, Mona Tera (who was six or seven when the rest of us were 11), was just adorable. I watched Laugh-In when it was on, sort of appreciated that there was some new joke along any second, didn't really get what was supposed to be funny about much of it, but enjoyed some of the proudly stupid material (like, "say goodnight, Dick" / "goodnight, Dick", which I didn't realize then was stolen from Burns & Allen). My crush, watching the show, wasn't Goldie Hawn (adorable) or Judy Carnes (strikingly talented; exact same energy as Davy Jones in the Monkees reruns I was watching) but Teresa Graves - just stunning.
How'd they get the joke wall?
Re: Burnett and Bonell--At that time, TV was not only exploring but pushing the social boundaries, especially with regard to race. Black people went from characters being portrayed by White actors in blackface to actual POC playing POC characters. Shows centered round Black characters were greenlighted and ran (Diahann Carroll, for example), and scripting changed dramatically to show Black characters as full humans struggling with day-to-day existence in the capitalist paradise of America.
So it's not too surprising that Burnett would do such a routine. There was, after all, a lot of hope that America would finally start being a land of freedom and opportunity for all regardless of race.
I get it. I wonder if someone's done a scholarly study of that evolution. There's always a lot of talk about Kirk kissing Uhuru , but not about these little cracks in the veneer. And it's still an issue -- remember Trump bitching about "blackish"? https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/feb/25/series-creator-kenya-barris-on-abc-sitcom-black-ish
OMG. Watched JULIA (who was a Vietnam widow) while my father was in Vietnam. Good times
How could Carol miss with a cast like that?
I thought Laugh In was a poor replacement for TW3, and much preferred the Smothers Brothers show, both for satirical content and musical guests.
That Was The Week That Was was some of my favorite TV. I've never tried to find a copy because I'd hate to learn it wasn't as good as I remember (or that I don't remember the news of that day well enough to get the jokes).
I'm sure you'll get the jokes (or run to the internet for an explanation, like I do when I read Owen Jones). I saw a little TW3 as a small child and it was WAY beyond me, so much so that I didn't even have an aspirational attachment to it -- not like when I saw Playboy After Dark, which made me want to grow up to be a bachelor.
I went to YouTube and looked. Boring bit by David Frost but then a strange musical number about Mississippi that wasn't doing much for me but just as I reached to turn it off six white male dancers in straw boaters and striped coats came on stage in blackface.
Justifiable in a satirical context but it made my head hurt to think about the reaction if SNL ever tried it. I'll have to watch some more of the YouTubes another time when my head isn't full of Carol Burnett.
There was a minstrel show on the BBC that ran into the 70's, so it wasn't as much a stretch as it seems today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMoLprj921o
Something that doesn't get covered a lot is that the minstrel show was the dominant entertainment format in the US for over 100 years.
TW3 was a BBC show and nothing at all like the Smothers Brothers show, which was much more like an evolution from Milton Berle or Sid Cesar and a predecessor to SNL than the strange mashup of David Frost and a bunch singing and dance numbers that was TW3. I was too young to appreciate it anyway.
It's moments like this when I can see better what the Muppet Show was trying to accomplish: celebrate the glory days of the TV variety show & lament its loss.
60 Minutes did a piece on The Muppet Show and its lead said, essentially, that it marked the return of vaudeville. Which I thought was apt.
You don't see the return of vaudeville much anymore.
I always worried as a kid that the Muppet show was going to fold because they couldn't pay the bills. Backstage, Kermit always had the vibe of being the only one present who was aware that they had to start doing better or never-mentioned off-screen heavies were going to close the theater. I was six so who knows how the hell I picked that up, but for all its innocence and joy, the original Muppet Show seemed to have a subversive element that got into my DNA (and that I've heard tell is not in the current incarnation). To this day I just want it to be a world where we can all get together to put on a show, and I don't fully understand the people who see money as the important thing. 70s TV raised me right.
As for Carol Burnett - I always think of the episode where she is running a lighthouse, and her neighbor from the lighthouse next door comes over to borrow a lightbulb. "I think we've got a spare," she says, and she comes out of the closet struggling to heft a bulb as big as she is. Shaped just like an ordinary 120-watt lamp bulb -- but huge. Saw that in 1976-77 and still feel giddy every time I think of it.
I'm pretty sure my subversive DNA came from The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
Jay Ward — and not just the shows, but all those awesome cereal commercials —
is criminally underappreciated
I like your vision of Kermit, Wednesday's Child.
The Carol Burnett Show was appointment viewing when I was a kid. It’s one of those rare shows where everything comes together and you get way more than the sum of its parts. The players have great chemistry and talent to spare, the writing is sharp and the costuming and set design are spot on. The Eunice & Mama skits are IMO the best example of this but the whole show was just wonderful. And yeah I still watch the reruns whenever I can, too! Thanks for the AP tip!
Never saw those shows. We, a well off middle class family, didn’t have a TV. If we wanted to watch, we had to go upstairs to my grandmother’s, where there seemingly always was Lawrence Welk or Liberace on display. When I tell my kids that, their disbelief is obvious; like my tales of walking to school in the snow carrying my books and my sister’s. Unpossible! I was off to college before my dad broke down and bought a TV, which I think he turned on just so he could snort at whatever was on, then retreat to his study to read. Anyway, I appreciate that early TV shows are part of my generation’s social DNA and Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime can be a sort of mRNA vaccine for we few outliers, injecting pop culture retroactively. Maybe I’ll look into Carol when I’m done with Buffy and Veronica.
Good God, you watch that Riverdale thing? What's it like?
What Riverdale? Buffy the Vampire Killer (not as good as the movie, IMO) and Veronica Mars (smarter than I expected and proof Kristen Bell hasn’t aged - maybe she’s a vampire!).
The existence of a gritty Archie Comics reboot convinced me that the shark had jumped the shark, and we are all living in a holodeck gone rogue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djRAiiFlCy8&feature=emb_logo
I loved watching the Carol Burnett show back in the day. It was a laugh riot so far as I was concerned. My evangelical parents wouldn't allow Rowan and Martin's on the household TV but I'd get to watch when I was at my friend's house sometimes. I loved it!
I can see the evangelical issue with Laugh-In. First time I saw it, they had a musical number about pills -- with one who identified herself as "Little Old Me."
Call Columbo 'crap' one more time and it is pistols at dawn, sir.
Hate to be this way, but Colombo is like the pinnacle of crap -- the highest craft standards, perhaps, to which crap ever rose.
I see where Roy is coming from, 70s-entertainment-wise, but feel strongly that Peter Falk’s Columbo portrayal saves it from mediocrity
Falk is of course the best. He’s so good that much of my pleasure in the show comes from imagining him as the franchise player and everyone else as his flunky, which would be a rare case of justice in show biz. (Of course Levinson and Link were the producers, but without Falk they’d have shit.)
My Lampoon writing partner, Danny Abelson, grew up in Durban in South Africa. He was at Penn the same years I was (but we didn't know each other then). When we met working at the Strand bookstore, I learned that he was a huge fan of the Carol B. Show, which he watched both for the laffs, and to somehow learn more about the U.S. He said smart guys and gals growing up in S. Africa either oriented themselves toward England, or the U.S.
The Wikipedia page for the show is admirably detailed but doesn't mention ONE FUCKING WRITER. As though those actors improvised the show each week? I don't THINK so.
I think of that whenever the credits roll. Sometimes I see it in slow-motion with inserts: Died in a madhouse, cirrhosis, taught high-school English then killed himself, in prison for statutory rape... All the while the music plays.
I remember when Burnett would appear on The Garry Moore Show, and was not at all surprised when she got her own.
I look at Kirby, Moore, and Burnett being so loving to one another and I actually believe they’re sincere — which, believe me, is rare.