An Afternoon With Carol Burnett

America’s a funnier place thanks to her.

By Aaron Goldstein – 4.21.15

One of the most endearing qualities of Carol Burnett’s comedy is her willingness to answer questions from her audience. The spontaneous nature of these exchanges demonstrates her ability to work a room and shows Burnett at her funniest. Hillary Clinton could learn a thing or two from her.

Burnett, who will turn 82 next week, can still connect with an audience as she demonstrated this past Sunday afternoon at Boston’s Symphony Hall. Unfortunately, due to a cold she was unable to do her trademark Tarzan yell. She also needed to sit down midway through the show. But this did not diminish her spirit nor her wit, which remains razor sharp. When an audience member asked Burnett what drew her to comedy, she quipped, “My face.” This brought much laughter and there was a lot more from where that came.

Many of the stories Burnett told revolved around her cast mates from The Carol Burnett Show. She recounted the letter she received from a teenaged Vicki Lawrence who informed her she had entered the Ms. Fireball of Inglewood pageant and enclosed a newspaper clipping of herself. When she looked at the picture, Burnett said Lawrence reminded her of herself at 17. She phoned Lawrence to see if she could attend the Ms. Fireball pageant. Lawrence’s mother answered the phone and screamed, “It’s Carol Burnett!!!” The younger Lawrence thought it was a prank from one of her friends and answered the phone, “Yeah, Marcia!” Burnett soon convinced Lawrence the call was genuine. Lawrence would become Miss Fireball of Inglewood and a few short months later joined the cast of The Carol Burnett Show.

Burnett also paid tribute to the late Harvey Korman. She said of her co-star, “It’s always good to play tennis with a better player to bring out the best in you.” And then there was the irrepressible Tim Conway “whose mission it was in life to destroy Harvey Korman.” Burnett then showed a clip of the dentist’s sketch in which Korman could not keep a straight face while Conway went off script and literally injected his own brand of humor into the proceedings.

Conway did not confine his antics to the stage. When The Carol Burnett Show traveled to Australia to tape shows at the Sydney Opera House, Burnett and her husband invited Conway to dinner. Conway told them to meet him in his hotel room. When they did they found him lying in bed, bare chested, smoking a cigarette, lying next to a stuffed lamb. Burnett deadpanned, “We didn’t have lamb chops for dinner.”

Read more at http://spectator.org/articles/62462/afternoon-carol-burnett