Carol Burnett ready for your questions
Legendary comedienne Carol Burnett used to begin her TV variety show with a few questions from the audience, in a segment that both reinforced that the show was taped before a live audience and demonstrated her considerable skills as a spontaneous funny woman.
This June, she will take the stage in Winnipeg, Toronto, Regina and Saskatoon with a show Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett that recreates those Q&A sessions. She also returns to Vancouver this fall to headline the Comedy Festival.
The Q&A sessions, like the sessions in her TV variety show, which ran from 1967 to 1978, will be completely unplanned.
No planted questions “because that wouldn’t be honest,” Burnett said in an interview Thursday with CBC’s Q cultural affairs show.
“They ask a lot. I get certain questions every place I go,” she said. “Like how did you find Harvey [Korman] and Tim [Conway] and Vicki [Lawrence] and Lyle [Waggoner] ó how did you get with them? How did you teach yourself the Tarzan yell? Why do you pull your ear at the end of every show that you do?”
The late Korman and fellow comedians such as Conway, Lawrence and Waggoner were part of the sketch team that made The Carol Burnett Show a hit for so long.
At 76, Burnett said she doesn’t need to keep entertaining, but still welcomes the chance.
“The reason I’m doing it is a) I’m enjoying it and b) it keeps the grey matter ticking. I have to be on my toes as I never know what anybody’s going to ask and I have to turn it around to make it entertaining to the audience,” she said.
The idea for the Q&A session came from The Garry Moore Show, a New York variety show that Burnett worked on regularly in the 1950s.
In the beginning, she was terrified
“He would go out before the show and he would warm up the audience by having a conversation with them,” Burnett recalled.
Harvey Korman holds the face of Carol Burnett during a routine on The Carol Burnett Show in 1967 in Los Angeles. (Associated Press)”When I got my own show, my executive producer Bob Banner said, ‘You know, Carol, if you are going to be doing a lot of characters, it’s really important for the audience to know you.’ I said, ‘I’m not a standup comic. I’m not going to come out there and do jokes or anything.'”
Burnett admits she was initially terrified at the idea of facing questions, but it soon became a favourite part of the show.
“I never knew what anybody was going to ask or want to do ó sometimes we got people up on stage who would sing,” she said. “It was a great opening for us to get know each other. Then we went on with the show.”
Burnett is credited with blazing new trails for women in comedy. She has won the Peabody Award, Kennedy Centre Honors and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She still follows comedy keenly and admires how far female comedians have come since her day. But she regrets the loss of variety shows on network TV.
Nine variety shows were on the air at the same time as The Carol Burnett Show, including The Smothers Brothers and Laugh-In, she said.
“You couldn’t do it today because of cost,” Burnett said, adding that TV viewers are missing some of the “flat-out belly laughs,” that made TV so much fun in the 1970s.
Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett starts June 10 in Winnipeg, followed by June 12 in Toronto, June 14 in Regina and June 16 in Saskatoon.
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