New York is entering Phase 2 of reopening, but we may as well still be in lockdown. You can't eat indoors at a restaurant, browse in a bookstore, or stroll through a museum. I'm definitely not going to a movie theater anytime soon and Broadway appears to be off limits until at least spring 2021. One museum I definitely will visit once this ends is the Paley Center (formerly the Museum of Broadcasting.) A search of their archives of old TV shows turned up several complete Carol Burnett Show episodes available only piecemeal on MeTV, Amazon or ShoutFactory. Until then, there is still plenty of Burnett bounty to analyze in our continuing series of reconstructing the show. For this blog, I thought I would concentrate on presenting a broad range of episodes from across the entire 11 year run.
Season Three
Sept. 13, 1968: Jim Nabors
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| Jim Nabors and Carol in Hollywood Canteen |
During the Q&A, Harvey accepts his Emmy and delivers a long-winded speech. There is a super-brief commercial take-off with Harvey as a Russian chess champion playing against Jim. Then Carol as the ancient Stella Toddler is assaulted and battered during a dedication of a theater named for her. She eventually winds up under the corner stone. The Stella Toddler character was not as funny as Tim Conway's Old Man, and I never found him that funny. The majority of the episode is devoted to movie send-up of generic WWII homefront films. Hollywood Canteen features Jim and Harvey as GIs attached to USO girls Carol and Vicki. There are five specialty songs, written by Ken and Mitzi Welch, climaxing into a Goodwill-and-Brotherhood number, There Will Never Be Another War, which erupts into violence as stereotype-costumed nationals engage in hand-to-hand combat. My favorite is a geisha attacking a Greek soldier with chopsticks.
Oct. 6, 1968: Steve Lawrence, Edward Villella, Rock Hudson
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) The only two sketches in the pared-down edition were quite interesting for different reasons. In the first, a Carol and Sis vignette, Roger (Harvey) is insanely
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| Carol with Rock Hudson |
jealous of Lyle again--a trope to be played dozens of times, but this one was slightly askew from the usual. The scene opens with Carol expecting a visit from an interior decorator and a plumber as Roger is leaving for a golf game. Roger goes on a homophobic rant, imitating a stereotypical swishy decorator and declaring he doesn't want one of "them" in his house. Enter hypermasculine Lyle in a sober business suit as Mr. Bruce, the decorator. Immediately, Roger forgets his golf game and fears Carol may be seduced by this hunk of man. In order to grill Mr. Bruce on his sexuality, he gets Carol out of the room to fix coffee--this act in itself is a fascinating example of male privilege. Roger asks Bruce if he would like some java and then insists Carol go and make it.
With Carol in the kitchen, Roger asks Mr. Bruce highly personal questions. Is he married? Does he live with his parents? Does he have a roommate? Bruce reveals he played pro football and you can tell from Harvey's subtextual acting and Lyle's reactions, the presumably straight decorator thinks this weird husband is coming on to him. (That potentially fascinating angle is not explored.) Eventually, Roger cannot control his envy and tells Mr. Bruce his wife will be doing the decorating herself. Just as he leaves, Lyle asks Carol if the couple have any children. She replies in the negative and Lyle says, "It figures." Does that mean he thought Roger was a closet case?
Roger apologizes profusely to Carol for his behavior and is about to leave for his golf game when the plumber arrives--Rock Hudson! Before Carol can ogle the gorgeous plumber, Roger rushes him off to the dripping sink. End music! Carol proceeds to drool over Hudson in a post-sketch chat while he plugs a war movie he just finished--The Hornet's Nest (1970, a war-movie bomb just like Robert Goulet's Underground, also plugged on Carol's show). Ironically, the closeted gay Hudson was playing a super-manly threat to a hetero hubby.
The second sketch was Steve Lawrence's first venture into movie parody--The Murderer Always Rings Twice, a spoof of the classic The Postman Always Rings Twice. I remember seeing excerpts from this sketch on an anniversary or reunion show. Carol is Lana Turner, dressed in white, continually removing skirts when they get the least bit dirty. Steve does a good John Garfield and would repeat it in Golden's Boy (a pastiche of Golden Boy and Body and Soul, though William Holden did the movie of Golden Boy). Harvey is Carol's older, ordinary husband with an Italian accent as in They Knew What They Wanted (though in the original movie, the husband was Cecil Kellaway who had a slight British/Irish dialect).
The final goodbyes are all we see of Edward Villella while Lyle's voice-over informs us he performed a dance to Prince Igor.
Season Five:
Sept. 22, 1971: Tim Conway, The Carpenters
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory/YouTube) Another episode scattered in bits and pieces across the Internet. The 22-min. edited version features run-of-the-mill sketches with Carol and Tim as a couple
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| Richard and Karen Carpenter |
renovating their mountain cabin (physical comedy reminiscent of the duo painting their new apartment in another scene) and Tim's Little Old Man as a surgeon cracking up Harvey during an operation. The one interesting segment is Beyond Lovely Story, a sequel to Lovely Story, the parody of Love Story which aired the previous season during the Rita Hayworth/Jim Bailey show. Vicki introduces this feature on Tearjerker Theater. It's ten years later and Jenny (Carol as Ali McGraw) didn't die, but Oliver (Harvey as Ryan O'Neal) is getting sick of her non-stop affection. When he threatens to leave, she gets that terminal illness again. Lyle returns as the doctor and Carol's death-scene is repeated. At many false starts, she finally expires and the two men dispose of the body by folding her up in the sofa bed.
The Carpenters' musical numbers can be found on YouTube. These include Carol attempting to be "with it" by singing with the younger pop duo in a Burt Bacharach-Hal David medley. (This is kind of ironic since the Carpenters were not exactly cutting-edge. Bette Midler once joked upon receiving her first Grammy from the sibling act, "Isn't that a hoot? Me up here with Miss Karen.") The finale (cut from the METv version) features the whole cast in a salute to old-time radio music shows like the Make Believe Ballroom. Karen, Vicki and Carol form a trio and warble Jerome Kern's "Who."
Dec. 15, 1971: Ken Berry, Dionne Warwick
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) Apart from a protracted Q&A session which Dick Cavett gate-
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Dynamite, Ken Berry and Carol in
The Saga of Lilly and Billy |
crashes, the entire 22 minutes of this edited segment is taken up with The Saga of Lilly and Billy, a spoof western with Carol and Ken as wanna-be Roy Rogers and Dale Evans movie stars. The main source of humor is Ken's love of his horse Dynamite over Carol and Carol becoming a stunt woman and suffering numerous funny injuries. Pain and suffering were a riot in the 1960s. According to imdb.com, Dionne Warwicke sang "Something There to Remind Me" and "One Less Bell to Answer" and duetted with Carol on a musical interpretation of the constitution. Ken's wife Jackie Joseph also appeared, but her sketch along with Dionne's songs were cut.
Jan. 19, 1972: Ken Berry, Nanette Fabray, the Carpenters
The truly lost episode. This segment does not show up on any DVD collection or on the roster of the MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory 22-minute segments. Ken Berry and Nanette Fabray appeared together as guests in Season 3 (1970) and the Carpenters were featured in an earlier show during this fifth season. But all that can be found of this segment are fragments on YouTube: The Carpenters singing a medley of Paul Williams songs with Carol, Richard Carpenter kissing a female fan during the Q&A and Karen singing "Superstar" and accompanying herself on the drums. IMDB.com says the rest of the show consisted of Ken and Nanette singing "Coffee in a Cardboard Cup" with the dancers, Carol warbling "The Empty Ballad" solo and "I'm Not Complete Without My Sweetie" with Ken and a production number, "The Ballad of Broadway."
March 22, 1972: Paul Lynde, Karen Black
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) We have no idea what Karen Black did on this episode. She had won several film critics awards for her supporting role in Five Easy Pieces, but lost the Oscar to Helen Hayes for Airport. She is probably chiefly remembered now for a TV-movie called Trilogy of Terror
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Paul Lynde and John Calvin on the short-lived Paul Lynde Show.
Calvin was playing Paul's son-in-law.
What do you suppose what going on in
Paul's mind during this scene? |
where a tiny demon doll menaced her. But she was also a singer and probably had a few musical solos. Lynde stars as a deceptive real-estate salesman hoodwinking gullible Carol and Harvey. This is a variation on a previous sketch when nasty Paul was a deceptive insurance salesman. The only real interesting bit of this hacked-up episode is Paul's appearance in a Tenth Avenue Family sketch as Lance Papovski, a low-rent version of an interior decorator. (As noted in the Season 3 show, interior decorators, along with hairdressers were an easy target of homophobic humor.) Bob Mackie designed a truly bizarre outfit combining bum and swishy stereotypes. Lynde plays on his sarcastic, flighty schtick. "Oh, those stairs," he whines upon entering, "I gotta sit down. My Guccis are killin' me." The gay aspect of his persona was always there, but not in a sexual way. He was just queeny, but never expressed an attraction for his own sex in his roles. One wonders what he made of hunky, often shirtless Lyle Waggoner. We do get to see the finale--Carol as her charwoman belting "I Don't Care."
Season Six
Sept. 20, 1972: Marty Feldman, Carol Channing
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) A very funny 22 minutes, well maybe a very funny 14 minutes.
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| Marty Feldman with Carol |
Feldman, a British goofball comic best known for his insanity in such Mel Brooks films as Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie, causes mayhem as a bored airline pilot spooking passengers with false alarms and a demented plastic surgeon. The latter sketch is a raucous farce reminiscent of the Marx Brothers with Channing popping up at the end. She can only be seen there and in some witty commercial take-offs. The Carol and Sis sketch plays on the repeated trope of Carol being jealous of Roger and jumping to the wrong conclusion about a collection of girlie magazines found in his briefcase. How did those two stay married with all the suspicion? One was always accusing the other of the roving eye.
Oct. 25, 1972: Tim Conway, Pearl Bailey
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| Carol as Nora Desmond and Harvey as her butler, Max |
(The Best of DVD set) Salutes to major movie studios afforded opportunities for comedy sketches and musical numbers. 20th Century Fox allowed Carol and company to poke fun at Carmen Miranda (for the second time), The Sound of Music, and Anastasia. In the Sound of Music sketch, governess Carol (as Julie Andrews) cheerfully sings Do a Deer, to the chorus kids as the mischievous but adorable Von Trapp children, until she get to hunky-for-his-age Lyle and she belts out You Gotta See Mama Every Night (Or You Can't See Mama At All), then leaping into his manly arms. The highlight for me is the Anastasia parody wherein Carol plays Helen Hayes' Dowager Empress and Pearl is Ingrid Bergman ("I'm the princess Anastasia, baby.") Carol and Pearl have a great duet on A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Tim does his Old Man as a galley slave, a lawyer who is really a rabbit (Fluffy Lee Bunny) and ad man out to convince Carol's Nora Desmond to film an insecticide commercial. I'm sorry, but a little of Conway goes a long way for me.
Season Seven
Sept. 22, 1973: Charo, Tim Conway
(Amazon Prime) One of the complete episodes from seasons 6-10 you can buy on Amazon for $2 each. I distinctly remember watching parts of this one, particularly the finale with Carol, Vicki, and Charo dressed as jockeys and cavorting with the chorus to Fugue for Tinhorns and Luck Be a Lady
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| Tim, Charo, and Carol |
Tonight from Guys and Dolls. Then they stuck in Spinning Wheel at the end because of the line about "Ride a painted pony." Harvey is mysteriously missing, so Lyle has more to do including play straight man for Tim's physical comedy. Charo, a huge star in the 1970s, would probably be deemed offensive today. With her heavy Hispanic accent and gyrating hips, she fulfilled the stereotype of a hot Latina. In a hilarious sketch that would also likely not fly in 2020, Carol plays Charo's mother, complete with low-hanging breasts in a scarlet-red outfit to match her fictional daughter's. There was also a weird appearance by a group of break dancers--the style predated hip-hop--called the Campbellock Dancers in a number choreographed by Toni Basil. Fred Berry, who later had a brief hit of fame as Rerun on the sitcom What's Happenin', is among the troupe. Weird because the dancers' street vibe jarred with Carol's non-edgy humor.
Season Ten
Sept. 25, 1976: Jim Nabors
(YouTube) I found this entire episode (or almost complete from what I can tell) on YouTube
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| Carol as Louise Lasser as Mary Hartman |
including commercials. This includes the classic Family scene with Eunice, Ed and Mama playing their infamous game of Monopoly and a marvelous parody of the cult soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Harvey as Norman Lear introduces the bit and Carol does a brilliant Louise Lasser as Mary. The gag is Fernwood is populated with nursery rhyme characters, but the main joke is the accurate imitations of the zany characters on the hit cult show. It used to come on every night at 11PM and we would talk about at school the next day (Well, I would talk about it with the art teachers and some other eccentric students.)
Season Eleven
Feb. 19, 1978: Ken Berry
(MeTV/Amazon/ShoutFactory) By the time you get to the end of the last season, you could tell the writers were running out of ideas, Dick Van
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| Carol and Vicki in Mr. Schleppington |
Dyke had left as Harvey's replacement, and it seemed the only guests were Ken Berry and Steve Lawrence. But whenever the staff went to spoofing old movies, they usually came up with a winner. This segment features a funny riff on the Bette Davis-Claude Rains weepy, Mr. Skeffington. In Mr. Schleppington, Carol is the super-vain, flirtatious Franny who strings along rich husband Schlep (Ken) so she can enjoy his wealth and still have fun with the boys. In the last scene, Franny is old and decrepit, but fortunately Schlep is nearly blind. Then Ken has a nifty dance number from Yankee Doodle Dandy. The overriding theme was a salute to Warner Brothers movies.
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