August 21, 1996: The Art Bar reading series disapproved of my bending the rules but enjoyed it

Thirty years ago today 

            On Wednesday night I went to the Csarda Hungarian restaurant on Elm Street for the Art Bar reading series open stage. I talked with the host Pierre Labbé about my feature performance last week. He seemed to enjoy it while at the same time disapproved of my bending of the rules.

Beatrice Lillie

            On Monday after midnight I put some more double sided tape along the middle of the wall side of my mattress. I woke up a little after 4:00 when I felt a bedbug and killed it. I got up to pee and used a back scrubber to kill a couple of babies that I couldn’t reach. 

            After yoga I memorized the third verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the fifth verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. The Vian song has two verses left and the Gainsbourg song has only one. 

            I weighed 90.85 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune. 

            I weighed 92.05 kilos before lunch. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.95 kilos at 18:00. 

            I was still three days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I had a potato with margarine and a piece of roast pork while watching three interviews of Jerry Lewis, Jim Nabors, and Julie Andrews on the topic of Carol Burnett. 

            Jerry met Carol when she was in the cast of The Garry Moore Show. He did a sketch with her and was stunned by her rhythm. She was unique in that she gave pieces of herself to everyone she worked with. Carol is the essence of the great Beatrice Lillie. Beatrice has been forgotten and Jerry had just heard some things about her when he first got into the business at 12. She was the greatest female physical comedian 30 years before Carol was born. 

            Carol never left her femininity in the dressing room. There’s never been a female genius comedian like Carol. She was stronger and prettier than Anna Magnani. “When she sang a ballad my skin crawled.” Carol was a clown and clowns come from a very unique place that has no name. Those of us that come from there recognize others who come from there. 

            The country hasn’t had a good lesson in judgement, taste and class. That’s what’s coming down the pipe now to make up for all the garbage that we’ve been put through since 1948. 

            Jim Nabors says he was a fan of Carol’s before he met her. Her show preceded Gomer Pyle USMC and she wrote him a fan letter (I think when he says “her” show he means Garry Moore’s show since Nabors already knew Carol and was her first guest on her own show). Nabors went to a taping of the show and when Carol saw he was there she ran up and embraced him. It was instant love for Jim.

            Carol and Jim did an act together in Las Vegas and it was a big success. 

            When he was on The Andy Griffith Show he had to try very hard to not laugh when doing a scene with Don Knots. 

            Near the end of Carol’s series the new writers were presenting her with ideas for sketches but she frequently had to tell them that they’d already done that. He says variety shows don’t work any more because both the comedy and singing are gimmicky. He says he heard someone singing the other day and it was all electronic but he couldn’t find a melody. 

            Jim says when he first went to the Indianapolis 500 he was invited to sing the song but he thought they meant “The Star Spangled Banner”. He didn’t find out until five minutes before start time that it was the Indy theme song “Back Home Again In Indiana” written in 1917 by James F. Hanley and Ballard MacDonald. His singing of the song was such a success that he continued to sing it there every year until he was 84. 

            When Carol was looking at buying property in Hawaii next door to Jim she climbed a coconut tree and did her Tarzan yell.

            Julie says when she and Carol did their first special at Carnegie Hall they were emulating with tongue in cheek a special that had been done years before by Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. 

            Carol is hugely generous to work with. 

            Kenny and Mitzi Welch wrote the songs for their special and Kenny asked Julie if there’s something she always wanted to do. She told him she’d never played a cowboy. They came up with “Big D” which even stopped the show in rehearsal. 

            Carol thought that rain was a good omen and it poured during the two days of rehearsing and shooting the special. 

            Carol breaks Julie out of her primness. 

            They parodied The Sound of Music musical long before Julie ever starred in The Sound of Music movie. 

            They did three specials together, each one ten years apart. They got to be more and more expensive. “Wait Till the Sun Shines Nellie” became a very successful closing number. 

            Carol is her chum. Her very very very good friend. When she first met Carol when she was doing Once Upon a Mattress they bonded instantly. Not long after that Julie guested on Garry Moore and then they did Carnegie Hall. But Julie never appeared on The Carol Burnett Show. Maybe they felt it was best to save it for the specials. 

            Julie and Carol were asked to do one of their medleys for the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson. They were at their hotel in Washington when Mike Nichols called and asked if they wanted to get together for tea. They waited for him but he didn’t show and so they got into their pajamas and were going to go to bed when Mike called and asked if it was too late. They said it wasn’t. They went down the hall in their dressing gowns to sit on the couch in front of the elevator and wait for Mike. They decided to prank him by kissing so Mike would see it when the elevator opened. When the elevator arrived Julie bent Carol in her arms and pretended to give her a passionate kiss. But when the door opened the elevator was full of Secret Service agents. The elevator door closed and went away and then another came, which had to be Mike. But it was the First Lady of the United States Lady Bird Johnson. She took one look at them kissing and then walked down the hall but stopped, turned around and came back. Carol had crawled behind the sofa and was laughing until she was crying. Lady Bird leaned over the couch and asked, “Are you Carol Burnett?” Carol said, “Yes and this is my friend Mary Poppins!” Lady Bird went to her room. The elevator came and Julie started kissing Carol again. This time it was Mike Nichols. He saw them kissing, said, “Hi girls!” and walked down the hall. 

            Julie thinks Carol felt free to be outrageous on her show because her husband was the producer.

            Carol once scared away a mugger by doing her Tarzan yell. 

            Canadian comedian Beatrice Lillie was born in 1894 Toronto. She sang with her mother accompanied by her sister on piano in an act called The Lillie Trio. Her mother took their act to England. She made her professional stage debut at the Chatham Music Hall in 1914. She made her London West End debut the same year in The Daring of Diane. Her first revue was André Charlot’s Not Likely, also in 1914. She starred in six more of Charlot’s revues over the rest of that decade. She skillfully interwove sketches, songs, and monologues with parody and satire. In the 1920s when her husband became a lord, she became Lady Peel. She starred in The Nine O’Clock Revue in 1922 for which her sister Muriel wrote the music and which ran for a year. When she returned to North America in 1924 she was an instant success on Broadway in The Charlot Revue, which took New York by storm. She came to be called the funniest woman in the world. Noël Coward and Cole Porter wrote entire shows just as vehicles for her. She premiered Coward’s song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” at The Third Little Show in 1931 on Broadway. In his Set To Music revue in 1939 she debuted his and “I Went to a Marvellous Party”. She made her film debut when she starred in Exit Smiling in 1927. She co-starred in Doctor Rhythm and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Her 1972 autobiography was Every Inch a Lady.

August 20, 1996: I featured at my own open stage

Thirty years ago today 

             On Tuesday night as always I hosted my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy writers open stage. But we started something new in hopes of increasing attendance, which was to have one featured poet every week. I decided that anyone could be invited to be a feature as long as they’d read at the Orgy on two occasions. I kicked things off by making myself the first feature and Brian Haddon accompanied me on recorder. As I recall we had a fairly good turn-out that night.

Dave Garroway

            On Sunday I went to bed at 1:30 and unlike the night before I got some sleep. After yoga I noticed a few more bedbugs had been caught on the carpet tape but there was at least one on my bed. 

            I worked on memorizing the third verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the fifth verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I weighed 91.45 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Kramer for the first of two sessions and it stayed in tune most of the time. 

            Around midday I pulled out the dressers on the east side of my bedroom and vacuumed the floor and the baseboards. I found at least one bedbug on the back of the dresser at the south east corner. On Tuesday I’ll steam the area. 

            I weighed 92.15 kilos at 14:00. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride downtown and back. 

            I weighed 91.2 kilos at 18:05, which is the lightest I’ve been in the evening since July 28. 

            I was back to being three days behind in my journal. I haven’t been caught up for about a month. I guess eventually I will be. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a sliced hot Italian sausage, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Harvey Korman. 

            The interviewer Jenna asks if he had any nicknames growing up. He says his grandmother used to call him Vontz, which is Yiddish for bedbug. He says he was a loner and so there were probably names for him he never heard. Harvey had a tendency in this interview to go off on tangents and forget the original question. He says a lot of entertainers are loners and less than popular. Comedians in particular tend to be shy and withdrawn but also tend to be very bright. 

            He studied drama when he was 10 and started working on stage in Chicago at 12. He doesn’t think that he ever really grew up and he thinks that’s another thing entertainers have in common. 

            They sat around in front of their big Philco radio console and listened to Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, The Shadow, boxing matches, baseball games, and political events. He was a Chicago White Sox fan. He was entranced by Benny, Cantor and Orson Wells. As a kid he used to go downtown where a theatre would have a movie, then a vaudeville stage show, followed by another movie. He would stay there all day and work his way up until he was in the front. He was much more interested in the live performers. When they got a television it was one of those little ones with a huge magnifying glass. He watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which he adored. In those days Chicago was at the vanguard of television with The Dave Garroway Show, The Studs Turkle Show, and Ed Sullivan. 

            It was going to the movies though that really got him and the stars were gigantic gods. Later when he became a TV star and he met these gods he was astounded and jolted when they told him that they were fans of Harvey Korman. 

            He played baseball and touch football and also loved music crossword puzzles. 

            After high school he went to the Goodman School of Drama. He performed in the classics and discovered that he was a very good actor. He left Goodman in 1950 and his goal was Broadway. He had been an honour student and the top of his class but when he went to New York he was instantly driven to his knees. He worked for ten years in restaurants so he could be around food. He lived in cold water flats and had to boil water on the stove to transfer to the tub for two hours so he could have a hot bath. But he always managed to go to the opera, the ballet, and the New York Philharmonic. The tickets were only $3 in those days. 

            He studied acting with Uta Hagen, who he worshipped. She was not a diva. She would teach her classes, raise her daughter, and do her own grocery shopping during the day, and then star on Broadway at night. 

            He failed in New York and went back to Chicago to do dinner theatre and summer stock. Summer stock was really how he learned his craft because there was a different show every week. One learns where the laughs are, one learns character, reality, and conflict. That’s why the Carol Burnett Show was so successful because they prepared it like summer stock. 

            The producers of The Red Skelton Show were doing a play in Chicago called Mr. and Mrs. starring Jackie Coogan and they used Chicago actors like himself for the secondary roles. 

            He got married and the choice was to either go back to New York or to move to LA. He decided if they were going to starve they might as well do it where it was warm. 

            In LA he got work first for The Donna Reed Show on which me played a maître d’ and had about three lines but made the most of them. If you get a shot you’d better do something with it. He made $125 in three days. They liked him at Screen Gems so he started to get work on Hazel and Route 66. Jenna reminds him that he was on The Untouchables and he’s surprised to hear that. He says he’s been told he was on Perry Mason but doesn’t remember that either. On Dr. Kildare he played a young doctor for three or four episodes. Michelle Lee’s father was the makeup man. 

            He was on Red Skelton who was somewhat disturbed but cute about it. Harvey used to see him on vaudeville and couldn’t believe he got to work with him. Through Red Skelton Harvey became a second banana on The Danny Kaye Show. He did that show from 1963 to 1967. Danny Kaye was a very complicated man. Harvey remembers seeing him in Up In Arms at The Brooklyn Paramount and there was never a performer like him. To work with him was extraordinary. He was inclined to be depressed and very moody. He was a perfectionist and as this was Harvey’s first job he was a wreck. Carol was the opposite of Danny Kaye in that the most important thing was to have fun rather than being perfect. Danny could be so charming and loving and then sometimes a wall would come down. 

            Harvey worked a bit with Lucille Ball. He says, “I love Lucy!” Lucy will be able to make people laugh until the end of time. She was very perfectionistic and when she was a guest on Carol’s show she tried to tell Harvey what to do but he put her in her place, which she accepted. 

            In the mid 60s he became a voice performer on The Flintstones. He was the voice of The Great Gazoo for only about 13 episodes but now the cells with The Great Gazoo on them are worth lots of money. He just made him superior and elite but says he’s not a very good voice over actor. He also doesn’t think he’s a very good movie actor either because he’s very intimidated by the camera. In order to be a star one has to have a persona and a rapport with the audience and Carol Burnett had that. When she started with questions and answers on the first show the audience was already in her pockets. Carol was the kind of performer that needs to have someone who can bounce the ball back quickly. 

            He tells his friend George Siegel not to be happy with four laughs because you’ve got to get six or eight. When he does his live shows with Tim Conway the back and forth they have with the audience is like communion, like a religious experience. 

             He loves doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. It takes him hours but he nearly always finishes it. 

             That was the end of the Korman interview but the video still had another twenty minutes of general interviews about the show with clips I’d already seen. 

             Dave Garroway had a degree in Abnormal Psychology. He began working as a page at NBC in 1938. He graduated from NBC’s School for Announcers and got a job at a Pittsburgh radio station. he gained a reputation for going to great lengths to get a story. After two years he moved to Chicago. After WWII he became a DJ, He was the host of The Dave Garroway (radio) Show from 1947 to 1955. He hosted the experimental radio show Garroway at Large from 1949 to 1951. He was the first host of The Today Show from 1952 to 1961. His easygoing presence attracted a large audience. He hosted The Dave Garroway Show from 1953 to 1954. He would tell the audience to respond to music by snapping their fingers rather than by applauding. He created a jazz circuit of local clubs and organized concerts. he was voted the best DJ in the US by other disc jockeys in 1948, 1949, and 1951. He was the first host of the NBC radio show Monitor in 1955. From 1955 to 1958 he hosted the weekly documentary series Wide Wide World. He co-starred in The World Through the Eyes of Children. He would sign off by holding up his palm and saying, “Peace!” In 1960 there was a board game called Dave Garroway’s Today Game. In 1961 he began to suffer from depression and would sometimes disappear in the middle of a Today broadcast. He quit the show in June of that year. He returned to work as a DJ. He began reading law books and on a bet took the bar exam, which he passed. He moved to LA in the 70s and began taking acting lessons. His acting debut was on an episode of Alias Smith and Jones. He collected and restored vintage cars and sometimes raced his SS Jaguar 100. He appeared in the first commercial for the Chevrolet Corvette in 1953 and the Ford Falcon in 1964.

August 19, 1996: I rehearsed with Brian for our feature

Thirty years ago today

            On Monday I rehearsed with Brian Haddon for our feature at my Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy open stage on Tuesday at the Gladstone Hotel.

Pat Carroll

            On Saturday after midnight I put fresh two-sided carpet tape around the edge of my mattress. I didn’t get to bed until 2:45 because I was working on my journal and wanted to stay only three days behind rather than going back to four. I didn’t sleep very well but only felt one bedbug on me overnight. After yoga I checked the tape and about ten bedbugs had been caught. 

            I memorized the second verse of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian and the fourth verse of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg. For the latter there are only two verses left to learn. 

            I weighed 90.75 kilos before breakfast. 

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio for the last of two sessions and it went out of tune about half the time. 

            Around midday I rode to No Frills where I bought five bags of Canadian cherries, a pack of Canadian blueberries, a pack of Mexican raspberries that went moldy before I could eat them, some bananas, a basket of Canadian peaches, a basket of Canadian nectarines, a bag of red grapes, a pack of Canadian chicken drumsticks, a pack of interdental brushes, three bags of 1% skim milk, two containers of skyr, and a bag of Miss Vickie’s chips. 

            I weighed 92.2 kilos at 14:30. 

            I woke up from my siesta too late to take a bike ride. 

            David was supposed to come over tonight so I could make a Lost Python poster for him but he called to tell me they found his snake at the hospital. He was there a couple of days ago and hadn’t realized that his python had crawled into his backpack before he went there and crawled out while he was there. They figured out it was his snake because it had a tattoo with his initials. 

            I weighed 92.5 kilos at 17:30, which is the heaviest I’ve been in the evening since February 16. 

            I was two days behind in my journal and worked on getting caught up. 

            I made pizza on a slice of Rudolph’s sandwich bread with marinara, tomato pesto, a sliced hot Italian sausage, and five-year-old cheddar. I had it with a glass of Creemore lager while watching an interview with Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. 

            On The Carol Burnett Show Dave Powers was not a bossy director. Harvey says there was not hierarchy and they were all working together to make a good show. Even the cameramen and the cue card guys might suggest something for a sketch. 

            Harvey says no other show would have sometimes taken up half the episode with a film parody. When they did the parody of Gone With the Wind Harvey didn’t know how to do an impression of Clark Gable until he was in costume and then he suddenly felt like him. Tim says his favourite was probably The Little Foxes parody. Near the end most of the cast were laughing corpses on the floor. 

            Harvey doesn’t think Tim really liked parody. He preferred to come up with totally original characters doing ridiculous things. Tim’s favourite sketch was the dentist and Harvey says he liked it too. 

            The first five years of The Carol Burnett Show were never re-broadcast. 

            Tim says there were over 1300 sketches in 11 years. 

            Harvey left at the end of season 10 because he had an offer to do his own show. He had about three or four different shots but couldn’t make it as the star of a show because he isn’t a star. He points to Tim and says, “He ain’t a star” and Tim agrees. The audience goes nuts when Tim is introduced but when he comes out on stage as himself he looks awkward. People don’t like to see their favourites moved into a different context. 

            The interviewer asks Tim how Harvey’s departure affected the show and Tim says it was a couple of weeks before they realized he was gone. He says Dick Van Dyke was a tremendous asset to the show but it was out of balance. Harvey says it was out of balance because Harvey was the glue that set up everybody else. With Dick and Carol there were too many stars on the show. 

            Harvey says when Tim had his own variety show his ratings were incredible but the show failed. Today the show would have been a hit with those numbers. 

            Tim says the best shows were the last ones before time off and everybody would just go out and explode. 

            Harvey says he started crying during the final show when Carol sang her theme song. 

            Their first reunion special was number 1 that week and the fourth highest that year. They showed clips of old sketches but also did new sketches. Harvey says the new sketches were just not as good and so they didn’t air them. They just kept their introductions of the old clips and their repartee in between. 

            Trying to recreate the Carol Burnett Show just wouldn’t work. 

            Harvey says he’s heard from people who said the only time they got along with their families was while watching Carol Burnett on Saturday night. 

            Harvey directed the TV movie Eunice starring Carol and co-starring Harvey, Vicki Lawrence, Betty White and Ken Berry. Harvey says he was never comfortable playing the character of Ed but he enjoyed directing it. It was Carol’s idea for Vicki to do Mama’s Family as a series. She didn’t want to do it at first but it was a hit. Harvey co-directed the first 24 episodes and he softened Mama’s character up a bit making her less harsh and caustic. 

            Tim says all of his shows only went 13 weeks. Early in his career he did Steve Allen three times and that was his favourite show and so he thought he’d already reached his peak and so he almost turned down McHale’s Navy. 

            Tim has a character named Dorf who is very short and is always an athlete involved with a different sport in each direct to video episode. There is also a direct to video movie that Tim and Harvey did called Tim and Harvey in The Great Outdoors. 

            Harvey doesn’t want to do movies or sitcoms anymore because they are too time consuming. Harvey does the live shows with Tim because Tim needs the money. The reason they are successful is because they are both brilliant. It took him years to be able to accept that but he’s always known Tim was brilliant. “He ribs me relentlessly and I love it. I don’t dare do that to him because he’s too sensitive. 

            When they were each nominated for an Emmy and Red Fox the host began to list the nominees, they both walked onto the stage and just stood there waiting to win but Chevy Chase won. One time when Tim won an Emmy he thanked everybody at the Tarzana Pitch and Putt. He listed their hours of operation and mentioned that they had baby sitters there. He announced that they had a new Mark Twain hole and that soft drinks were only a quarter. One time when Tim won he had Harvey accept it for him while Tim was right there. 

           Harvey says Tim has 6 Emmys while he only has 4. Tim corrects him that he only has 5.5 Emmys because one of them is for daytime and they’re smaller. 

            Tim says Harvey is neurotic, hypochondriac, obsessive compulsive, panicky, and anxious and so he’s an easy target. There are so many times Tim has taken advantage of that and attacked him on a daily basis. Harvey adds, “Many of which he can’t tell you about”. Tim compares their relationship to Jack Benny and George Burns. There’s one time Jack had just bought a new Bentley and George was directing him as he backed into a parking space. He kept saying “A little more!” until Jack hit a pole and then George said, “That’s good!” Tim says that’s essentially what he does to Harvey all the time. He says Harvey can do the New York Times crossword puzzle in five minutes but he can’t tie his own shoes. Harvey got new luggage with a new combination lock and so Tim locked it. He knew that a new lock’s combination would be 000 but Harvey didn’t so he pretended to crack it by listening to it and opened it. Then he reset the lock and locked it again. Harvey ripped open the suitcase. 

            Harvey says Tim got him to invest in a racehorse named Hail Columbus with him and two other guys for $30,000 a piece. He told him that his $30,000 would probably turn to $3 million. The horse never won a race. Then the horse couldn’t run because it was depressed and so they had to pay for a horse psychiatrist. After that and other treatments including a spa it had already cost Harvey $60,000. Then they found an Australian guy who was willing to buy it for $120,000 but the buyer’s granddaughter suddenly says she doesn’t want the horse because it’s not brown. Harvey was getting mad until he found out this was set up by TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. It wasn’t even their horse he thought they were selling. 

            Harvey says he and Tim met on The Danny Kaye Show but Tim remembers that they met on The Carol Burnett Show. He says in their first skit he gave Harvey a boost to his career. Harvey asks if The Carol Burnett Show was the high point of Tim’s career and he says it was. He asks if it would have been the high point if Harvey hadn’t been there and Tim says it would have been higher. 

            Tim says a Harvey Korman type is a straight man who is taller than the other’s in his skit so he can look down on them. Someone who can do voices, characters, who can be very physical, but most importantly who knows when to shut up, not to jump in but to just let something play. Harvey says that was very well put “and you didn’t have those tremors that you usually have”. He says a good straight man knows how to make the star shine and how to return the ball without stealing the show. 

            Carol established from the start that she wanted everybody to love each other and have fun and that was the atmosphere until the end. She let Tim go on and on while she just stood there. No other star would have allowed that. 

            Tim says as the years passed the rapport between the cast members was such that there came to be a flow and so they needed less rehearsal time. Sometimes the whole script might be changed in the middle of a rehearsal but it was no problem. If you did that to people nowadays they’d die. Harvey says that too much rehearsal can just squeeze the joy out. 

            One time Joe Hamilton came on in the middle of a skit in front of a live audience and told everybody to stop because it wasn’t working. That was the week Alan King was the guest star and he was astounded at what had just happened. 

            Tim says there were about a dozen audience members who came to almost every show. 

            Tim was also a writer on the show and he wrote things like the Tudball-Wiggins sketches. He says the prop men loved his suggestions like on the As The Stomach Turns set there was a painting of a barn on the wall. Tim asked the prop man to put a real door in the painting so he could crawl inside. The prop man added a lot of other stuff like hay, little animals and the barn catching fire. So everybody contributed. 

            Harvey says when they did the skit as two German sailors in a submarine, that morning Tim had a vasectomy. Tim adds, “Which I did myself.” Harvey says, “You took out your own prostate too. He saved a lot of money.” When Tim slid down the periscope and hit the floor he was in such pain after the operation. 

            Tim talks about the time Carol was singing in front of a horse and it started pissing. The handler came with a bucket and saluted Carol while she was cracking up. 

            Harvey says you can’t do sketches and look at cue cards. 

            They went through about 40 writers. The original head writer was Arnie Rosen who was brilliant. Artie Malvin and Ken and Mitzi Welch wrote the special songs. 

            A few guests were intimidated and who looked for the cards because they couldn’t improvise. But Carol always made them feel comfortable. 

            When Pat Carol was a guest she wet her pants during a sketch. She said after the first taping, “This is the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever seen in my life! What is this laughing business in the middle of a show? We have to have some discipline and pride in our work!” But during the second taping she reacted to Tim acting like a dog and started laughing so hard she peed her pants and had to leave the stage. Harvey says, “Talk about unprofessional? She still had dialogue left!” 

            Harvey had never thought of himself and Tim as a team but they were inducted into the Television Hall of Fame as a comedy team. He wonders if they would have been inducted individually. Maybe Tim would have been and Tim says, “Absolutely!” 

            Harvey says Tim is a very good writer and comedy innovator. Carol has said that more people steal from Tim than anybody else. 

            Tim says a wonderful thing about Joe and Carol is if there was something they wanted to take out but if you said, “Let’s give it a shot” they’d let you. During the dentist sketch Tim arranged with the sound man to have the sound of a fly buzzing around. When Tim swatted it while his hands were limp from the novocaine Harvey lost it. They show that sketch in dental schools. Tim says it came from a real situation when one dental student was applying a needle to someone’s cheek and it went through the cheek to the student’s thumb. 

            Harvey didn’t like playing Roger in the Carol and Sis sketches because he was a real person.

            Tim is the only person who ever fell upstairs. 

            Pat Carroll earned a BA in Acting from Catholic University. After college she began performing in nightclubs, at Tamiment resort, and in over 200 stock and regional productions. She made her stage debut in The Goose and the Gander in 1947. She made her film debut in Hometown Girl in 1948. She made her television debut when she became a cast member of The Red Buttons Show. She made her Broadway debut in Catch a Star in 1955 and was nominated for a Tony. She starred in The Saturday Night Revue. She was in 46 episodes of Caesar’s Hour for which she won an Emmy Award. She played Bunny Halper on 40 episodes of The Danny Thomas Show. She played Mrs. Hope Stinson on 21 episodes of Too Close For Comfort. She played Gussie Holt on all 45 episodes of She’s the Sheriff. She played Pearl Markowitz on Busting Loose. She played Katrina Stoneheart on Pound Puppies. She co-starred in With Six You Get Eggroll, The Brothers O’Toole, . She starred in the one-woman show Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein and won a grammy for the recorded version.

August 18, 1996: Action figures

Thirty years ago today

            On Sunday my daughter and I played with her action figures on the back roof.