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.