Charlene Beatty

            On Monday I went to bed a little before 1:30 and slept fairly well until 3:00. I started feeling bedbugs on me after a couple of days of peace since I destroyed the nests above the bedroom door curtains. I got up and lint rolled my bed then got a little more sleep but not much. After yoga there were a few caught on the carpet tape around my bed but more crawling freely on the wall at the head of my bed. The tape tends to get less sticky after a few days. 

            I worked out the chords for most of the chorus of “Jules Bonnot c'était pas n'importe qui” (Jules Bonnot Was Not Just Anybody) by Boris Vian. I might have gotten more or all of it done but the guitar strap for my Martin broke at the button end and so I had to widen the next hole so it would fit the button and then untie the leather cord I use to attach the strap to the neck so I could extend it to compensate for the new shortness at the other end. 

            I published on my Christian’s Translations blog “The Seduction of Doctor Faust”, my translation of “Docteur Faust” by Serge Gainsbourg then posted the text on Facebook. I looked for the next Gainsbourg song on my list to work on and that’s “Soixante Treize” but that was just a one-off piece Gainsbourg wrote for Jane Birkin to sing on a TV show and there is no recording. The next song after that is “Les filles c'est un flipper” (Girls Are a Pinball Game) for which there is a video by Jacques Dutronc. I have a set of lyrics for it but I think I transcribed them years ago from listening and I don’t think they’re accurate. So tomorrow I’ll download the video and try uploading the audio to another free transcription app. I might have to try more than one because sometimes they’re not very accurate. 

            I weighed 91.05 kilos before breakfast.

            I played my Gibson Les Paul Studio during song practice for the last of two sessions and it stayed in tune about half the time. 

            I weighed 92.35 kilos before lunch. 

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

            I weighed 91.8 kilos at 17:55. 

            I was still two days behind in my journal and worked on catching up. 

            I had a potato with gravy and two chicken drumsticks while watching a couple of videos about The Carol Burnett Show. One was about the Tudball and Whiggins sketches and the other was about breaking out laughing during sketches. 

            Tim says the appeal of Tudball and Whiggins is the familiarity of the situations. He says Mrs. Whiggins was inspired by Charlene Beatty who is now his wife. Carol loved the character and she made sure that she never laughed because she had to be too dumb to see the humour. Amy Pohler says she loves Mrs. Whiggins is because she was so slow and it dragged out the comedy. Tim says he got Tudball’s accent from his mother’s Romanian relatives. Vicki says it sounded a little like Lawrence Welk. 

            The second video opens up with Harvey cracking up while dressed as a German officer while Carl Reiner tells him to be a good Nazi and stop laughing. 

            Carol says Harvey would get mad at himself for laughing. Vicki says they used to have a betting pool in the green room. How many seconds into a sketch with Tim before Harvey loses it? 

            Ken Solms says in the dentist sketch, Tim didn’t accidentally put novocaine in his leg during the dress rehearsal. That was entirely improvised. Tim says his object in life was fulfilled when Harvey wet his pants during that sketch. Ken Berry says Tim was the only one they let get away with such wild deviations from the script. 

            Steve Lawrence says that in the sketch where he and Harvey are ad men competing for the account of Tim the client, it was Steve’s idea to play it as if they were competing for Tim’s love. This was the one sketch in which Tim cracked up more than anyone else. Tim says he thinks he wrote the original sketch. 

            In the Born Free parody sketch when Carol and Harvey are making Tim as the lion return to the wild, it was Tim’s improvization to have the sound of a toilet flushing while he was packing to leave in the other room. 

            Tim says his Old Man character came about because he’s always thought elderly people were funny. 

            Charlene Beatty was a production assistant for 160 episodes of The Carol Burnett Show; for Sills and Burnett at the Met; and for the TV movie The Tenth Month. She was the original inspiration for the character Mrs. Whiggins on The Carol Burnett Show because of her inability to use an intercom. Tim thought it was funny and so that was the premise of the first sketch. Tim married Charlene in 1984. He said she fed him so much fiber he was passing wicker furniture. They were together for 35 years until Tim died.