Surprising Facts About The Queen Of Sketch Comedy, Carol Burnett
It’s hard for comedy to be timeless, as many jokes tend to be fairly topical and based on the current matters of the day. That’s not even addressing how certain material ages socially, but both considerations can make something uproarious in one decade and only elicit blank stares during the next one.
However, true innovators manage to be funny across generations. Along with having that feather in her cap, Carol Burnett was such a comedic innovator that an entire comedy ecosystem wouldn’t exist without her. Of course, there’s far more to her life than the laughs and that’s about to be very clear.
Burnett Tugged Her Ear As A Message To Her Grandma
According to Today, Burnett has been open about the fact that she was primarily raised by her grandmother, as her parents lived with alcoholism to the point of being unfit to care for her. When she got her first television gig on the The Paul Winchell Show, her grandma asked her to say hi to her.
Although she didn’t think she’d be allowed to do that, she came up with a signal of tugging her left ear for this purpose and she used that signal throughout her career. As she joked to the Golden Globes, “I’d always pull that ear at the end of every one of my shows to say, ‘Hi Nanny, I’m fine, I love you, your check is on the way.'”
Burnett Had Not Planned On Becoming An Actress
When Burnett started studying at UCLA with her eyes on her career, she never imagined that she would end up being an actress or a comedian. Indeed, her initial career plans were much more seriously-minded because she wanted to be a journalist.
As The Smith Center confirmed, UCLA didn’t have a journalism program at the time, so she decided to pivot to playwright-focused courses instead. This program included a mandatory acting class, which revealed to Burnett what a natural she was. As she put it, “I picked (a scene to perform) that was light and funny and I did it, and they laughed where they should’ve, and I thought ‘wow.'”
The Carol Burnett Show Was Nominated For 77 Emmys
As CNN confirmed, these 77 Emmy nominations were not just specific to The Carol Burnett Show but also its reunions and specials. For her own part, Burnett received 25 of these nominations personally.
While it’s not unusual for actors and shows to rack up an array of nominations without every actually winning, that wasn’t a problem in this case. The show would go on to win 25 Emmys, while Burnett herself won seven, as well as an honorary award from the committee.
She’ll Never Reveal Who Funded Her Career’s Start
After she found her passion for performing, Burnett found a gig at a black-tie event while she was still in college. According to The Smith Center, her act made an amazing impression on one influential couple, as when she mentioned that she couldn’t afford to pursue musical comedy in New York City, they offered her $1,000.
This amounts to almost $12,000 today but it came with three conditions: She couldn’t reveal who gave it to her, she had to pay it back within five years, and she had to help others if she made it big. She fulfilled all three obligations, with the number of scholarships she’s formed and the favors she’s done for up-and-coming performers fulfilling the most nebulous of the three.
She Found A Petty Place For Her Walk Of Fame Star
By 1975, Burnett’s show had proved both so groundbreaking and so popular that she was awarded a star on Hollywood’s famous Walk Of Fame. While it’s unclear how often stars of that stature get specific about where theirs should be, Burnett specifically requested hers to be placed at 6439 Hollywood Boulevard.
According to Masterworks Broadway, she wanted this spot at Hollywood and Wilcox because that’s where the old Warner Brothers theater was. What does that matter? Well, that was the theater she was brusquely fired from as an usher in 1951 because she advised two patrons to wait ten minutes so they don’t spoil the ending of Strangers On A Train for themselves. That’s some delicious pettiness.
Burnett Briefly Fired Harvey Korman From The Show
As Burnett wrote in her 2016 memoir, In Such Good Company, Harvey Korman was particularly rude to his guests and fellow cast members during the seventh season of The Carol Burnett Show in 1975. When Burnett confronted him about it, he told her to mind her own business, to which she replied that her show was her business.
Korman doubled down on his attitude and threatened to leave the show, at which point she called his agent to inform him that he wouldn’t be returning and told him he got his wish. He asked what he could do to keep his job, at which point she told him that he was going to be much nicer to her guests from then on. When he was overly chipper the next day on set, she found it so funny that she put “Mr. Happy Go Lucky” on his dressing room door.
Burnett’s Husband Suggested The Opening Q&A Segment
Although it’s not unusual for a stand-up comedian to warm up an audience before a show’s taping, but Burnett’s husband (and the show’s executive producer) Joe Hamilton worried that this could go wrong if the comedian ended up upstaging the actual cast.
According to Mental Floss, he suggested that Burnett warm up the audience herself by answering fan questions. Although the unpredictable nature of this was terrifying to the cast (especially Lawrence), this would prove to be as much of a widely adopted innovation in the entertainment world as sketch comedy itself.
Vicki Lawrence’s Mother Got Her On The Show
Vicki Lawrence was an 18-year-old with little to no acting experience when Burnett hired her for the show, and it would never have happened if Lawrence’s mother didn’t make her write a letter to Burnett. According to Mental Floss, this was because the short haircut she got in her senior year made her resemble the famous comedian, which the mother apparently saw as an in.
Unlike so many parents who have thought similar things, however, she was right. Burnett attended the pageant Lawrence wrote to her about while seven months pregnant and when Lawrence brought flowers for the baby, the nurses mistook her for family. That put her in Burnett’s mind when she needed someone to play her sister and the rest is history.
She Once Fell Asleep Onstage Due To Overwork
According to The Smith Center, Burnett’s early career gave her too much of a good thing, as she starred in the Broadway show Once Upon A Mattress while also securing a regular role on The Garry Moore Show. As she described it, this meant filming Moore’s show for the day and then immediately getting on the subway to show up to the play’s call time.
Ironically, Once Upon A Mattress saw her character struggle to sleep on a stack of 20 mattresses. During the grueling year with this as her schedule, however, Burnett had no problem falling asleep for real during one performance. As she put it, “The stage manager in the wings was saying, ‘Carol, Carol wake up!’ The audience, they didn’t know. So, then they did give me a day off.”
Burnett Was The First Ever Guest On Sesame Street
In the years before she launched her show, Burnett was no stranger to children’s television. So when a show with as groundbreaking of a production focus and with as creative and well-made of characters as Sesame Street came along, Burnett was interested before almost anyone.
That not only meant that she became the first of many celebrity guests on the show, but that she was there for their inaugural episode in 1969 and came back several times over its next 50 years. As AP News reported, she said, “I was a big fan. I would have done anything they wanted me to do. I loved being exposed to all that goodness and humor.”
The Carol Burnett Show Exists Thanks To A Contract Clause
Although the executives at CBS were nervous about the prospect for Burnett launching her own variety show, there was nothing they could legally do to stop it. That was because her agent was able to negotiate an unusual ten-year contract that included a clause stipulating that Burnett could do a one-hour variety show whenever she chose.
As she told ABC News, “All I had to do was push the button and they would have to put it on for 30 one-hour pay or play shows.” Five days before this period elapsed — in the days between Christmas and New Year’s Day, no less — she pushed the button and got her show.
Burnett Once Used Her Tarzan Yell As identification
Alongside the ear tug, one of Carol Burnett’s signatures throughout her show was her Tarzan yell, which was relevant to the parody shown here but also became a recurring bit. So much so that when she realized she was shopping without her ID or credit card, it was able to get her out of and then back into a bind.
Both the cashier and the floor manager recognized her, so Burnett was allowed to use her iconic Tarzan yell to confirm her identity. However, as The Standard Times reported, a security guard suddenly burst in and pulled a gun on her in response. Apparently, he was not familiar with the bit.
A Dress From The Show Is Now In The Smithsonian
One of the most famous sketches on The Carol Burnett Show was “Went With The Wind,” a segment that saw Burnett parody Gone With The Wind. As shown here, its pièce de résistance was a dress that looked far more like it was made from a curtain than Scarlett O’Hara’s dress did.
While the revised dress looks hilarious, it is nonetheless now considered a serious American cultural artifact, as it’s now in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The fact that it was envisioned by famed costume designer Bob Mackie probably doesn’t hurt, either.
There Was Only One Guest Burnett Wasn’t Able To Get
If there was a star that Burnett wanted on her show by the ’70s, her platform was big enough that she rarely had much trouble booking even unthinkably big names. In just one of many examples, here we can see jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald appearing during an episode.
However, while Burnett would have adored booking Hollywood icon Bette Davis, she was the only one who was beyond her reach. According to Mental Floss, it wasn’t even due to Davis’s unwillingness, but rather the price tag her appearance required. It was more than the show had budgeted and Hamilton believed it would set a dangerous precedent for the show’s budget if they acquiesced anyway.
Burnett Considers A Rainy Day A Lucky One
Although Burnett told Vanity Fair that this doesn’t apply to rain heavy enough to cause flooding, she’s felt since childhood that an average rainy day is a herald of good luck. In her words, “When I was a kid and I would take a test in school, and if it rained, I got an A. It calmed me down.”
While some examples include her getting her agent’s number, starting Once Upon A Mattress, and starting her show on a rainy day, she also mentioned that it rained during specials she was particularly proud of that featured Dolly Parton, Julie Andrews, and Beverly Sills.
