Sometimes a celebrity comes along and you love them, though you can clearly remember when you didn’t. Then you have those celebrities you may have loved when you young, but they’ve faded over the years.
The special kind are the celebrities that you loved for as long as you can remember, no matter how old you are! Today I wanted to talk about one of those for me anyway. I can’t remember exactly when I was first aware of Carol Burnett, she was also a big name to me. Of course this makes sense since she was around looonng before I was even born. But before I run down a list of projects, you may be wondering what brings this topic up today. Well, let me tell you.
On Sunday as a birthday present for my mother, I got to see literally see Carol Burnett live and in person at the Providence Performing Arts Center. Yep. And I gotta say you’d never know the woman was 83! It was a simple show, she took questions from the audience as she used to in her old show and did a lot of reminiscing. Yeah I could be a jerk nitpicker and note that I have heard these stories a hundred times…but so what, she was live on stage! Here are some highlights….
She did a tribute to Harvey Korman by showing that classic dentist sketch with him and Tim Conway.
Her best line came from the first question. A member of the audience asked “Would you consider running for president in 2016?”. Her response-“No, but I’d consider moving to Vancouver”.
She talked about Her friend Lucy and of course all her other co-stars from the old show Tim Conway and Vicki Lawrence. She gave some advice and discussed other work outside of The Carol Burnett Show.
She discussed her first big break in “Once Upon a Mattress” and told other stories, including how she felt that today’s comedy is not as good as it used to be because there is to much emphases on low brow humor.
Of course there were clips and the end of the night was, of course, “I’m So Glad We Had The Time Together”. And yes, she did the tarzan yell!
Burnett is one of the entertainers where you know who she is, I don’t care if your eighty or eighteen you know who she is. And why not with her career? She is a funny lady but she can also sing and is even a decent actress doing lots of drama. Let’s go over some of my favorite things that she has appeared in, these last forty years! Now as always this is just things I have seen, so to say the least this will hardly be a complete list of all her work. Normally I manage to cobble together quite a list, but truth is there isn’t that much I have seen of her episodic work. I never saw her in Magnum, PI, Hawaii Five-O, or All My Children for instance. I guess I know her more from her appearances as herself in various talk shows and other specials including a few Carol Burnett Show Reunions. And she has done a lot for Disney,
The Carol Burnett Show
I talked before about how much it kills me I missed out on this when it was broadcast originally. The little fact when the series ended I still hadn’t been born being the reason. But man was this show fantastic. Variets can get boring to be honest, after awhile all of these shows kind of feel he same. Music, sketches, more music, and so forth. What set this show apart then? The chemistry between the five leads, it really like they loved each other. It’s why we loved it when Conway would break up Korman for instance.