Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Breaking News: Carol Burnett is Alive! (Videos)

By N.S.

Several days ago, I fell for some classic click-bait (but only for about 30 seconds). A video “thing” said that four big actors had all died on the same day, and showed a picture of Carol Burnett, who is now 91 years old. Naturally, I clicked, and quickly determined that the “thing” had nothing at all to do with Burnett, who was still very much alive (and still occasionally performing!).

My chief of research set me up with ad blocker a few years ago. According to him, the whole point of such “things” (often accompanied by an ai bot “narrator”) is to rope the unsuspecting into seeing the commercials that they are laden with.


Carol Burnett: “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together” (CBS Network Debut Version, 1967), by Joe Hamilton, her second husband, producer, and the father of her three daughters (1929-1991)




“Career Couple”: Sketch from The Carol Burnett Show




Carol Burnett as Stand-Up Comic (1958)




Quotes

“I was once asked to do my Tarzan yell at Bergdorf Goodman, and a guard burst in with a gun! Now I only do it under controlled circumstance.

• “I had the imprint as a child that if Mickey and Judy could put a show on in a barn and then it got to Broadway, well that's just the way things are! Inside I always knew I would be okay.

• “[on never trying stand-up comedy] I can’t tell a joke to save my soul. It's just not my thing, though I love to listen to jokes. I remember Ed Wynn, a famous comedian who started out in vaudeville, once said ‘Stand-up comedians say funny things. Sketch comedians say things funny.’ Isn’t that a good distinction?

• “I’m glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie. The networks just wouldn’t spend the money today.”

I think of this song as “Nanny’s Song,” because Carol always ended it with a tug at her ear, to her Nanny in heaven. As most of my more “mature” readers and contributors know, Carol Burnett’s beloved Nanny saved her life, raising her in the place of her completely unfunctioning, drunken parents. She sang this song, written by her husband and producer Joe Hamilton (and father of her three children), for years and years, at the close of each show.


Carol Burnett: “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together” (Extended Version)





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

She still has her marbles.I posted last Saturday that there were some rare showings of "The Carol Burnett Show" from the late 60s on "Catchy Comedy" tv all weekend.

Carol was kind of cute,in a goofy sort of way in 1967-68.The shows featured Mickey Rooney,Bob Hope,Carol Channing,Bernadette Peters(in the mid 70s)and many others.To be honest,I'm not sure if the shows hold up on binge viewing.Big musical numbers,comedy sketches galore that are hit and miss.It took a while before they hit their stride with Tim Conway and Harvey Korman,plus Vickie Lawrence.The early years?

Maybe not so classic,but it WAS a time capsule.

--GRA






Anonymous said...

They've been doing the same thing with Clint Eastwood; one site even had an AI (presumably)- generated image of him slumped over in a hospital bed! Utterly disgusting people. If Youtube was run by human beings and not auto-generated like so many other things nowadays, one could complain and maybe something would be done about it. But we're not living in a "human" world anymore.

-RM