The Carol Burnett Show

I loved the Carol Burnett show when I was a child. It was in half-hour reruns. After spending the last weekend watching TV Land marathon, I just learned why. It was one of the most entertaining experiences in television history. This was a great cast of highly talented people not just the beloved star, Carol Burnett. Her former husband Joe Hamilton produced the show. Her friends like Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence, and Lyle Waggoner were all uniquely talented and gifted. We can see why this show thrived. Most of the cast were there from beginning to end. After 11 years of superb Emmy winning and golden globe episodes, the show is available on DVD and can be seen on TV Land where it belongs with some of television's classics. It is still a classic. Sometimes Saturday Night Live and MAD TV can embrace the wholesome comedy as a risk in itself.

The Carol Burnett Show, a.k.a. Carol Burnett and Friends, is my favorite show in TV history, without question. It made me laugh endlessly with its sketch comedy. For me, the best comedy revolves around lines that often seem ad libbed; the spontanaety often results in some of the best humor around. What also made this show special was Tim Conway's deliberate ad libbing of lines and actions to try to make the other actors bust up laughing. A classic example of this is when Conway, playing a NAZI officer in one sketch, tries to interrogate a POW (Lyle Waggoner) with an Adolf Hitler Puppet doll.

Whether its Tim Conway as Uncle Waldo, Carol Burnett as "Missus Uh-Wiggins" or "Eunice", Jim Nabors as Yung Fool, or Vicki Lawrence as Mama Harper, this show's absolutely priceless.

i can not understand why this show is not in reruns. I'm writing a letter to TV Land, to ask why they have never aired this on their network. What makes this show so good, is the chemistry between the perfect cast. A variety show like Saturday Night Live is greatly dependent on the chemistry among its cast members. When one of them leaves, it upsets the balance among the rest. This show was lucky enough to have most of its cast stay for the duration of the run, and therefore, it is the best.

The jewel in the crown on CBS's Saturday night comedies. In one night you saw All in the Family, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, bob Newhart, and Carol Burnett. There was never that much great comedy on one evening, before or after. Must-see TV years before NBC. Me and my family stayed glued to the set from 8 to 11. A great cast and consistently funny; I found out later that several Mad magazine writers were on the staff. I did get tired of Harvey Korman breaking up very week... but opposite Tim Conway, who could resist? I remember a sketch where Harvey was in a dentist chair; Tim was the dentist. All was going well... until Tim injected the Novocaine into himself and not his patient. Various parts of his body went numb. I remember him slapping his dangling right hand with his left--the numb hand swung back and forth like a half-filled water balloon. Then the left half of his face went slack. Then the right. The his right leg gave out and he had to sit on the chair with Harvey. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard, and poor Harvey almost slid out of his chair with laughter. A class act, all the way. It's a shame Harvey Korman never went on to comedy stardom, when marginally talented folks like Adam Sandler became millionaires.

Half of the fun of watching Carol Burnett and Friends was watching the actors and actresses try to maintain straight faces during their skits, even when on the inside they were dying to burst out laughing. What made this series funny is that the actors and actresses ad-libbed most of their lines. This way, even the other actors didn't know what would be said next. I've seen many episodes of this show and each one of them keeps me laughing. This is comedy at it highest, at a time when humor was based on slapstick humor and the totally unexpected instead of sexual one-liners. If you ever get a chance to see this show, watch it. You won't be disappointed--especially if you're fortunate to see the episode where Lyle Waggoner is a prisoner of war in WWII interrogated by German officers Harvey Korman and Tim Conway.