She's so glad we had this time together

LET’S bump up the lights."

With those words at the start of her TV variety show in the 1960s and '70s, comedienne Carol Burnett would get the house lights turned on. Then she'd take questions from her studio audience.

No matter how inane, personal or off-the-wall the query, the much-loved funny lady always showed off her improv skills with a witty, often hilarious, reply.

Burnett, now 76, is a legend who has logged more than 50 years as a stage and movie actress, singer and TV star. It's not as if she has anything left to prove.

But the slender redhead with the contagious grin is on a short Canadian tour that brings her to the Centennial Concert Hall Wednesday. In an evening of "laughter and reflection," she'll show memorable clips from The Carol Burnett Show and take questions from the audience.

"It keeps my brain active," says the warmly friendly Burnett from her home in Santa Barbara, Calif. "It's to keep the grey matter ticking.

"It is a conversation with the audience. Really, the audience is my partner."

Burnett performed in Canada for the first time last fall, when she did the Laughter and Reflection show in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.

How did she find Canadian crowds compared with Americans?

"I think they're better -- I really do," she says. "They were warmed up before I came out. They were just ready to have fun."

Because she's not bringing any musicians, she says, the only singing she'll likely do is a few bars of her wistful theme song ("I'm so glad we had this time together..."). The four-line song closed the weekly CBS show that ran from 1967 to 1978 -- always including, of course, the star's trademark ear-tug signal to her grandmother.

You might imagine that Burnett has already fielded every possible audience question. But only about half, she says, fall into the predictable category.

She has a repertoire of funny stories that she can use for standard questions such as "Is Tim Conway (the member of her show's cast who was most prone to zany improv) really that funny in real life?"

She is always asked to belt out her Tarzan yell, a goofy signature bit that harks back to her early tomboy-klutz persona. Does she still oblige?

"Oh, sure!" she says. "All it is, is an extended yodel. As a singer, you go from the head voice, to the chest voice, to the head voice. Sometimes I'll have somebody in the audience stand up and try to do it."

The comedienne says part of the fun of taking questions is the challenge of thinking fast.

"There was one I got last fall in Texas -- it almost threw me. This woman up in the balcony said, 'Carol, if you could become a member of the opposite sex for 24 hours, who would you be, and what would you do?"

Burnett snorts with laughter as she recalls how her mind was racing. "I said a little prayer real quick: 'OK, God, I'm gonna open my mouth, and whatever comes out is your fault.'

"What came out was: 'I'd be Osama bin Laden, and I'd kill myself.'"

One of the keys to Burnett's TV appeal was, as one writer put it, "her unique blend of sophistication and folksiness." She was a gangly, unpretentious everywoman who wasn't afraid to look ridiculous. Yet she could dress up in chic Bob Mackie gowns and sing duets with the most elegant of guest stars.

She names Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett as singers she wishes she'd had on the show. The musical giants she did croon with -- names like Peggy Lee and Bing Crosby -- never intimidated her, she says.

"I was more intimidated singing by myself, unless I was in a character. To have me, as Carol, get up and sing a straight song, I was a wreck. If I was sitting next to Eydie Gormé or Steve Lawrence or even Ella Fitzgerald, we had a camaraderie going."

Burnett, a child of alcoholic parents who was raised by her grandmother in Hollywood, knew she was not beautiful in a movie-star way. But a career in movies wasn't her dream.

"I originally wanted to be on Broadway and be a musical-comedy star like Ethel Merman or Mary Martin," she recalls. "They were not considered great beauties. But they could sing and belt and have a lot of fun."

After moving to New York, she first achieved widespread fame as a "zany ugly duckling" performer, as she puts it, on Garry Moore's variety show from 1959 to 1962.

On her own show, which ran for 278 episodes, her ensemble included Conway, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner and her younger lookalike, Vicki Lawrence.

Among the show's classic sketches were "As the Stomach Turns," the Gone with the Wind parody "Went with the Wind," "Mr. Tudball and Mrs. Wiggins," "The Family" (which spun off into the show Mama's Family), and spoofs of annoying commercials.

Most fans loved the times when the cast would crack up -- usually because of Conway's impish disruptions -- and shake with uncontrollable suppressed laughter.

"Nobody ever tried to break up," Burnett insists. "Every one of those was honest. We tried not to! It was Tim's goal in life to destroy Harvey."

Each week, she explains, the show had two tapings. At the first taping, Conway would do the sketches "to the ink," exactly as they were written and rehearsed. At the second taping, for a different audience, he would monkey around.

"Vicki was the best one to keep a straight face," she remembers. "Lyle was the second-best. I was the third-best. And Harvey was helpless."

Some critics might say that the Carol Burnett Show's broad parodies and vaudeville-inspired physical comedy don't hold up today, or couldn't possibly seem funny to young people in 2009.

Burnett disagrees.

"Funny's funny. You can't look at something that Tim Conway's doing, where he's on a roll, and say, 'I don't get it'... I could pick out certain sketches that I swear, if you did them today, they'd get the same response."

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 6, 2009 C3