Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter and Love (Silent House, NBC-TV, aired April 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I got to see a TV special called Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter and Love, which aired last night because April 26, 2023 was in fact Carol Burnett’s 90th birthday. (As I found out later on one of the late-night TV comedy shows, April 26 is also the birthday of Melania Trump. Both are pretty funny ladies, but Burnett, unlike Mrs. Trump, actually was trying to be.) Though virtually all Burnett’s TV career was on CBS – both her early stint on Garry Moore’s variety show and the 11 years she hosted her own – for some reason the special aired on NBC. Our long-time friend Garry Hobbs came over about midway through the special and recalled actually meeting Carol Burnett; his dad was in the Marine Corps and Burnett, Nancy Sinatra and Jim Nabors came to Camp Pendleton in San Diego’s North County to entertain the troops. Garry sneaked backstage during the performance and got royally chewed out by Jim Nabors, who emerged from his dressing trailer and rudely told him to go back to the audience where he belonged. Then Burnett chewed Nabors out, telling him that the fans were the ones who had put them there in the first place and he should be nice to them. Garry said he approached Burnett and addressed her, “Ms. Burnett” – and she said, as she was wont to do whenever anyone approached her, “Call me Carol.” Garry’s anecdote tied in to the things the participants in the special were telling about her – that she was unfailingly polite to fans and also she worked hard to give new talents a break.

Vicki Lawrence, who seems to be the only regular cast member of Burnett’s show besides Carol herself to have survived (Tim Conway died in 2019, Harvey Korman in 2008, and Lyle Waggoner in 2020), recalled that she wrote Carol a fan letter expressing her wish to follow in her footsteps – and Carol not only wrote her back personally, she invited her to a meeting and six years later hired Lawrence for her show. Not surprisingly, by far the best parts of the show were the clips from Burnett’s actual episodes, including the screamingly funny parody of Gone With the Wind. In the movie, Scarlett O’Hara makes herself a new ball gown from the curtains of her home, Tara; in her spoof, Burnett left the curtain rod in. According to Bob Mackie, who designed it (and all the rest of the costumes for Burnett’s show, as well as being Cher’s famous designer – Cher appeared on this show and joked about her and Carol being the same size, which they clearly aren’t), the original costume is in the Smithsonian Institution. Needless to say, the show included a whirlwind biography of Burnett, from her start on Broadway in the musical Once Upon a Mattress (a part-adaptation, part-spoof of the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea”) and on TV when first Jack Paar and then Ed Sullivan put her on their show to sing a comic love song to, of all people, then-U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. (One joke about the Dulles brothers – John Foster and Allan, who headed the CIA – from their time was they were so aptly named they were “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”) That got her on Garry Moore’s show (where she consistently outshone him) and then onto a show of her own that ran for 11 seasons.

The show featured tributes from modern-day entertainers as well as veterans like Vicki Lawrence, Julie Andrews and Lily Tomlin. Burnett and Andrews did three specials together and Lawrence introduced a clip of her and Carol doing Brahms’ Lullaby together at a time when Lawrence was visibly pregnant. Broadway veterans Kristin Chenoweth and Bernadette Peters introduced a clip of Burnett and the late opera star Beverly Sills doing a duet called “An Octave Apart” as a spoof of the difference between their voices. Then Chenoweth and Peters did their own “take” on the song, with Peters taking Carol’s original part and Chenoweth doing Sills’s – to much less effect; though Chenoweth has a good “legit” extension on her voice, she’s not a trained opera singer and frankly a true modern diva like Renée Fleming or Natalie Dessay would have been a better choice. There was also a segment featuring Burnett’s career as an actress on both film and TV – including what I think is her all-time best dramatic performance in the 1979 TV-movie Friendly Fire as Peg Mullen, the mother of a U.S. servicemember killed in Viet Nam who’s determined to find out why her son was killed by “friendly fire” – i.e., by his own side. I remember reading an interview Burnett gave to TV Guide to promote that film in which she was asked how someone best known as a comedienne could deliver a dramatic performance, and she said, “Actually, comedy is harder.” (One person who agreed with her was classic-era actor and director Erich von Stroheim, who frequently cast comedians in serious roles on the ground that if you could play comedy, you could play anything.) Alas, the movie they mostly featured was the 1992 film of the hit Broadway musical Annie, which aside from Burnett’s own performance as orphanage manager Mrs. Hannigan – the true villainess of the story, a role she tore into with all the venom it required and then some – was frankly terrible.

The show also paid tribute to the musical guests on Carol’s show, including Steve Lawrence and his wife, Eydie Gormé, The Carpenters, The Jackson 5, Helen Reddy, Ray Charles (the show included a clip of their great duet in the song “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry”), Bing Crosby, “Mama” Cass Elliott, Ella Fitzgerald, Liza Minnelli, Jim Nabors, Mel Tormé, Ethel Merman and two huge talents that weren’t primarily known as singers but acquitted themselves beautifully as such on Carol’s show, Steve Martin and Lucille Ball. The show ended with acknowledgments of Burnett’s current projects, including a recurring slot on the last six episodes of the TV black-comedy Better Call Saul (whose star, Bob Odenkirk, revealed that in the final episode his character was supposed to kill Carol’s, only at the last minute he demanded a rewrite because “I don’t want to go down in history as the man who killed Carol Burnett”) and her newest mini-series, Palm Royale, which according to imdb.com “chronicles a woman reconstructing her identity in the 1960’s after being dismissed by her husband and her entire social circle.” Carol’s co-stars in this series, Alison Janney, Laura Dern and Kristen Wiig, all paid tribute to her on the show and spoke predictably about what it was like to be working with a living legend.

The show concluded with Carol Burnett’s closing theme for all 11 seasons of her show, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together,” sung by Katy Perry (surprisingly soulfully; she’s made news recently as one of two entertainers, along with Lionel Richie, who’ve agreed to perform at King Charles III’s coronation after other, bigger names, including Charles’s countrymen Elton John and Ed Sheeran, turned him down) with Carol herself taking over on the last line. Carol Burnett has been one of those people who’s been in the public eye for literally my entire life, or as close to it as makes no difference, and though this show had its clunky moments, it was mostly a heartfelt, moving tribute to an entertainer who has also been a genuinely good, decent human being. When Charles and I watched the biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers I wondered whether being a great talent also inevitably means being a great asshole; Carol Burnett’s life and career have been living proofs that the answer to that question is, “No.”