Laugh Lines: Conversations With Comedians (15 page)

Corey: Now that you’re off the market, what is some good advice you have for singles?

Lisa: Oh, my God. Get your whore stage out of your system in your 20s, because it’s kind of gross in your 40s. Then, don’t look for a guy who’s good-lookin’ or had a lot of money, look for the things that really count: nice character, nice morals—and a big meat sack.

What’s a Tim Conway?

“
About 120 pounds.”

Such is the spontaneous repartee the diminutive comic is known for, whether he’s causing the entire cast of “The Carol Burnett Show” to turn crimson and tear up from laughter or holding his own with another comedy legend, Don Knotts, in “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”

Conway got his start on “The Steve Allen Show” and then “McHale’s Navy,” but he is probably best known for the Burnett show, where characters like the not-so-swift-footed Old Man and the perplexed and heavily accented office boss, Mr. Tudball, made him an audience favorite. The show-stealer was also known by millions for his ability to get Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence and, on occasion, Burnett to lose their cool and crack up on camera.

As Tim Conway gets closer to resembling the little Old Man character he plays, who shuffles along a path at a turtle’s pace, his comic sense of timing hasn’t slowed a bit.

(On a side note, this interview occurred prior to the death of Harvey Korman, so we weren’t really teasing the dead—just the elderly.)

Corey: You have to be honest, you’re carrying this show, right?

Tim: Absolutely. I’m telling you, I don’t know how much longer I can do it. I’ve been carrying this guy for 45 years. He thinks I’m his friend or something.

Corey: Can you tell me a little bit about the format of the show?

Tim: I’m sensational in it, I can tell you that much. It’s kind of a traveling Burnett show. We do about five or six sketches, and there’s a lady who travels with us, Louise DuArt, and she does impressions. We do stand-up. It really is a Burnett show. We do characters, the old man and Tudball and Dorf. Not sketches that they saw, but for the most part it’s something they will recognize. It’s like when you go to see Andy Williams and he sings ‘Moon River,’ and you go, ‘By golly, it was worth it.’ We try to sing ‘Moon River.’ I guess they enjoy it.

Corey: Is there a question and answer period?

Tim: Yes, there is, and there’s plenty of places where we jump in and do what we did on the Burnett show—Harvey still being a very poor performer. He’s still easy to break up. It truly is such a joy to do. I know that sounds crazy when you’re working. We give them what they’re looking for and they really enjoy it.

Corey: When was the first time you realized you could get someone to break up while a camera was rolling?

Tim Conway: It was on the Burnett show, that’s for sure. I think the biggest one was the dentist sketch, where Harvey (Korman) went south on me and never recovered. First of all, I never took the business seriously. I was never one to (say), ‘Let’s get our lines down and rehearse’ and all that crap. I was out there having a good time. If they had told me to go home at any time during my time in show business, I’d say, ‘That’s great. I’ve had a ball, and I’ll see you folks in another time zone.’

That attitude lent itself to monkey-ing around. Carol is about as gracious as you can get for a star. Anybody who let us clown around her the way we did, she should have her head examined. She just let us do whatever we wanted. It was a very easy show to do.

Corey: When the ad-libs first started, did they want to keep them out and do another take?

Tim: No, Carol believed in doing the show as though it were live. We taped it twice, once on Friday afternoon—and that was really a dress rehearsal to find out where we were going. And at night we would tape the show and they didn’t correct it. That’s why they left everything in. It had the appearance of being done at that time and the audience was in on it. Sometimes the crew didn’t know what we were going to do for the air show—including the producers. It had the quality of letting the audience join in on the break-ups.

Corey: I spoke to Vicki Lawrence about a month ago, and she described it as almost a playground-like atmosphere.

Tim: Absolutely. The last three or four years I don’t think we rehearsed three hours a week. We would get the sketches on Monday and by Monday afternoon we had it all down. So we would just talk the rest of the week. That was another thing, Carol did not believe in over-rehearsing. Let’s keep it fresh and whatever comes out that’s going to be entertaining will come out while we’re taping.

Corey: When you first started to get Harvey to bust up, what would he say after?

Tim: He was always kind of embarrassed about it, and after a while, he just gave up. The thing was, I was a writer. I’d write a sketch for us and write one thing but do something else while we were doing the sketch, because I knew where I could go with it and how to control it. And he’d just stand there and stare at me. It was fun to see him go. You could tell the minute we started he was trying to control breaking up, and we hadn’t even started anything yet.

Corey: Was that a lack of professionalism on his part?

Tim: I would say so, definitely.

Corey: Who was the hardest to get going?

Tim: Carol. It was awfully hard to break Carol up. We’d get to her once in a while.

Corey: Did you see that as a challenge?

Tim: Oh yeah. She knew it, too. But we continued to do it.

Corey: When you created the Old Man character, did you think you would still be doing him 30 years later?

Tim: No, I didn’t think I’d do it for that show. I didn’t do the Old Man until we started taping that show. When I started walking out, I was walking across the room and I thought it was a joke to walk that way. They’ve got to stop me, because this thing is gonna be three days long if I keep walking this way.

And I just kept walking and walking and nobody stopped me, and I thought, ‘Jeez, they’re actually accepting this.’ We had a sketch that was eight minutes and it probably went until at least 15 on the original one. That’s the way things were discovered on that show.

Corey: I always enjoyed the Mr. Tudball and ‘Mrs. Huh-Wiggins’ sketches. Where did the character come from, and how would you describe his accent?

Tim: I have no idea where that accent came from. That was another thing with the Burnett show, you’d get a sketch, and it didn’t matter what your character was supposed to be on paper. You’d go to wardrobe and Bob Mackie would throw a strange costume on you—you’d get a bad toupee, some kind of a dopey voice—and that was your character for the week. Those characters came out spontaneous almost.

With Tudball, I wrote the original sketch, and the writers had a room at the end of the hall, and there were six of us. At the other end of the hall was the secretary who would type all this stuff. You’d have to walk all the way down there to say, ‘Change this, type this.’ You spent most of the day walking back and forth. They finally got this intercom and it was one of those early ones, two buttons: talk and off. When it would buzz, you’d say, ‘Hello,’ and when you wanted to talk, you’d press the talk button.

But when you pressed the talk button, you couldn’t hear the guy on the other end. You’d call down and say, ‘Charlene, could you just type …’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Uh, Charlene …’ ‘Hello?’ ‘Charlene, don’t press the…’ ‘Hello?’ You have to walk all the way down and say, ‘Charlene, don’t press the button while I’m talking. You see I can’t hear you; you can’t hear me.’ That was the basis of that sketch. And Carol, her character came from Bob Mackie. He put that big rump on her, and she said, ‘Don’t you think we should take this down a little?’ He said, ‘No, stick it out there and let’s see what happens.’ Away it went.

Corey: At what point do you know a sketch is good enough to become recurring?

Tim: I think the audience that first night was a definite indication. That was the thing, you never really knew. The dumbest things would take off. That was really meant to be a one-time-only sketch about an intercom.

Corey: What would it take for the Apple Dumpling Gang to ride again?

Tom: Wow, I don’t know if we could get up on a horse again. I’d love to. Don and I are getting some kind of an award for Disney. Outside of ‘Mary Poppins,’ that was one of the highest grossing movies of the time when Disney was around. I guess you get your footprint in cement on Mickey Avenue or something.

Corey: Are they gonna make you put on the old get-up?

Tim: Boy, I hope not. That was great to work with Don. I always say, I’m in this business because of Don. When I used to watch the old Steve Allen show and man on the street with Don and Tom Posten. Don is an icon in the business. That face and what he does with it just will never be duplicated. Don is Barney in real life. It was such a pleasure to finally get to work with him. There’s some things in that movie I’m very proud of, and a lot of that is spontaneous, too. Of course, Don being the professional he is, went right along with it and became part of the picture.

Corey: Are people hesitant to work with you?

Tim: Yeah. As a matter of fact, in ‘The Apple Dumpling Gang,’ the scene in the firehouse where we take the ladder out, they actually built a set for us way ahead of the time they were supposed to shoot that. They said it was really a silent movie sketch and we were going to have to work it out. They built this set and brought us out for a whole week just to rehearse this scene, while they were filming other parts of the movie. Don and I would come in and talk about Steve Allen and show business and we would go home at noon and we never even attempted to do anything. After about a week, now they’re ready to shoot this thing, and they say, ‘OK, what did you guys work out?’ I said, ‘Actually, Don worked most of it out. Don, do you want to show them what you’ve got?’ He had nothing. We just started walking around the set, creating it as we went. And they said. ‘Great. Swell.’

Corey: Did you tour with Don for a while, doing a live show?

Tim: Yes. Harvey didn’t want to tour as much as we are now, so Don would do it once in a while. They just love him. He is the lovable character he created. People want to pick him up and take him home.

Corey: Do you have to change your style depending on who you are working with?

Tim: Not really. I think both Don and Harvey are excellent comedians. When you are dealing with straight men in a two-man situation, you really need the other guy to know what timing is, and the important thing is, when to shut up. Rather than jump in, sit back and note that somebody’s on to something there and just clam up for a while and let the other guy go.

Corey: I enjoyed the Burnett reunion special you guys did. One of the things people remember most is the family sketch and the elephant story. How much of that was really scripted?

Tim: Nothing. We were doing that sketch, and Carol was asking me a question and I was supposed to say, ‘Elephant.’ The director came on and said, ‘We’re running long in the show; we’re about a minute and a half over already. Keep the sketch moving along.’

When it came to me, obviously I took two and a half minutes to tell them about two Siamese elephants who were joined at the trunk. They did the dress show and they said, ‘That was very amusing. Now, on the air show, don’t do anything. Just do the lines because we’ve got to get out of here.’ So then I did three minutes. Dick Clark actually lives with that thing, because he plays it on every show he has, that has anything to do with breaking up.

Corey: Do things like that just pop in your head?