Vicki Lawrence was a shy 18-year-old fresh out of high school in Inglewood, California, when she walked onto the set of The Carol Burnett Show in 1967, and she had planned on becoming a dental hygienist. Carol Burnett thought the young lookalike was a wonderful idea. One of the show’s seasoned pros did not, and Lawrence, now 77, has finally said out loud just how badly that first impression went.
She shared the story this week in an exclusive interview with People, which Parade picked up on Friday, November 13. The man who was horrified by the new kid turned out to be the one who taught her nearly everything she knows, and years later he rescued the sitcom that made her a star all over again.
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It started with a firemen’s ball. In her senior year Lawrence entered the Miss Fireball of Inglewood contest, and a local reporter covering it noted that she looked remarkably like a young Carol Burnett. Her mother, a devoted letter writer, urged her to mail the clipping to Burnett. Burnett tracked down her father’s number in the phone book, called the house and promised to come to the contest. She did, and when Lawrence won, Burnett was the one who crowned her.
Burnett happened to be casting a kid sister for the “Carol and Sis” sketches on her new CBS variety hour. “This girl looked more like me at age 17 than I did!” she wrote in her 2010 memoir This Time Together. Not everyone at CBS agreed she was ready. Burnett recalled an executive warning her that the teenager was “rough,” and she answered, “So are diamonds, at first.”
The network gave in, but someone in the cast had doubts too, and he stood a few feet from her every week.
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It was Harvey Korman. “Well, Harvey, I think, was appalled when I was first on the show,” Lawrence told People. Korman was already a polished sketch man by 1967 after years on The Danny Kaye Show, and he could not believe how green Burnett’s discovery was.
“He was like, ‘Forget stage right and stage left. You can’t even find the ladies’ room,'” Lawrence remembered. She figured he looked at the situation and decided it was “either train me or kill me.”
Luckily for all of us, he chose training. “So he just decided he was going to make me a comedian, and he would help me with dialects and props and history,” she said. The show lived on movie parodies, and Lawrence had never seen most of the old films they were spoofing, so Korman would explain who she was supposed to be playing before she went out in front of the cameras.
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Lawrence has told versions of this before. Back in 2018 she told TVLine, “Honestly, Harvey took me under his wing. I think it was either kill me or train me for Harvey.” In her 1995 memoir Vicki! The True-Life Adventures of Miss Fireball, she put it even more plainly, writing, “It was Harvey that I learned most everything I know about how to perform comedy.” She has called her years on the show her “Harvard school of comedy.”
Korman won four Emmys for the series before he left in 1977. By then Tim Conway had joined as a regular, and the two men became one of the great double acts in television history. Conway spent years trying to make Korman crack up on camera in sketches like “The Dentist,” and the pair later toured together reprising their old routines. In 2002 the Television Academy inducted them into its Hall of Fame together.
Lawrence has named Burnett, Korman and Conway as the three people who taught her timing. “Carol had a show to run, so it was really Harvey that took me under his wing,” she told People this week. And Korman’s biggest lesson was still to come, years after the variety show signed off.
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The cranky Thelma Harper was born in “The Family” sketches, with Korman as Ed and Burnett as Eunice, and in 1983 Mama got her own NBC sitcom. Lawrence had resisted the spinoff for years, partly because she did not want to play Mama without Korman and Burnett beside her. Korman did come along. He played the stuffy host Alistair Quince in the opening segments during the NBC run and worked behind the camera as a director, a story told in our look at how hard Vicki Lawrence was working in the ’80s.
The first two episodes they filmed did not work, and Lawrence knew it. “They were so awful that I said, ‘Stop for a minute. I need Harvey,'” she told People. Korman explained that a sketch character and a sitcom character are different animals. “She has to laugh. She has to be silly. She can’t just be yelling at people all the time,” he told her. “You can’t expect people to come home from a hard day at the office, pop a beer, and watch this woman screaming for a half hour.” Lawrence credits that talk with “setting her free,” and Mama went on to run six seasons through 1990 after NBC let it go and a syndicated revival picked it back up in 1986.
Korman died on May 29, 2008, at 81. Conway followed on May 14, 2019, at 85, leaving Burnett, now 93, and Lawrence as the two surviving original cast members. Lawrence still tells their stories in her touring stage show Vicki and Mama: A Two Woman Show, which plays George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 13 and 14. The night Conway died, she wrote the line that says it best: “Harvey and Tim are together again. The angels are laughing out loud tonight.”
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