MovieChat Forums > The Carol Burnett Show (1967) Discussion > Tim Conway is kind of rude and disrespec...

Tim Conway is kind of rude and disrespectful to the rest of the cast

posted 8 years ago by archer6749
6 replies | jump to latest

I'm sure that all the cast on the show has improvised here and there, but he was the worst to improvise all the time and most of it wasn't even funny. If you think about it, it was kind of disrespectful to the other cast members for him to improvise so much. Here you have a group of people that needed to memorize a entire show and then he comes in and just throws the original skits out and does his own thing like it's his show or something. Not to mention it would cause the cast to start laughing (or almost start laughing) which would ruin the skit. It may have been funny, but at the same time it wasn't for him doing them like that.

[–] sjbradford 8 years ago

Carol loved him. Watch the final episode and listen to her tribute to him. If it bothered her, she would have gotten rid of him since she owned the show.

[–] Astrid2266 8 years ago

I just finished listening to This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection by Carol Burnett audiobook (which she narrates herself) and she talked a lot about each of the members of the cast from TCBS. She talks quite a bit about Tim Conway and she and the other cast members love him. They also loved his improvisations and enjoyed how he was able to make others laugh (or try not to with failed results) at his antics. I can remember watching the show when I was a kid and I loved it when he would make Harvey Korman crack up. He would try so hard not to but it never worked. Ruin the skit? Far from it. He made the skit way more hilarious than it originally was.

"The whole history of the world is the story of the struggle between the selfish and the unselfish"

[–] tinkerbell_jonna 8 years ago

There are MANY ppl who do not consider Tim cracking the cast up as RUINING the sketch, many think that is what MADE the show!

I've heard many say the only reason they tuned in was to see Conway do this.

[–] WeDidntBurnHim 8 years ago

It most situations I would agree with you that an actor who insists on constantly improvising would be a major issue. But, in this case, the rest of the cast was perfectly fine and it was encouraged. I can assure you that if they didn't like it, it would have been shut down immediately.

What's going on? What's all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here...

[–] anthny_platt 8 years ago

And yet Whose Line is it Anyway was created specifically for the purpose of bringing improvisational comedy to television.

Improv has advantages. It's always fresh, it adds another layer of tension as the audience realizes that the way all of this turns out is not preordained, and anything can happen, it allows the players to play off the audience. In the end, if the professional comic actors can't keep a straight face, then by God that's funny!

Conway was a writer for the show from the beginning, so one can hardly fault him for writing some of the dialog on the fly. Besides, Lawrence (despite just being a kid) did a fair amount of it too.

[–] InherentlyYours 8 years ago

But, and a huge but, it depends on how much like Tim Conway.