Carol Burnett Wants to Make People Laugh in a Time When Comedy Is Not Funny Anymore
Carol Burnett is 91 years old and could likely retire at any time, based on the success of her 70-plus-year career. However, she continues to work and currently stars in the Apple TV+ series Palm Royale, where she had to speak gibberish as a woman named Norma Dellacorte just coming out of a coma. Like any seasoned comedian, she went with it and showed off her hilarious physical comedy.
“Abe Sylvia, the creator and showrunner, [told me] I can’t really form words because I’m just coming out of [a coma],” she said. “And I said, ‘What do I do here?’ He said, ‘Oh, just do gibberish’ — but then he said, and I totally agreed, ‘Even though you’re doing gibberish, if you had the lines, how would you emphasize what you want to get across?’ So that’s what I did — you can’t write gibberish in a script, so I had to make all of that up. I was improvising — I had a lot of fun gibberishing, if there is such a verb.”
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While Palm Royale may end up being her final role unless “something really insane comes along,” Burnett said that she hopes to stay in Hollywood as long as it’s fun and that she would love to work with stars Meryl Streep, George Clooney and Bradley Cooper. Unfortunately, she isn’t too happy about the way comedy has aged and called many modern comedies “boring and not funny.”
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She explained, “I’m not a prude, but sometimes I think some of the stuff today … it’s been kind of easy to get a laugh by being a little blue. I don’t mind if it’s within the character, but if they do it just to say a bad word, I think it’s boring, and it’s not funny. Funny is The Dick Van Dyke Show. Funny is Mary, Bob Newhart, All in the Family — and they hold up today.”
Do you agree with Burnett about modern comedies?
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March 2018
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