(Ran originally Sunday May, 2019 in The Times and The News-Star.)

All it took was Tim Conway in any of his World’s Oldest Man skits to begin shuffling across the floor, and I was done. On the floor.

If you are of my generation that grew up in the Golden Age of Television, before what’s called “reality TV” took the place of the “variety show,” you missed some studs whose names might be foreign to you.

Jonathan Winters. Flip Wilson. Bob Newhart. Jackie Gleason. Art Carney. Mary Tyler Moore. Carol Burnett. Lucille Ball. Don Knotts.

Sure I’m missing some. Didn’t realize how much I missed Tim Conway until I learned he’d died at 85 Tuesday. I’d read he had no signs of dementia which I applaud; it’d have been a shame had he forgotten how funny he was, what a genius he was.

We haven’t.

The look. The timing. The willingness to not “have” to be the star. Just a guy hanging around stealing the show.

Guy had it all. Five-tool player.

Tim Conway appeared as a guest star on The Carol Burnett Show for eight seasons before becoming a regular in 1975. I read that he won a Golden Globe Award for the series in 1976 and Emmys in 1973, 1977, and 1978. Not sure I even knew they had those awards then. But I knew he made me laugh.

My mother was so innately good, at least to her only son crammed between two sisters, that it was hard to be too bad. We had our moments, but it just wasn’t in me to cause a bunch of trouble. I mainly just blamed stuff on my sisters.

But when it came to The Carol Burnett Show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, or Gumsmoke (Festus was a comic genius too!; he and Doc were the Wild West’s version of Abbot and Costello or Lewis and Martin), the ground was level. Every one of us had better be quiet.

She gave us some leeway on The Carol Burnett Show because of Tim Conway and all the laughing, to this day my favorite sound.

I’ve always appreciated my mother’s taste in TV.

Oh. Shoot. Red Skelton. Dom DeLuise. And Redd Foxx, please.

This was back in a time when people enjoyed watching 12-minute skits. Much of Tim Conway’s comedy was physical. Don Knotts is highly revered but probably doesn’t get enough credit for how good he was at the same thing. Just think of him angrily putting on his hat while wearing his faithful old salt-and-pepper, or trying to get his bullet out of his pocket or his pistol out of his holster.

Tim Conway would hold stuff back during rehearsals, then spring it on his castmates mid-skit. They were seeing or hearing what he was doing for the first time, so like us, they almost always started laughing. That was the real reality TV; one of the great things about the show was seeing whether or not Tim Conway could make his friend and fellow funnyman Harvey Korman laugh. Basically, Conway was Don Knotts and Korman was Andy Griffith, and so it worked.

Gold.

Almost everything he did was simple comedy heightened by the tiniest thing, a movement or expression or sound. But my favorites were the World’s Oldest Man skits and the Mr. Tudball and “Ah-Missuz-ah-Whigginzz,” skits, Tim Conway as the boss and Burnett/Mrs. Wiggins, who the Los Angeles Times once described as “a bimbo who the IQ fairy never visited,” as the secretary. Bad toupee. The intercom. The Romanian/Swedish (?) accent?

So beautiful.

I wish millennials could have seen these. Youth is wasted on the young.

Now and then, the writers and directors would just set him up for straight jokes. In one skit, Tim Conway and Korman are dressed as fishermen. (Forgot: the Bob Mackie-designed costumes, bunches each show, were basically another character.) I think Korman has his fishing line in a bathtub and they’re trying to rid an apartment of a shark that’s been terrorizing the building, a spoof of JAWS.)

Looking toward the tub Korman is fishing in—of course Korman is strapped to the commode—a long-billed cap on his head, Tim Conway, wistfully, says something like this:

“You know somethin’? I lost a girlfriend to the sharks once…It was in Hawaii. She jumped off the front of our sailboat, started swimming. Got about 40 yards from shore and then a…(shaking his head)… a big white hit her…(pausing, seeing the event in his mind)…She’da made it too…(pause)…if she hadn’t been wearin’ her good luck ham.”

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu

-30-