60 years of smiles

The question came from a woman in the balcony. It was somewhere in Texas, about seven years ago, Carol Burnett recalls.

“If you could be a member of the opposite sex for 24 hours, who would you be and what would you do?”

Burnett, one of the top comediennes of all time, a woman who wittily answered countless questions during the opening of her enormously popular TV variety show from 1967 to 1978, was momentarily at a loss for words.

“OK, God,” Burnett thought to herself. “I’m gonna say a little prayer and whatever comes out …”

And then this came out: “I’d be Osama bin Laden, and I’d kill myself.”

Yes, she’s still got it.

Burnett, who turned 81 six days ago, is scheduled to make an appearance at the Hult Center on Wednesday night in her first-ever trip to Eugene. It’s an evening of “Laughter and Reflection With Carol Burnett,” presented by the John G. Shedd Institute for the Arts.

The 90-minute show is billed as a “conversation” with the woman who is also an award-winning actress and best-selling author of three memoirs.

Just like during the opening of “The Carol Burnett Show” on CBS back in the day, it’s all about the audience asking the questions to keep that conversation going.

“So really, the audience is my partner,” Burnett says during a telephone interview from her home just outside of Santa Barbara, Calif. “And I never know what anybody’s going to ask. It’s all off the cuff.

“So, it’s kind of like flying without a net.”

Burnett, whose show won 25 Emmys and who was the 2013 recipient of the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, has plenty of experience with that.

Besides answering all of those questions during 278 episodes over 11 seasons of “The Carol Burnett Show,” she’s also been doing the conversational format of her road show for about 25 years. However, she only does between three and six shows a year now, and Eugene is her first scheduled show of 2014.

Burnett also will be in Seattle on May 9.

Holler like an apeman

So put on your best Carol Burnett character costumes, Eugene, and get ready for some fun.

Audience members actually have been known to do this, says Jim Ralph, The Shedd’s executive director. They have dressed like Starlett O’Hara or Nora Desmond or Eunice Higgins, all characters Burnett played on her show that also starred Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner.

Not that Burnett will be seen in any of those costumes. She left those characters behind long ago.

But there is one thing the Eugene audience is likely to see, and more specifically hear, because the chances are about as slim as a Nora Desmond cigarette holder that someone won’t ask: “Can you do the Tarzan yell for us?”

And if you think she doesn’t still have the “pipes” to belt out what became known as one of the signature bits on her show, well, just listen to the audio link at registerguard.com.

(The sample she provided through my telephone last month came through loud and clear.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Burnett, though, is not her comedic talent or her down-home charm and humility. It’s that she made it this far, made it anywhere at all, given the obstacles she faced early in life.

Tragedy behind the laughter

Burnett was born in San Antonio on April 26, 1933, to Joseph “Jody” and Ina Louise Burnett. But ultimately, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, whom she called Nanny (the one she was signaling when she tugged on her left ear at the end of her TV show), after the family moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s.

Burnett’s parents were both alcoholics and unable to care for her. Burnett’s mother lived in her own apartment down the hall from the one-room apartment Carol and her grandmother shared a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, and her father lived in Santa Monica.

Burnett’s father died of alcoholism in 1954. He was 47.

Four years later, her mother also fell victim to the disease. She was 46.

“It was very hard, because I loved them both,” says Burnett, who was pursuing her dreams in New York City when her parents died. “Mama didn’t start drinking until later, and Daddy had always been drinking,” Burnett says.

“I always described him as a drunk Jimmy Stewart. He was one of the sweetest, kindest human beings. And even when he drank, he got even sweeter.

“It was just that he had that disease, and he couldn’t hold down a job. And it took its toll on his health.”

Burnett, who is now married to her third husband, Brian Miller, 23 years her junior and principal drummer in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, also dealt with tragedy later in life. The first-born of her three daughters, Carrie Hamilton, died of brain and lung cancer at age 38 in 2002.

An actress, singer and playwright, Hamilton also struggled with drugs and alcohol as a teenager, a story her parents (Dad was TV producer Joe Hamilton) took public in order to help their daughter and others.

Much of that story was told in Burnett’s 2013 memoir, “Carrie and Me: A Mother-Daughter Love Story.” The spoken-word version, narrated by Burnett, was nominated for a Grammy this year.

Burnett’s youngest daughter, musician Erin Hamilton, 45, also has been open about her own recovery from drugs and alcohol.

Enter “hillbilly woman”

Burnett certainly wouldn’t be the first to turn tragedy into comedy, but asked if she was funny as a child, she says: “Um… no,” and laughs.

“I had a sense of humor, and my mother had a sense of humor, (and) my grandmother. But I was never very outgoing. I was more shy in school.

“But I had close friends in the neighborhood, and we would play and go see a movie, and then we would come back and act out what we had seen.”

As a child and teenager, Burnett loved films with lots of laughter and happy endings, particularly films with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, or Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland.

Watching movies as a kid is also where she got the Tarzan yell, imitating what she saw actor Johnny Weissmuller doing on screen.

But it was at UCLA — which she was only able to attend because an anonymous donor left $50 for the entrance fee in her grandmother’s mailbox — where Burnett first heard the laughter she would elicit the rest of her life.

Burnett actually planned on becoming a journalist, because of her love of writing and having served as editor of the school newspaper at Hollywood High School. She wrote for the Daily Bruin at UCLA, but journalism was not a major at the school, so she pursued theater arts instead and considered playwriting.

Taking an acting class was a prerequisite for any theater arts major, Burnett says. That led to playing a “hillbilly woman” in a UCLA production, and her first line, “I’m baaaaack,” uttered with true hillbilly inflection as she entered the stage.

The audience roared, and Burnett was hooked.

“It was something I’d never felt before,” she says. “And that’s what I decided I really wanted to do.”

“Total improv”

Burnett wanted to do it so badly, she left UCLA before graduation and moved to New York City, where she made ends meet by getting a job as a hatcheck girl. Her first TV experience was on “The Paul Winchell Show” in 1954, playing the girlfriend of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

That led to more work and eventual comedy spots on “Tonight Starring Jack Paar” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Her Broadway debut in 1959 as Princess Winnifred was in “Once Upon a Mattress,” the role she considers her “big break.”

In the early 1960s, Burnett also became a regular on “The Garry Moore Show,” a CBS comedy-variety show that earned her her first Emmy. It was a 10-year contract with CBS, which Burnett signed upon leaving the show, that ultimately led to getting her own variety show in 1967, Burnett says.

CBS figured it wouldn’t go anywhere, since hosting a variety show was “really a man’s game,” she says. But the network had to give her 30 episodes under the contract, even if it figured it would “be canceled by February.”

Instead, it was a huge hit from the get-go, and the rest is television history.

And that question-and-answer format to lead off each show? That was the idea of one of the show’s producers.

“You should let the audience know who you are,” he suggested.

“I was terrified that they wouldn’t care or have any questions,” Burnett recalls. “And then I was terrified that they would, and I wouldn’t have any answers.

“But I enjoyed it. It was total improv.”

And it still is.

Follow Mark on Twitter @delmont5 . Email [email protected] .