Was the Carol Burnett Show ever broadcast live?

There's a story floating around that CBS didn't want Nanette Fabray to do sign language on the Carol Burnett Show because sign language was "contoversial"(Lip Reading was preferred), but as the show was allegedly live, CBS couldn't stop her. But I really don't think that the Burnett Show was live. I'm sure that it was always taped, wasn't it?

 

Actually, it was filmed twice and then the best from each taping was edited together.

 

I wonder if any of those two full tapings for each episode still exist somewhere? Hmm..

 

I had a feeling that the sign language story was an urban legend.

 

What's controversial about ASL?

 

There was a time when Deaf Children were forbidden to use sign language in school, and at least one had his hands tied behind his back so that he couldn't use it. Many educators were adamant that Lip Reading was the way to go. According to this story, CBS was afraid of offending such educators by showing sign language on TV. But where the story falls to the ground is the simple fact that THE CAROL BURNETT SHOW was not live, and CBS indeed could have cut Nanette Fabray's sign language rendition of "Over the Rainbow" if they'd wanted to.

 

I think the Burnett Show somehow got mixed into this story:

Worst Use of Sign Language at an Awards Show

In 1976, Best Actress winner Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) signed her acceptance speech to her deaf parents. The Academy decided that her presentation was "cute," so during the 1977 ceremony, Debby Boone was scheduled to perform her Oscar-nominated song "You Light Up My Life" accompanied onstage by 11 young girls from the John Tracy Clinic for the Deaf who signed the lyrics as she sang. Eagle-eyed viewers, however, noted that each girl seemed to be signing a different song. It was later revealed that at the last minute a group of (non-Deaf) students from the nearby Torrence Elementary School had been recruited instead, and they had been signing gibberish.​

 

That is hilarious! "What? You forgot to book the deaf kids? Umm, okay just bring in any kids and have them "sign" gibberish- I'm sure nobody will know the difference...".

Unbelievable...

 

And they were surely an inspiration to future generations, no doubt...

 

It may not have gone out on the air live but clearly it was “live” in the sense that the sketches at least were performed straight through for the audience without stopping for retakes because Harvey Korman was laughing. Were there ever visible flubs in the musical numbers?

Or did they actually do retakes on mistakes that didn’t have any comedic value?

 

I guess the real John Tracy students weren't photogenic enough.

 

I think that actress Marlee Matlin was the source for the Burnett story. Assuming she was, Matlin was certainly a child when that Burnett show went out, and her memory was probably playing tricks on her. By the way, check that Burnett episode out on YouTube! It has the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" parody with Fabray as "Ethel Mermaid"!

 

I just saw Nanette Fabray signing jokes on a LAUGH-IN rerun tonight. Seemed like an earlier episode. Sounds like some mis-remembering for sure.

 

Where did you get this story?

 

A comment on YouTube, but I really doubted it was true.

 

Congratulations on being the only other 2 guys on this board who remembers Garry Moore. I can't believe his only legacy as far as the general public is concerned, is because of the name of his sidekick became a prop on the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show...

 

Keeping within the scope of this board, I got a Garry Moore record for my, I think, ...5th...? birthday. It's a children's story, with instruments, called, "Tommy's Tin Whistle". And it's Garry narrating this story about a kid who gets a tin whistle for his birthday, and all the kids make fun of him, he practices, then when the kids are playing their jazzy, dixieland-y, big-band grown-up instruments, Tommy starts jamming with them, and proves "it's not what you play, but how well you play it".

Propeganda for the Celtic-Industrial Complex, to be sure, but, not wrong, either....!

 

I think the story regarding the "live" broadcast was perpetuated by Nanette Fabrey herself in this interview...

 

But the actual broadcast seems to contradict her version of the story. This clip suggests it was not a spontaneous event...

 

They did retakes all the time, and by 1966-1967, it was a standard thing to spend days and days re-editing even variety shows. Even shows like Dean Martin, where the star famously only agreed to work one day a week and would not rehearse, still had tons of editing and pickups. But not as extensively as they started to do with the advent of digital non-linear editing.

Laugh-In set the record for edits on a comedy/variety show, where they would routinely do 1000+ cuts -- all mechanically-spliced -- in the early years of that show. Emmy-award-winning editor Art Schneider actually wrote a book on his experiences, Jump Cut, and it's a fascinating tale of how TV worked 50 years ago:

https://www.amazon.com/Jump-Memoirs-Pioneer-Television-Editor/dp/0786403454/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1530090741&sr=1-4

Art was a genius at what he did, and his tricks and techniques had an enormous impact on the TV variety shows of the late 1960s and 1970s. (By an amazing coincidence, I'm sitting in the very building in which Schneider cut Laugh-In. Many ghosts in this building.)

Carol Burnett did do multiple takes and pickups on all the sketches, and they would also routinely tape her opening monologue and let it go 10-15 minutes, then chop it down to maybe 5 or 6 minutes for the broadcast. The sketches were very much edited and remixed in post, with laugh-tracks used to cover up some of the more obvious edits. They weren't afraid to let some of the screw-ups air (like Harvey Korman cracking up), because the producers realized it was funnier than the show itself. It's fair to say by the mid-1970s, editing was a very, very standard part of variety shows: I wrote up an article many years ago when I hung out for a day on the Tony Orlando & Dawn set and saw them do 4-5 takes per sketch because they were screwing up the lines too often. Some retakes were done with an audience, some without.

 

Make it three at least. I used to really love THE GARRY MOORE SHOW. Tuesday's at 10 PM. The final element on each show was "That Wonderful Year" where they'd pick a year in history and look at pop culture through music, movies, etc., and perform those songs and do sketches within the particular year theme. I missed the whole first year of THE FUGITIVE because I wouldn't give up on GARRY MOORE.

 

I only remember Gary Moore as the host of To Tell The Truth when I was a kid. I do remember one time we were visiting some elderly friends and the conversation turned to something that had been on To Tell The Truth but our friends kept calling it The Gary Moore Show. I figured he must have been a big deal back in the day.