Tuesday A/V: Shut Yer F*#@in' Face, Mr. Tudball

This production clip from CBS's "The Carol Burnett Show" -- perhaps the last great prime time variety show of U.S. television -- has mysteriously shown up on the internet all of a sudden, and let me warn you -- it's definitely NSFW. And that's what makes it so intriguing.

I was a fanatic of the show - I admit it. Any American fag my age who wasn't a fanatic of this show while growing up....well....has to have something wrong with him. And anyone who watched the show or has seen blooper reels knows that the cast members regularly took turns trying to crack each other up during live taping of the skits. But this particular piece of video archeology has various elements that make it pure gold:

• It's a raw clip, meaning it was not edited and reflects an uninterrupted segment of taping, documenting a gradual slide by the cast into a depth of blue comedy that approaches Red Foxx;
  
• It's without a studio audience -- they were taping a flashback sequence to show the day that the transcendentally stupid Mrs. Wiggins (Burnett) was hired by the crypto-Scandanavian Mr. Tudball (Tim Conway) -- in order to drop it into another skit they would tape in front of the audience for live responses; so, naturally the cast's guard was down (and yes, the laughter you hear is from the enormous crew and production staff in the studio, not an audience);
  
• It has Vicki Lawrence playing Mrs. Tudball, and Lawrence is known to any blooper reel aficionado as having quite a salty mouth. Naturally, she has the honor of dropping the f-bomb at the end;
  
• We learn the boss and secretary's first names (Bernie and Wanda, respectively);
  
• It does not appear to have come from any DVD known to me or anyone I've quizzed, and has just suddenly appeared on various video websites, much like the series of hilarious outtakes from the film "I Heart Huckabees" featuring the Wagnerian on-set battles between Lily Tomlin and the film's immature director. So one wonders - who put it out there, and how much more gold is there in some CBS video vault?

In any case, their inability to get through this sequence without losing their shit and give the director a single useable take gives you a sense of the chemistry, the camaraderie and the sheer fun that existed on the set of that show. They never worked with anything but white-bread material on the Burnett show -- it was the 1970's, of course -- but somehow they were able to kick out some of the most classic bits of TV comedy ever, simply from the sheer force of their collective wit and chemistry. I guess we can see that some of the grist for all that must have been days like this one.

(p.s. - lots of other bloggers are, no doubt, commemorating the events of six years ago on this day. For once, I'm not in the mood. Sure, I remember that day, and my personal recollections of it are well preserved in other parts of the internet. I don't see a reason to touch on it today. It's time to move on.)