In Such Good Company
By Carol Burnett
By Carol Burnett
Copyright 2017
Winner of the 2017 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album
This was not what I expected.
A book written and read by Carol Burnett should have been a laugh a minute, right? I grew up watching her show. She was hilarious. So, I checked this out of the library because I thought I could use a good laugh.
I laughed once, and that was at some point in the last 2 hours of the audio when she did the Tarzan yell.
This is a behind-the-scenes story of her show. She goes through skits, talks about guest stars, and mentioned cameramen, producers, and loads of other people.
She talks about how Vickie Lawrence, Tim Conway, Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner joined the show.
What she doesn't do is talk much about Carol Burnett. Oh, there are a few stories here and there - the pulling on her ear was a signal to her grandmother, who raised her, telling her she loved her, for example. There are hints that she went to college, that she went to New York to be in the theater, that she and her husband Joe worked well together; she mentions having children.
But there is little of Carol Burnett in this reading. I guess if you're a connoisseur of old TV and want to know how things worked back in the day, this might be a great read. I did not mind listening to it, not at all, and I learned a great deal.
However, I wanted to know about Carol Burnett.
I wanted to know her favorite color. How she raised her children while she worked. If she ever finished college. There are hints of her life throughout, but only hints. There is no deep outing of Carol Burnett in these lines.
One of the things that struck me was the difference in hours between Carol's work on this weekly show - from the sounds of it she put in 6-hour days, mostly - and Kate Mulgrew's 12-18 hour days for Star Trek: Voyager. (I recently read Mulgrew's autobiography.) Carol mentioned that she could take the kids to school and pick them up most days, except for the day they did the show. Kate Mulgrew's kids grew up barely seeing their mother for 7 years while she worked on Voyager.
At any rate, if you want to know a little about Carol Burnett but a lot about the Carol Burnett show, then this is a great book. If you want to know a lot about Carol Burnett, then it's not so great.
Like anything, it depends on your perspective.
You need to read her book "One More Time". She tells a lot about her childhood. I read it years ago and still recall a lot of things in the book. It's out of print, but you can find it as a hard-covered book on used book sites for three or four dollars. I use Abebooks for such things.
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