Tim Conway Gone West

One of the funniest men on Tv.

Anyone remember the Tv series with Tim Conway and Joe Flynn as pilots with a one airplane charter company.??

 
Conway & Korman had me on the verge of peeing myself laughing more times than I can count. There's nobody funnier.
 
There was a show on tv a few years ago when they were replaying bit from the old days and Carol and others were giving the back-story to what really happened. One common theme was that they'd rehearse all week, then when it was live Tim would go off-script. That would probably give any actor today the pink slip. They realized the genius and made it work for them.

His elephant thing was one of those, and they planned a counter attack and got him back several months later.
 
murphey said:
Nah, I like the Mama's Family skit where he imitates an elephant.
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RIP Tim - I used to watch the Carol Burnett show as a kid, never missed it.

I love it when all three of his costars are on the couch with their heads down at 0:55, trying not to lose it:

 
RIP Tim. Lots of laughs and good clean family fun. I’m sure there’ll be a lot more laughs up in Heaven now that you’re there.
 
Gerhardt said:
There was a show on tv a few years ago when they were replaying bit from the old days and Carol and others were giving the back-story to what really happened. One common theme was that they'd rehearse all week, then when it was live Tim would go off-script. That would probably give any actor today the pink slip. They realized the genius and made it work for them.

His elephant thing was one of those, and they planned a counter attack and got him back several months later.
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The Carol Burnett Show was extremely unusual because they had complete creative control over the show. The network had no say in the matter. Carol insisted on that. But she also was smart enough to know that letting the cast (especially Tim) do pretty much whatever they wanted was a winning formula because the end result was hilarious.

Tim was notorious for wandering from the script. Both he and Harvey used to say in interviews that it wasn't so much planned as a response to audience feedback during the live taping. It took Tim seconds to read the audience. If something wasn't working, he ditched it. But when something seemed to tickle the audience, Tim would take the ball and run with it -- script be damned.

His mastery of deadpan rarely failed him, but he broke up everyone else on the set. That just made the bits even funnier. Watching Carol, Vicki, or especially Harvey completely lose it was one of the things that made the show funny. It was something we looked forward to. And when Tim himself did break the fourth wall, he did so in a way that just made the bit that much funnier.

I miss that kind of entertainment and humor. Today's comedians rarely get a laugh out of me, and I find most sitcoms decidedly unfunny. It's not that I don't get the jokes. I get them. I just don't find them funny. They're basically a string of one-liners. If you miss a few, you haven't missed anything. What the cast of Burnett and other variety shows did was different. Each skit was a story. You had to pay attention or else it wouldn't make sense.

Then again, I don't know that today's sensory-overloaded generation are even capable of paying attention long enough to appreciate that kind of humor. When I show my young relatives videos of some of the funniest and most famous of the old skits, they barely make it through 30 seconds before their attention wanders. Their lives are an endless series of text messages. Humor that takes five or ten minutes to develop is lost on most of them.

Rich
 
I think a lot of his genius was in being so smart that he was able to pass off playing goofy dumb characters. There's no doubt the guy was extraordinary smart. Every character he played was the bumbling idiot.

and there was something captivating about him. He's not someone I would ever have sought out to go look up videos on but if he was on the TV I'd stop and watch him do his thing.

sad he's gone, but somehow feels right knowing he and Harvey korman are back together in some sense.
 
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