Carol Burnett didn’t hesitate when the Santa Barbara News, per MeTV, asked if she had an all-time favorite sketch from her long-running variety show. The best was any sketch featuring the Harpers, the maladjusted clan who eventually got their own sitcom as Mama’s Family.
“It really was a one-act (play),” Burnett said. “The laughs were character-driven, and we were over the top. If you just did it as a straight play, you wouldn’t get any laughs.”
In the initial conception of the sketch, the show’s writers envisioned Burnett as sassy senior Mama. “But Eunice reminded me more of my mother, who had a lot of (unfulfilled) dreams,” she said. “I recognized the desperation in Eunice that my mother had.”
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For Mama, Burnett and company considered bringing in an older actress, according to Burnett’s book In Such Good Company. It was costume designer Bob Mackie who suggested letting Vicki Lawrence give it a try. Since the original sketch was considered a one-off, why not?
At the first readthrough, “I tore into Eunice with a kind of ‘South Texas’ accent,” Burnett wrote. “I just saw those three coming from that part of the country. Harvey (Korman) and Vicki followed suit with the accent and ‘The Family’ was born.”
The one-off became a recurring series of sketches, then a full-length dramatic play, Eunice, which CBS ran in 1982. “This is not, clearly, the stuff of standard Carol Burnett sketches,” wrote the New York Times. “There are laughs here, to be sure … but, for the most part, Eunice is preoccupied with the overwhelming dreariness of their hopelessly narrow little lives. The underlying bitterness of this ‘comedy-drama’ is startling.”
The line between comedy and drama was razor-thin, with hilarity found in those over-the-top performances. Once, Burnett said, the cast decided to rehearse a “Family” scene completely straight, just for the heck of it. No accents, no going overboard with the histrionics. “The result was … devastating,” Burnett said. “Because there were no jokes in the scene, we were able to play these people as the damaged goods they were, without going for laughs. The very same material could be played for comedy or tragedy, and it turned out this was the stuff of high drama.”
That’s why “The Family” sketches were the show’s best, says Burnett. “This was definitely not the norm for a variety show,” she wrote. “Eunice, Mama and Ed were perfect examples of a dysfunctional family, and the mail we got reflected that.”
“My sister is just like Eunice; she drives me nuts!”
“My mother is like Mama. I hate the holidays because we always end up fighting!”
“The Family” was one of the most popular sketches in the show’s history, says Burnett, for one main reason: “People identified.”
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