Harvey Korman Was ‘Appalled’ When Vicki Lawrence Joined ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ at 18

At 18, Vicki Lawrence went from planning a career in dental hygiene to sharing a stage with Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman. According to Lawrence, Korman took one look at the new kid and figured they’d better start with the basics.

“Well, Harvey, I think, was appalled when I was first on the show,” Lawrence, now 77, told People. “He was like, ‘Forget stage right and stage left. You can’t even find the ladies’ room.’”

Lawrence had barely finished high school when she joined Burnett, Korman and Lyle Waggoner on the CBS variety show in 1967. She’d won the Miss Fireball of Inglewood contest, and her resemblance to Burnett helped land her a job playing the star’s little sister. Suddenly, there she was in front of a studio audience, looking from the cameras to Burnett and Korman and wondering, as she later recalled in her memoir, what the hell she was doing there.

Korman decided to teach her. He worked with her on accents, comic timing, mannerisms and even how to handle props. Burnett had a show to run, Lawrence said, so it was Korman who took her under his wing. She credits him with teaching her most of what she knows about comedy.

Lawrence stayed with the show through its final season in 1978. By then, the teenager Burnett had hired to play her kid sister had become famous for playing a sharp-tongued family matriarch. When Thelma Harper got a sitcom of her own in the early 1980s, Korman helped Lawrence figure out how to take Mama from a sketch to a weekly series.

Lawrence summed up what she owed both stars in her memoir. “Without any question, Carol was the one who gave me the first leg up,” she wrote. “It was Harvey, though, who taught me how to ride.”