"You know, Carol, variety is a man's game."
Carol Burnett is a bonafide feminist hero. She rose up at the helm of her own variety show decades before the question of whether women are funny was somehow a thing. While her brand of humor never contained explicitly activist messages, the very fact of her presence during the women's lib movement, of performing each night as the first female host of a comedy variety show, was a feminist act -- whether she realizes it or not.
"You know, Carol, variety is a man's game," CBS told her at the time, trying to talk her out of creating what would become "The Carol Burnett Show." She didn't listen to them, of course; she just did what she wanted to do.
As Burnett tells it, her contract stipulating guest appearances on "The Garry Moore Show" contained a clause that allowed her to pursue a variety show within five years of her 10-year contract with the network. On the last day of that fifth year, she decided to push the button.
"They had forgotten about it," she said, laughing at the implausibility of her rise to prominence on a technicality.
CBS initially asked Burnett to consider a sitcom instead, but she balked at the idea of doing the same thing each week. She wanted to play different characters. She wanted to have musical numbers. She was a Broadway baby, after all.
"The Carol Burnett Show" debuted in 1967 and ran for over 10 years. It was a ratings gem for the network, heralded as a good enough excuse to stay in on Saturday nights. Burnett made waves bringing in huge names for her musical acts and convincing them to participate in sketches, with the likes of Bing Crosby entangled in her physical comedy. She parodied entire movies, using the typically uneven genre of the variety show to deliver lengthy one-acts based on cultural staples. (See: That "Gone With The Wind" skit, in which Burnett emerges in the dress made of curtains, curtain rod and all.)
In 1978, Burnett ceased production on her own, having tired of the format in the shifting landscape of TV. "I'm sorry to see attention spans so short," she said, when asked if the show could exist today. "You know, because we did longform. Sometimes, we had sketches that were 12 or 15 minutes. We took the time to build."