Lucille Ball was a great physical comedian, Conan O’Brien acknowledged back in 2016. But he told Carol Burnett that she was even better. “I think you surpassed her physicality in the things that you would try to do,” he said. “You were kind of fearless.”
Burnett was flattered, especially because no one had trained her in the art of pratfalls. “I taught myself to do stunts,” she confessed. “Nobody ever taught me how to do it, and I’m amazed I never broke a bone. I had a few bruises.”
The first big fall Burnett ever attempted was “back in the covered wagon days” on The Garry Moore Show. Neil Simon, still in his lowly TV comedy writer era, had written a sketch about nursery-rhyme stalwarts Jack and Jill. Everyone knows what happened to Jack — the dork fell down, broke his crown, that whole bit. A doctor character in the sketch asked Burnett, playing Jill, what she was going to do next.
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“Well, I’ll just go tumbling after,” Jill shrugged. “Tumbling after” meant Burnett had to throw herself out a set window. The show’s producer approached Burnett to find out if she knew how to make the stunt-leap.
“Sure!” came Burnett’s nervously enthusiastic reply. “I wanted the gig.”
When it came time to do the sketch, Burnett delivered her “I’ll go tumbling after” line and jumped out the window as scripted. To her surprise, she landed on a cushion. “I sat up, and I said to everybody, ‘Oh, thanks for the mattress!’” It hadn’t occurred to her that anything other than a hard floor would be waiting for her on the other side.
Conan had a similar experience with a stunt on his show, though the ending wasn’t quite as comfortable. He and Andy Richter had done a bit a few months earlier in which the sidekick was supposed to get angry with Conan and throw him through a window. Unlike Burnett, Conan got the word from the prop team that a mattress would be waiting for him on the other side.
“Andy’s a big strong guy,” Conan explained, and Richter gave him a mighty toss. O’Brien helped with his own jump to really sell the bit. “I go flying through the window, and I’m in the air flying on the other side of the window,” he remembered. “And I look and I see the mattress is about this wide…”
“…and I see it sail past me and then bang! I hit a bunch of cameras and cables and stuff.”
A group of stagehands surveyed the damage. “Yep, we got a bigger mattress,” they admitted. “We’ll use that next time.”