Tim Conway from "Carol Burnett Show" Has Dementia

The decline in his physical health was suspected when he did not appear on Carol Burnett's 50th anniversary spectacular on her eponymous variety show.

He’s ancient

Let’s give him credit for his incredible comedic skills in his prime. Getting old is not fun if you get there? You may not.

Sad. Is this another case of thieving family wanting it all for themselves in the end?

Didn't this happen to Casey Casem, too?

He could have appeared on Carol's 50th special if he played the "old man" character. No one would have been the wiser. (Too soon?)

Isn't the same thing happening with Nichelle Nichols?

It happened to Peter Falk

The family “caregiver” and heir sees their inheritance being consumed to give quality care to the person who actually earned the money. They move to cheap care for the old fart. Happens a lot.

So she wants to administer his medications, herself?

And him with noted problems with swallowing?

I just bet she does...

Having been through this myself, with my Dad, I'm really saddened. I'm not going to pretend I understand what's happening without reading more details, but it's an absolutely horrible situation to be in.

[quote] I'm not going to pretend I understand what's happening without reading more details,

Do you know where you are?

They had him doing promo spots for METV not that long ago. I wonder when they were filmed?

I suspect a lot of people are breathing a sigh of relief. I know of a car mechanic specialist that had to be flown in to repair his car around ten years ago. He was a nasty piece of work, being a complete asshole customer. That’s the summary version. I don’t recall everything that was said, but I lost respect for him as a human being.

Never understood his appeal. Always found him annoying.

yes you have to be careful of those rest homes. Unless Charlene is actually visiting her husband every day, she should fuck off.

In the name of King David!

What is his son Tim Conway Jr. doing to help his dad.

His daughter's name is Kelly Conway? PLEASE tell me her middle name isn't "Anne."

And happening to Stan Lee, too.

I listen to Tim Conway, Jr., on the way home from work in the evening on KFI 640AM in Los Angeles. Jr. is kind of a funny guy.

My evil step mother put my dad in a home and went off traveling the world on his dime.

Been there

[quote]according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE and first reported by The Blast.

Christ, can't people have some privacy when it comes to personal (medical) issues.

Tim Conway is a vile right wing bigot (most likely a Trumper) who supported the religious right on numerous programs like the 700 Club with Pat Robertson.

He would go on the show, sit with Pat & lament the "family values" breakdown in Hollywood, New York, etc.

At this same time, he was appearing on "Married WIth Children" in a supporting role (playing Peggy's dad I recall).

MWC was a huge target for the religious right (they backed that Michigan lady) & suckup Pat never confronted Conway on why he was appearing on a "Godless immoral show ruining kids, families & America". I don't recall anyone ever calling Tim out for his hypocrisy.

I 've always wondered how he got along with Amanda Bearse who is openly gay & even directed some of the episodes.

It's ironic how R23 & others wonder why Tim can't have medical privacy when he supported groups that wanted to quarantine not only HIV patients but "every homosexual in America" in the 80's.

I wish more people in our community knew our history. I recall 1980s news magazines like Time & Newsweek showing religious right supporters holding signs to quarantine New York & San Francisco. This is what Conway supported when he gave his time, money & name over to that cause. The fact that he doesn't have medical privacy now when he couldn't give a damn about our community's medical privacy rights back then is an excellent case of "you reap what you sow".

Please R23 go back & reread R14 again to understand who this guy really is.

He's just punking them by playing the old man character from Carol Burnett

R24, thanks for your input, Charlene.

[Quote]They had him doing promo spots for METV not that long ago. I wonder when they were filmed?

You beat me to the punch, R13! He not only said a few lines in the promo, they had him dress as the old guy character. The promos looked fairly recent, too.

Those promos were maybe 3-4 years ago when MeTV started repeating the Burnett show. They weren't forever ago, but they were a few years back, perhaps before the dementia set in or became noticeable.

Oh, thanks, R28.

Thank you for that, r24. I never liked him on the Burnett show and like him even less now.

Charlene Beatty was Conway's assistant on "The Carol Burnett Show". He said he based Mrs. Wiggins on her.

Conway Jr. is very whiny on his show about being a poor radio personality. Very entitled white guy who thinks the world owes him more than what he has.

Tim Conway jr is a right winger too. KFI is a right wing radio station in LA. both should be burned to the ground

Funny how the tide turned at r14 lol!

[quote]Thank you for that, [R24]. I never liked him on the Burnett show and like him even less now.

Man, people will believe anything someone posts on the internet without evidence. No wonder trolls have been having a field day spreading bullshit for the past few years.

I'm not disputing anything R24 wrote because I don't know the details of Conway's beliefs and causes. But there is a difference between religion/being religious and "the religious right". Not every religious group holds the same beliefs. There is often a knee-jerk reaction to lump all religious groups/people together as "right wing" or anti-gay, and it's simply not the case.

Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. Carry on.

He was never funny on anything else except for Burnett.

I wish him no ill, but let's not go overboard here......

Fuck off, r2. You're a moron.

R37 he did a move with Don Knotts called The Private Eyes which was very funny. He also did a little known movie called The Long Shot in the mid 80s that while forgotten is still entertaining.

I always hated him. He was my least favorite actor on the Carol Burnett Show. I thought he mugged and overacted and was terrible. I also always assumed he was a closet case. I guess I was wrong about the latter. I had no idea he was a right winger. Fuck him.

I thought he was hilarious. Without him, she would not have had a winning show. She was the one that hammed it up.

Very sorry to hear about his politics.

I have no idea what to think about this. His daughter Kelly claims the stepmother is moving him out of an excellent skilled nursing facility to one that isn't as good.

On the other hand, the second wife isn't exactly your typical young trophy wife -she's been married to Conway for 34 years. And Conway has seven kids so why aren't they chiming in?

Then there's the whole thing about Conway being a far right-winger who persecuted gays in the '80s, which I've never heard until now.

Basically, I feel that I don't know what the hell is going on.

[quote]Basically, I feel that I don't know what the hell is going on.

I know the feeling.

[quote]I'm not disputing anything [R24] wrote because I don't know the details of Conway's beliefs and causes.

R36, you should dispute it. I was curious about what this person said and looked up anything I could find about Conway's political beliefs. I found absolutely nothing. R24 says that Conway "kept appearing" on shows; I found one appearance listed at the IMDB for the 700 club in 2007 (you can see it below). He was on the talk show circuit to promote his latest DVD with Harvey Korman. The most political thing he said was that he was a member of the PTC, which is one of those groups constantly lobbying for more family friendly programming for children. (It's not Christian Right/anti-gay/Deplorable to not want cartoon shows aimed at grade school kids filled with swear words and jokes about pot, sex and killing, FFS.)

Also, I watched Married with Children throughout its entire run, and remember the controversy well. It wasn't the Christian Right who were targeting the show. It was people who were upset at how bad it was making Americans look, since the show was also being aired around the world and they said it was portraying American families as being stupid and dysfunctional. People who barely watched the show also thought it was racist (I guess because they assumed it was another All in the Family), and were offended by Kelly Bundy, who was incredibly sexualized and a teenager having tons of premarital sex (remember, this was the age when teen pregnancy and AIDs were at their peak).

So, given all that, I would strongly take R24's post with a grain of salt.

I looked at the 700 Club appearance and all I saw was a cooment that he wasn’t promoting censorship but thought that the 7-9 viewing hour should be family friendly. Gosh, that is far less drastic than Tipper Gore’s rant against rock lyrics.

The Terry Rakolta was absolutely an extreme right thing, although they probably didn't know it. Rakolta is part of the Mormon Mafia and her family includes the Romneys.

[quote]Then there's the whole thing about Conway being a far right-winger who persecuted gays in the '80s, which I've never heard until now.

There is no "whole thing." It's one poster who seemed to have gotten triggered because 11 years ago, Tim Conway appeared on the 700 Club. If you can stomach sitting through 8 minutes of extremely boring talk about horses (which sounds like Conway trying to stall Pat Robertson from talking about politics or religion), you'll see for yourself that there's nothing that he said that was anti gay or Rightwing. It's also obvious why he was on the show; it was to promote his latest DVD (you can see the video for yourself at R44), and what better demographic to sell your inoffensive brand of comedy to?

He said he was a member of the Parents Television Council, but that is not a "Deplorable/Far Right" group. That's one of those variations of "parent lobby" groups that have been around since the 1940s monitoring children's entertainment for sex and violence. These groups have become necessary because what happens is that asshole writers, who find writing inoffensive material for kids "boring", will then start slipping in adult content to entertain themselves. You can see this problem rearing its ugly head in a country where there aren't lobby groups like that, such as Japan, where children's animated shows will have up skirt panty shots (euphemistically called "fan service), little girls with DD breasts and boy characters constantly leering at them or accidentally stumbling into them naked.

[quote]The Terry Rakolta was absolutely an extreme right thing, although they probably didn't know it.

Wow, you'll say anything at this point, won't you?

R48, this was my first post on this subject and I actually lived through it. If you did a little research on Rakolta, you'd know what she and her campaign were all about. I noticed you cut out my reference to the Mormons and Romney. Of course, this has nothing to do with Conway.

DL even had a thread about Rakolta years back.

[quote]He was never funny on anything else except for Burnett.

He was never funny on her show, either. His comedy was utterly predictable and borderline amateurish. Burnett's show went downhill when he became a regular. She, Korman and Conway constantly cracking one another up in sketches became tedious beyond words, although audiences inexplicably seemed to like it. The Mrs. Wiggins and Boss Tudball sketches were excruciating to sit through. Have you watched any reruns lately? Even the shows without Conway don't hold up at all. I'm sorry he's suffering, and I don't wish him ill, but Conway was always a hack.

What R51 said. Every word.

I love it how people like R49 keep thinking Wikipedia, a website written by the unwashed masses, is "research." I just love it. Explains why we're becoming an Idiocracy.

Actually, most of the carol Burnett Show was not funny and it wasn’t Tim Conway’s fault. Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner funny? Carol’s best humor was in her clever costumes.

"Unwashed masses", r53? It's true that Wikipedia shouldn't be considered a definitive source of information, but it's hardly a gossip site. It's A source, not THE source, for information. But I also don't think it's responsible for idiocracy (a word I like). And there's no reason to pick on r49. Is the Wikipedia entry on this Rakolta woman screamingly inaccurate, r53?

And how boring is Datalounge that sick, old Tim Conway is a hot topic?

R53, does that "research" extend to who Rakolta is married to (campaign manager for Romney 2008), sister of Rona Romney, right wing radio host and whose niece was a Trump delegate? Hey, find the sites that dispute any of that. And incidentally, anyone who seriously thought that MWC was boycotted because it made America look bad is just looking for a fight.

Too bad about his association with the conservatives. I thought that some of his stuff was funny.

Well thank god we have this on tape.

He can't remember two words of it now.

I love you R58.

R55 Harvey Korman was the MVP of the show.

I never found Tim Conway funny.

[quote]I never found Tim Conway funny.

There's a reason for that.

A not well known satire of "Jaws", Conway is very funny and ad-libs a brilliant story around 6:00. Conway had to do it repeatedly because he kept cracking up and Korman and Lawrence did as well. Notice Carol isn't in this scene but it's still great.

R62 That was a very looooooooooooooooooong comedy sketch.

People had longer attention spans before MTV came along.

It would have been so much easier to fill a show, with 10+ minutes sketches and people just making it up as they went along.

[quote]Conway had to do it repeatedly because he kept cracking up and Korman and Lawrence did as well.

They were the stars of the show and the audience as well.

Excruciatingly not funny.

I gotta say those particular sketches at the very least don't age well. Tiresome.

IIRC, Tim Conway was not a regular at first. He was just a frequent guest on the show whom Carol and the others loved working with so much (and who was a hit with the audience) anytime he appeared, so eventually they made him a regular cast member.

Harvey said Tim was the only person who could always crack him up, as evidenced in many of the sketches.

Actually, I think Tim took the place of Lyle Waggoner, who left the series to do "Wonder Woman."

Lyle Waggoner--now there was a talent.

I could give a rats ass what his political beliefs were,he made me laugh .

Tim Conway, Jr. on KFI talk radio in LA is a right-wing whacko, but he's okay sometimes in disguising it with some humor. John & Ken on KFI, the show that precedes Conway, have totally gone off the deep end in their right-wing lunacy, bigotry, smugness and arrogance. Talk about fake news and asshole Trump supporters, these guys are nauseating.

"Carol's show wasn't funny"

Sorry, but fuck THAT noise.

What I can say is that like most sketch comedy shows, it was hit or miss. Nostalgia has made us remember only the good, and it was more good than bad (although some of it has to be taken in the context of the time). The Family sketches and some of the movie and soap opera parodies were golden.

But there were dreadful skits that aged poorly. I saw one with Sammy Davis Jr. on a pirate ship and he was playing gay in a way that made me turn the channel immediately.

Conway was actually only a contract player on Carol's show the last few years, as I understand it. He seemed to work best in a team with Harvey Korman.

R73 I always associate Conway with being on the show from the beginning because he’s so closely identified with it. In fact he probably joined after Waggoner left. I heard somewhere he wasn’t what would be called a permanent cast member, but didn’t he do just about every show from when he joined til it ended?

Conway did become a regular cast member at some point. MeTV still shows the episode when Carol announced it onstage to the studio audience.

I always thought Vicki was MVP. She could have fit right in as a Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time player on SNL in the 80s.

R76, very true.

It’s a bitch getting old.

Vicki was very weak in the early episodes and didn't even do anything except play Carol's little sister in one running sketch. A lot of people forget how great she was as Prissy in the Went With the Wind sketch.

The daughter wants to move him where? So SHE can administer his meds?

Is she a nurse or something? Maybe he’s in a fancy place that has amenities he can’t appreciate to the tune of $20k/month difference. If it’s just a vegetative person in a bed, that money is better spent on the living.

And shut up. The VA my stepdad is in offers better CARE than the fancy private place with a fake village where he developed bedsores and didn’t cut his toenails.

^^ it’s no-frills, but he is happier there and there’s transparency and oversight. The fancy place looked better but wasn’t accountable to anyone.

I'm convinced much of the "cracking up within the sketches" were planned.

My father, who was not an easy man to be around most times, used to laugh like a hyena at the Conway/Korman skits. Those are some of the best memories I have of him. I thought he was hilarious as well. I don't wish dementia on anyone, regardless of their politics. It's horrible.

My favorite is this one, especially at 5:11, when he takes out the Hitler hand puppet to make prisoner Lyle Waggoner talk.

"I don't wish dementia on anyone, regardless of their politics. It's horrible."

I would agree with you, r83, except for a few cases: Trump, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, Putin...I'm sorry, I want to see those cunts suffer.

When I watched the show as a kid, I always got up and went to the kitchen or bathroom when Tim Conway appeared on screen.

It was a different, more innocent era. Not a lot ages well in this over-sharing, outrageous, crude, rude and more sophisticated time in which we live nowadays.

R87 I think "I Love Lucy" has aged pretty well. Carol Burnett just seems more corny.

I met Carol back in the early 90s when I had a job at CBS TV City and she was there for something; she was a DOLL, couldn't have been nicer -- so few celebs are like her.

I admit that not all of her stuff has held up, but I think music rights have kept us from seeing some of the great musical numbers over the years; also, the Family sketches ("Sorry!" Joanne Woodward's guest spot; Betty White as 'Sweet Sister Ellen', the movie spoofs: Went With the Wind, Mildred Fierce, were all fantastic and funny).

Very ironic that Carol, like other great female comic actresses of her day like Lily Tomlin, Jean Stapleton, Mary Tyler Moore, is pretty much forgotten today. Lucy is one of the only ones who has sustained fame.

R88. "I Love Lucy" was a sitcom and rare even among sitcoms that it has aged well, but even some of Lucy is a bit corny. Has "Father Know's Best," "The Donna Reed Show," "Make Room for Daddy" or even "The Dick Van Dyke Show" or "Bewitched" fared as well? Lucy's later show, "Here's Lucy" has not aged well and wasn't all that funny even back then.

However, "The Carol Burnett Show" was a variety show highlighted by sketch comedy, a totally different genre than sitcoms. Sketch comedy is always going to appear to be dated. Even many SNL skits haven't aged well. They were funny at the time; however, Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd proclaiming they were "wild and crazy guys" was funny then, but not so funny now.

R90. Mary Tyler Moore, my all-time favorite, is not forgotten!

And, R90, who remembers Garry Moore, the man who gave Carol Burnett her start on television?! If he's remembered at all it's for his hosting of the original I've Got a Secret.

Carol Burnett's special series, "Fresno," a spoof on "Falcon Crest," now that was funny! Riding in the back of a station wagon facing the opposite direction. Goddamn funny.

[quote]I'm not disputing anything [R24] wrote because I don't know the details of Conway's beliefs and causes. But there is a difference between religion/being religious and "the religious right". Not every religious group holds the same beliefs. There is often a knee-jerk reaction to lump all religious groups/people together as "right wing" or anti-gay, and it's simply not the case. Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. Carry on.

You should dispute what r24 says. Sure, Tim Conway appeared on "700 Club". He appeared on a lot of shows over the last 25 years or so...at that point, he was happy people were still asking him to appear anywhere. He appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show, so did Howard Stern...is Howard a right-wing, conservative wackjob? Tim Conway also appeared on "The Queen Latifah Show", and "The Wayne Brady Show". And guess what? He appeared on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart". So what is it--is he a right-winger or a leftist commie? Ask his son Tim Jr, who once told a story of how, as a child, he let the n-word slip, and Tim Sr. pulled him to the side and scolded him, saying he never wanted to hear that ugly word come out of his mouth again.

Speaking of Jr: he was suddenly fired from his radio gig in 2009, after 15 years. The only steady job he could get afterwards was in far-right radio because that was where the audience was (a LOT of angry Obama-haters needed to vent), so of course he turned the conservative rhetoric up to almost comic levels, and the deplorables fell for it and lapped it up. Of course they had no idea that several years earlier, he called for the death penalty for a white pervert who lured a little black girl into a Vegas casino restroom only to rape and strangle her to death. (although deplorables probably would've blamed the girl's dad for leaving her unattended).

[quote]So, given all that, I would strongly take [R24]'s post with a grain of salt.

Agree, there's always at least one "[Insert name of 'beloved' recently departed star here] was a gay-hating conservative asshole!" - troll ready to rear its ugly head here on Datalounge. Never fails.

R95, I remember that because they had the guy's friend on the show. This guy watched and didn't report it and said on the air that he didn't care about the girl who died because she was a stranger to him. He graduated from Cal. I remember Conway Jr. was furious on air as was anyone who heard it.

[quote]And incidentally, anyone who seriously thought that MWC was boycotted because it made America look bad is just looking for a fight.

Spoken like someone who just fell out of his mother's vagina yesterday!

How do I know you weren't alive (or probably were just a baby) when the controversy broke out? One of the hallmarks of someone like you is relying on Wikipedia and other discussions as a crutch to "prove their point", since they have nothing else to base their observations on.

So, as someone who WAS there, take your Wikipedia and your "research" and shove it. A large part of the reason why the show was hated was that Americans were feeling ridiculously patriotic under the Reagan administration (so stupidly patriotic, that they were playing "Born in the USA" at rallies, not realizing it was an antiwar song). The show triggered them because it made a big point of making Al Bundy one of them, the idea being, "Well, he may be a working class shlub/loser in a dead end job with a nasty wife and dysfunctional family and a shitty American-made car but at least he's a proud American, and that's all that matters!" The problem is that it DID matter. They didn't want this working class, uneducated moron with his rambling "We hate the French!" rants being a symbol of American pride.

On top of that, people were freaked out that MWC wasn't portraying the "all American family" as squeaky clean, wholesome and embodying family values but instead was a family of boorish, dysfunctional louts. People were so hung up about not tarnishing America's image as the best country in the world that they were literally fretting about what would happen when the show got played in foreign markets.

You're such a flake trying to put up MWC as a bastion of liberalness under target of the Far Right, you don't even seem to realize that the show was actually part of a huge wave of shows in the mid to late 1980s created by libertarians as a push back against political correctness, liberalism and positive strides made by women, gays and blacks in the media. The Bundys were originally supposed to be a black family as a response to The Cosby Show, which offended racists because it was just one of another line of shows and movies portraying blacks in a positive (read: uppity) light. When the show's producers dropped the idea to have the Bundys be black, they then used MWC to attack feminism. The show was so effective that to this day, you can see Incels/MGTOWs jerking off to clips on YouTube and quoting the shit in them as if they were gospel truth.

So, really, shut up. You have no idea what you're talking about. That's why all you can do is blather about "research." I don't have to blather about research and comb Wikipedia pages written by people who were still in diapers in the 1980s to back myself up because I was there.

My, R98, but you DO go on.

This is the first time in my life I’ve heard that MWC theory, and I was there, too. The MWC backlash was about smut and crassness

Conway had a cameo on 30 Rock in one of the early seasons, all his scenes were with Jack McBrayer and they were great together. I was never a huge Conway fan, but he had his moments. Of course, today some of the sketches on Carol Burnett were hit and miss, but those 'Family' sketches (unlike the sitcom that came out of it) were absolutely brilliant and so dark. I have several women in my family who are just like Eunice (who, btw, I feel is the real star of those sketches, mama was much more one note. There was so much pain and hurt just underneath the surface of the Eunice character, I think it's Burnett's greatest creation).

I agree, R101. They really de-fanged Mama in order to make her more palatable for the sitcom version years later. It was a far cry -- and huge letdown -- from the original version on the Carol Burnett show. The "Family" sketches were the jewel in the crown of the CB show in my opinion and went far beyond any of the other skits they did. Those characters were a real creation and there was even an arc to their lives from sketch to sketch (IIRC, when Harvey Korman eventually left the show, Ed was written out as having finally walked out on Eunice for a younger woman). The writing and the performances were all first-rate.

The only "miss" of sorts in my view was the Philip character portrayed by Roddy McDowell. It wasn't McDowell's performance but the writers were never willing to let Philip shake his above-it-all demeanor whenever he would visit the family. Whenever the usual confrontations would develop, he would mostly just sigh and keep his temper in check. It would've been nice to see him eventually let loose and take them on the way Eunice's other siblings (played by Betty White, Tommy Smothers, and Alan Alda) did through the years.

not anymore

What's a Tim Conway?

Tim Conway was the only funny part of the "Carol Burnett Show" . Carol was never funny by herself.

A journalist friend of mine who interviewed him said he was the funniest person he ever met. Actually much funnier in person than in his act.

r103 You saw the need to bump this thread for THAT?

r108

Who are you the Internet police? Go fuck yourself

He's DEAD

I just saw the "apple Dumbling Gang" movie on with Don Knotts on Disney+. Such a cute disney film for the time. RIP.

I never thought Tim Conway was funny. Too contrived and obvious. You could see the joke coming from a mile away.