It’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t live through it — what it felt like to sit in front of a flickering television set in the 1970s and watch The Carol Burnett Show. It wasn’t just a program; it was an event. Families gathered after dinner, the living room filled with laughter before the first commercial break even aired. And in that golden age of sketch comedy, no duo made the nation laugh harder than Tim Conway and Harvey Korman.

The sketch, titled “If Tim Conway Is Your Pharmacist, RUN FAR AWAY!”, has gone down in history as one of the purest displays of unscripted brilliance ever filmed. The setup was simple: Harvey Korman enters a small-town drugstore, clutching a prescription and a sense of urgency. Behind the counter stands Conway — the picture of clueless professionalism, his white coat barely hiding his mischief. What happens next is chaos in slow motion.

Conway squints at the label, mumbles something about the doctor’s handwriting, and begins measuring ingredients with absolute confidence — and absolute incompetence. He pours liquids into the wrong bottles, cracks an egg into a beaker “for texture,” and strikes a match to “sterilize” the mixture, causing a small explosion that sends Harvey stumbling backward. All the while, Conway never breaks character. His calmness is surgical. His timing is immaculate.

But the real magic isn’t in the script — it’s in the silence that follows every ridiculous act. The audience howls, but Conway just stares, wide-eyed and deadpan, waiting. That pause — that dangerous, deliberate stillness — is where he was a master. It’s also where Harvey Korman started to lose it. His lip quivers, his shoulders shake, and before long, he’s laughing so hard he can barely breathe. The audience catches on and laughs even harder.

The Carol Burnett Show | If Tim Conway is Your Pharmacist, RUN FAR AWAY! – video Dailymotion

Tim Conway’s mission, as Carol Burnett would later say, “wasn’t to get the laugh — it was to get Harvey to fall apart.” And in this sketch, he succeeded spectacularly. At one point, Harvey is bent over the counter, his hand covering his mouth, tears streaming down his face. Conway, pretending to ignore him, calmly adds a spoonful of some mysterious powder, sending another puff of smoke into the air. The laughter in the studio becomes uncontrollable.

Tim Conway and Harvey Korman in a 1969 sketch from “The Carol Burnett Show”. Conway plays a rookie dentist struggling to give novocaine to his first patient. Korman admits in later interviews he peed himself laughing at Conway’s antics during this sketch …

Behind the scenes, Conway was notorious for improvising — slipping in new lines, unexpected gestures, and absurd details that no one, not even Harvey, knew were coming. Harvey once joked, “Working with Tim was like standing on a trapdoor — you never knew when it was going to open.” Yet, that unpredictability was their genius. Together, they created lightning in a bottle — comedy that felt alive, dangerous, and human.

When The Carol Burnett Show aired that night, CBS phone lines lit up. Viewers called the network saying they hadn’t laughed that hard in years. Newspapers across America praised Conway’s performance as “a masterclass in deadpan destruction.” What should have been a throwaway skit became an immortal moment in TV history — one still shared, rewatched, and adored fifty years later.

What makes it so enduring isn’t just nostalgia. It’s what the sketch represents: a kind of laughter that’s pure, spontaneous, and shared. There were no special effects, no cynicism, no irony — just two gifted men cracking each other up in front of millions. It was theater disguised as television, and America never forgot it.

Both Tim Conway and Harvey Korman are gone now — Harvey in 2008, Tim in 2019 — but their chemistry remains unmatched. In their final interviews, both men spoke fondly of that sketch. Tim once said, “If we can make people forget their troubles for five minutes, then that’s medicine.” And Harvey added with a grin, “If Tim’s the pharmacist, that medicine probably explodes — but it works.”

Decades later, If Tim Conway Is Your Pharmacist stands as a time capsule of a purer kind of comedy — unscripted, unpredictable, and timeless. It reminds us that laughter doesn’t need explanation; it just needs honesty.

So yes, if Tim Conway really were your pharmacist… maybe you should run far away. But you’d be laughing the whole way out the door.