A SKETCH THAT NEVER GETS OLD — Tim Conway once revealed the story behind the moment that made Harvey Korman laugh so hard he literally lost control on The Carol Burnett Show. It happened during the now-iconic “Dentist Sketch,” when Conway—playing a painfully nervous dentist who accidentally injects himself with Novocain—began improvising in ways no one could predict.
As his arm went numb, his leg collapsed, and his face froze in place, Korman fought to stay in character… and failed. “You could see him shaking,” Conway later recalled. “Then I heard it — he completely lost it.” The studio exploded. Carol Burnett ran offstage to keep herself from breaking, the audience roared, and the sketch teetered on the edge of total collapse.
That unscripted moment became comedy history—a perfect storm of chaos, laughter, and brilliance, proving that when Tim Conway and Harvey Korman shared a stage, absolutely nobody was safe from cracking up.
