Kelly Conway used to tease her dad, comedian Tim Conway, by asking him which of his children was his favorite. “He’d go, ‘I can’t say that. I have six of you,’” recalls the star’s eldest child and only daughter. “He did divide his time evenly, but dads and daughters have a special bond. We hung out a lot.”
In his long career, Tim appeared in more than 100 TV shows and films, created iconic characters, including Dorf, but is best remembered for his years on The Carol Burnett Show. Despite her father’s fame, growing up in the then-remote San Fernando Valley, Kelly had a very normal, un-Hollywood childhood. “My dad was so low-key that I don’t think we realized that he really was famous until we got older,” recalls Kelly, whose memoir, My Dad’s Funnier Than Your Dad: Growing Up With Tim Conway in the Funniest House in America, is out now. “My dad’s from outside of Cleveland, and my mom’s from Detroit. They raised us like we were in the Midwest — simple, nothing fancy. Nobody ever got a car on their 16th birthday.”
But there were perks, like attending dress rehearsals at CBS on Thursday nights. “Thursdays were so fun,” says Kelly, who recalls dropping in on the sets of The Sonny & Cher Show and Three’s Company, which were also filmed on the same lot, with the children of Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman. “I had the luckiest, best childhood.”
At the end of every season, The Carol Burnett Show’s cast, directors, producers and their families took a group trip to Hawaii. “He loved the Kahala Hotel in Hawaii,” recalls Kelly. “It’s where he seemed the most relaxed.”
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At home, Tim spent a lot of time at the typewriter in his den dreaming up sketches. “His mind was always writing things, putting himself in situations, and looking around to see what he could make funny. He had a brilliant, brilliant mind,” says Kelly. Beyond writing, Tim, a skilled carpenter and tailor, created his own props and costumes. “He built a lot of stuff in our house. He had a workshop out back and taught us all how to build things.”
When it came to raising kids, Tim tended to let Kelly’s mother handle the discipline. He loved to be the fun dad — sometimes even secretly spiriting the kids off to spend a day at the race track he loved. “We kind of grew up at the track,” Kelly confides. “My dad would take us out of school for opening day at Santa Anita Park, which was just before Christmas, without my mom knowing about it!”
Even when Tim was out with his family, he made time for his fans. “I think what you see in my dad is exactly what he was. He was very approachable, so people weren’t afraid to say hi,” says Kelly, who lost Tim in 2019 at age 85. “Fans would look at us and go, ‘Your kids are so well-behaved.’ My dad would say, ‘Them? They’re not! They’re wild!’”
