One Laugh Changed Carol Burnett's life

The audience reaction to comedy inspired Burnett to use this concept to deal with life's pains and storms. Being funny came a bit too late for Carol Burnett, but it helped her change her life.

The Stage and TV Star was appearing on a Friday night in June 2009 at the Massey Hall for an evening which was named Laughter and Reflection with Carol Burnett. Here are some excerpts of a recent conversation held with this distinguished lady, before her evening at the Massey Hall.

At the inception she says, "Do you really want me to tell you how I grew up? I can, if you want me to, but it still hurts every time I want to do it, even after all these years." In actual fact, fans don't need to hear Burnett herself spell it out, but simply read her autobiography - One More Time and Hollywood Arms - the play she wrote with her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, which make the facts abundantly clear.

She was born in 1933 in San Antonio, and her childhood was marked with sadness due to her alcoholic parents, who fought constantly, and she was finally shipped off to live with her grandmother. Her parents finally divorced; Burnett, her half-sister and her grandmother moved to a bottom-of-the-barrel rooming house in one of the most impoverished areas in Hollywood.

During her stay at Hollywood High School, Burnett's dream was to be a writer. She always thought that one-day she could put her entire life down on paper, and hopefully that would relieve her and she would feel free. But Burnett gradually began to realize in ways bitter as well as sweet that life never turns out they way you want it to be.

During her early years at UCLA, Burnett learned that she had to take an acting class, before they'd let her into the playwriting program. She said that she wasn't ready to act, but had no choice. The first show that she ever acted was in a student-written one-act script and she played a hillbilly girl.

Burnett says, "Don't ask me why, but when we were in front of the audience, I suddenly decided I was going to stretch out all my words and my first line came out "I'm baaaaaack!'"

Burnett pauses for a while..... maybe that she was recollecting her past memories.

"They laughed," she says quietly. "They laughed and it felt great. All of a sudden, after loads of coldness and emptiness in my life, I felt a new sensation of warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you'll hear a laugh that great again."

She had a couple of similar occasions such as these, before she hit success after she and her boyfriend moved to New York in 1954.