Test Your Carol Burnett Trivia Prowess

Burnett’s character was Mrs. Wiggins, whom she once described as “a person who the IQ fairy never visited.” But she proved a recurring favorite with viewers for the exasperation she would cause her boss, Mr. Tudball, who wore an ill-fitting wig and spoke with a bizarre, vaguely Swedish accent.

In her memoir One More Time, Burnett explained that she started pulling her ear in her TV debut on The Paul Winchell Show in 1955 as a signal to her grandmother Mabel, who had mostly raised her. “That was my signal to her,” she wrote. “It always meant, ‘Hi Nanny. I’m fine. I love you.’ Later, it meant, ‘Hi Nanny. I’m fine. I love you. Your check’s on the way.’”

Burnett had a big number, “Easy Street,” with the film’s two other villains (played by Tim Curry, 78, and Bernadette Peters, 77) that the stars recalled was complete Hollywood overkill. The number had a big set, 150 dancers — even an organ grinder with a monkey — and took a week to shoot at a cost of more than $1 million. But the filmmakers scrapped it and reshot the scene with just the three stars in the orphanage. “It was so much better,” Curry recalled.

Mama’s Family, which ran from 1983 to 1990 on NBC and in syndication, was based on a series of sketches about a fractured Southern family. While Burnett popped up occasionally as daughter Eunice, the real star was Vicki Lawrence, 75, as sharp-tongued 60-something matriarch Thelma Harper.

Burnett got hooked on the ABC soap  All My Children while vacationing with her family, and first appeared on the show in 1983. Burnett played Verla Grubbs, who turns up in Pine Valley in search of her con-artist father, Langley Wallingford.