FAREWELL HARVEY KORMAN

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to The Carol Burnett Show and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in Blazing Saddles, died Thursday. He was 81.

And

"It takes a certain type of person to be a television star," he said in that 2005 interview. "I didn't have whatever that is. I come across as kind of snobbish and maybe a little too bright. ... Give me something bizarre to play or put me in a dress and I'm fine."

[Mel] Brooks tapped Korman's kinetic comic chops often, including roles in High Anxiety, The History of the World Part I and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

"I gave him tongue twisters because I knew he was the only one who could wrap his mouth around them," Brooks said. "Harvey was such a good solid actor that he could have done Shakespearean drama just as well and easily as he did comedy."

Brooks described Korman as a "dazzling" comic talent.

"You could get rock-solid comedy out of him. He could lift the material. He always made it real, always made it work, always believed in characters he was doing," he said.

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I don't have much more to add; Mel Brooks, who used Korman so effectively, again and again, understood him best. Korman, while extremely funny in his own right, was the ultimate straight man, aiding and abetting his scene partners regularly, making them much funnier than they could have ever been on their own.

For instance, in this great moment from Blazing Saddles, watch how Korman's utter seriousness, his hyper-villainy, make Slim Pickens' doofus bad guy character transcend the simple classic comedic idiot:



And Korman was at his absolute best with Tim Conway, often breaking character, seized by fits of nearly uncontrollable laughter, but doing it so honestly, visibly straining muscles in order to stay in the scene, that he quite literally becomes an audience surrogate, making Conway ten times as funny as he was with, say, Don Knotts:



Korman was brilliant. Very few actors understand comedy or how to execute it as well as he did. Indeed, I'm indebted to him as an actor myself, greatly indebted.

Farewell, Harvey Korman. You're one of the all time greats. I mean, right up there with the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Peter Sellers, Mel Brooks, Monty Python, John Belushi, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, all of them. Thanks for all the stitches.

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