Carol Burnett: Oh.  I loved The Sid Caesar Show.  We, I never watched, never got the chance really to watch Your Show of Shows that much because I was going to UCLA at the time and we’d just gotten a television set and I had homework, I had all kinds of projects that I was doing at school.  So, when I got to New York, I moved into a place called the Rehearsal Club, which Stage Door was written about.  It housed 25 young ladies interested in the theatre and had a, we had a, a woman who ran the club.  It was all very proper.  Young men couldn’t go anywhere beyond the parlor.  And I started on Saturday nights to watch Sid, because Sid Caesar Hour, I guess it was called that.  And that was when Nanette Fabray was on.  And of course Howie and Carl.  And I think Pat Carroll.  And I just couldn’t get over how clever everything looked and how funny, how funny they all were.  And, then I met a, a fella that we’d always go to the Stage Delicatessen and get coffee [COUGHS.] And his name was Milt Kingman and he was a wonderful comic.  And he stood in for Sid Caesar when they were blocking before they were gonna go live on Saturday nights.  And we became friends and he said, “Would you like to come see a rehearsal?” I said, “Absolutely.” And so he snuck me and, and I sat up in the balcony and I watched, watched Milt stand in for him and then Sid would do… looking at the camera shots.  And then he’d come out and then they’d do this rehearsal with all of ‘em.  And then I’d run home, and that would be at 5 o’clock and then at 8 o’clock the show would go on.  And I could see where’d they’d made changes and done different things and how they had tweaked it and made it better. And My Fair Lady opened and two tickets were donated to the rehearsal club and I won the lottery.  And so I won two tickets to My Fair Lady on a Saturday night.  I never told this to Julie.  Anyway, I gave the tickets to my roommate because I said, “Fair Lady’s gonna be running for a hundred years.  I know I’ll get to see it but Sid Caesar is live and I’ll never see that again and I want to see what they’re doing.”

Sid Caesar: Well, you take a picture like, with Chaplin, ‘City Lights’. There was a part in that picture where he’s running away from the cops, he’s always running away from the cops and he sees a traffic light, and he sees the traffic light and he goes “ah!” He gets an idea. And all the cars are stopped for the traffic light, so he walks through the back of all the cars, and the last car he gets out of is a limousine. Of course, that’s how he got the idea of a blind girl seeing – thinking that he is a millionaire. I mean, how do you do that? How do you do it? It’s a blind girl, in a silent movie, and she falls in love – I mean, she knows that this guy is a millionaire. And Chaplin gets out of the car, slams the door, and he sees that she turns around because she heard the door, and she offers him the lilacs that she’s selling. And he looks at her, and it’s immediate love. Immediate! He falls in love – aah! (laughs) And then he takes his last dime, and he takes it and he gives it to her. And she takes the dime and she gives him the flowers. And he takes the flowers and she takes this cup, and she’s going to walk down to the fountain in the park and rinse it out. So he follows her, and she gets the cup and she rinses it, and then she throws the water in his face! And the whole audience went “ah!” because they were in a serious situation, and all of a sudden there’s something that’s funny. Right there. No introduction or nothing, boom. Bang. A switch. And the audience went “ah!”, they drew in because they were in a serious situation and you get a thing like this, they didn’t know whether to laugh or not, because they would – in those days, they were afraid to laugh because they thought that they’d embarrass somebody on the screen.