The TV Zone

This has been a hell of a week for the dearly departed in television, with the deaths of Sydney Pollack (a classic TV director before he was a classic big screen one), and the amazing (and amazingly) prolific Earle Hagen, who helped create the soundtrack of our TV lives. And - of course - Dick Martin.

Now, exeunt, Harvey Korman.What can I say about Korman - dead yesterday at 81, after an illness associated with an aneurysm - that hasn't been said already? He was simply one of the great comic TV actors and personalities of all time, up there in the front ranks with Jackie Gleason, Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, Sid Caesar, Jonathan Winters, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson...and, of course, Carol Burnett, with whom he was so closely and memorably allied all those years ago.

Sorry, but to have known and loved Korman - as so many of us did and do - you had to have been of a certain age at a certain time in a certain America, which was in the throes of a horrific war in Vietnam and in a state of what seemed at times to be near-civil war at home. Yet there was Korman, glorious Korman, who seemed to make everyone forget about it all in the midst of some utterly silly, ludicrously over-the-top, Kormanesque moment.

His mouth would turn up ever so slightly, and his mock frown would turn into a grin because it just couldn't help itself; then a giggle, followed by a guffaw, would be emitted, and Harvey Korman - along with about thirty or forty million other Americans - would burst into laughter and then into tears.

Korman was the greatest. I love him to this day.

(Above, two classics for the ages.)