ss THE NIGHT COMEDY SHATTERED ON LIVE TELEVISION — TIM CONWAY’S “OLDEST MAN” ROUTINE HIT HARVEY KORMAN SO HARD HE LITERALLY COULDN’T BREATHE. What began as a simple sketch turned into a meltdown so uncontrollable, so brutally funny, that Harvey dropped his head onto the desk, wheezing, “He’s trying to kill me,” while Conway kept pushing the slow-motion chaos further and further. One sleepy blink, one agonizingly slow reach for the ship’s wheel, and Harvey’s entire body collapsed into shaking laughter he couldn’t stop — dragging the cast, crew, and studio audience down with him. Cameras shook, actors gave up, and the scene disintegrated into pure, legendary pandemonium the world still talks about decades later. It wasn’t just comedy it was a demolition of self-control broadcast live.
There are comedy moments you laugh at… and then there are moments that completely demolish you. For Harvey Korman, that moment had a name — Tim Conway.
On *The Carol Burnett Show*, Conway didn’t just deliver jokes. He engineered slow-motion chaos with a precision no one could defend against. And nowhere was that more obvious than in the legendary sketch where he played *The Oldest Man* — a character who moved so slowly it defied logic, patience, and the laws of television timing.
Harvey Korman was supposed to be the steady one. The professional. The man who held every scene together. But the second Conway slid into frame, dragging one foot behind the other like a rusty door hinge, Harvey’s fate was sealed. He could barely get through his lines. His shoulders would start to twitch. His lips would fight a losing battle against a grin. And then came the moment he completely lost it — head on the table, gasping for air, whispering through tears, *“I swear, he’s trying to kill me.”*
The audience exploded. Carol Burnett, sitting just off-camera, was already covering her face because she knew where it was heading: Conway was about to stretch the bit even further. A slower step. A longer pause. A half-second blink that felt like it took a full minute. He wasn’t trying to be funny — he was trying to see how far he could push everyone else before they cracked.
And it worked every single time.
What made Conway’s slow-motion torture so unforgettable wasn’t the silliness of the character — it was the joy behind it. He didn’t break Harvey to be cruel. He broke him because the two of them shared a chemistry that no script could ever replicate. Pure, childlike mischief met the helpless laughter of a man who adored him.
Decades later, people still try to watch those sketches with a straight face. And decades later… they still fail.
Because once Tim Conway starts moving slow, everyone else falls apart fast.
