Harvey Korman

Television spent most of the 1960s using Harvey Korman in small doses: The Donna Reed Show, Dennis the Menace, Gidget, F Troop, a turn on The Munsters, and, in cartoon form, The Great Gazoo on The Flintstones. He was a Chicago native, born in 1927, and a featured spot on The Danny Kaye Show was the break that moved him up the bill.

Then came ten years on The Carol Burnett Show, from 1967, work that won him Emmys and made him one of the few sketch performers whose job was mostly listening. Korman's speciality was pomposity with a slow leak in it. He would begin a sketch as the dignified one, the authority, the straight man, and then visibly lose the argument with his own face. Watching him try to hold a scene together while it collapses is the entire appeal, and it made everyone around him funnier than they would have been alone.

Mel Brooks took that quality to the movies. Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles (1974) is the performance people quote, a villain whose vanity is the joke and whose diction is the delivery system. Dr. Charles Montague in High Anxiety (1977), Count de Monet in History of the World: Part I (1981) and Dr. Jack Seward in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995) complete that partnership.

The later credits are a mixed bag of paycheques and oddities: Professor Auguste Balls in two Pink Panther films, Herbie Goes Bananas, The Flintstones in live action in 1994, Jingle All the Way, and a genuinely peculiar afternoon in The Star Wars Holiday Special. He died in 2008.