Following Gracie’s retirement George tried going on without her. A number of people played with George in place of Gracie including the world renouned Carol Channing. What follows is a routine that they did together. You may recognize many of the old jokes that actually came directly from the old Burns & Allen routines.
Carol and George enter from opposite sides and meet center stage.
George: Ladies and gentlemen, Carol is now going to say hello to everybody.
Carol: Hello, everybody.
George: Let’s see, how should we start?
Carol: I always like to start with a joke.
George: I think Carol’s got a good idea there.
Carol: All right. I took my girlfriend to the doctor’s today, and while I was there somebody told this joke that had everybody dying laughing.
George: I’m sure we’d like to hear it.
Carol: Well, it went like this: “Don’t let that upset you, he never says good-bye to anybody!” (A long pause)
George: That can’t be the whole joke.
Carol: There was some stuff ahead of it that I didn’t hear, but that was the line that had everybody dying laughing.
George: I think we better find another way to start.
Carol: This might be interesting. While I was in the doctor’s office I read a newspaper that had the latest census report on this city. And you people out there don’t look tired and worn out.
George: Tired and worn out? You don’t look that way to me, either.
Carol: Well, right at the top of the census report it said, “Population of Seattle–broken down by age and sex!”
George: I don’t think she understands what that means.
Carol: Ohhhhh, yes I do. I’ve known about the birds and the bees all my life.
George: That’s a surprise to me.
Carol: When I was a little girl my mother told me how the bees carry pollen from flower to flower on their feet. I even tried it and believe me its nothing.
George: I’m sorry to hear that–I was getting ready to take off my shoes.
Carol: And I read something else in the newspaper while I was in the doctor’s office. A very rich man died, and the lawyer read his will to his sons and daughters and their husbands and wives. It said for every new child that was born they would get an extra half million dollars, but they weren’t interested.
George: That’s hard to believe.
Carol: Well, they weren’t. Before he even finished reading the will the room was empty.
George: The reason they ran out was they were probably double-parked.
Carol: Anyway, this doctor has a beautiful redheaded nurse with the most gorgeous figure. But she was sick, too, poor little thing. She kept begging the doctor to take her appendix out.
George: Can you folks imagine a beautiful nurse askig a doctor to take out her appendix?
Carol: It’s true. Every time she went into his private office I could hear her hollering, “Doctor, please, cut it out!”
George: That doctor really knew how to operate.
Carol: Let me tell you folks why my girlfriend went to see the doctor in the first place. She went to have the dents taken out of her knees.
George: Well, if you’ve got dents in your knees, that’s the place to go.
Carol: That’s what she had. When I looked in the office, the doctor was pounding them out with a rubber hammer.
George: He was trying to get a look at her reflexes.
Carol: Well, no wonder she kept kicking at him…. And while she was in the doctor’s office I cheered up all the patients in the waiting room. There was one little boy there who looked so sad, so I took him around and made everybody shake hands with him. It made him so happy he almost forgot he had the measles.
George: Carol’s friendliness is really contagious.
Carol: I helped the nurse, too. I answered the phone for her. Somebody wanted to know if a man eighty-five years old could have rickets.
George: I can’t wait to hear what her answer was.
Carol: I said let him have all he wants as long as he chews them well.
George: For a minute I thought she might give the wrong answer, but she fooled me.
Carol: And then the doctor from the next office came in, and he was whistling.
George: He must have had something to whistle about.
Carol: The nurse said that he was Dr. Brown, the famous obstetrician. She said that last year he had two hundred and sixty babies.
George: Well, that’s wonderful.
Carol: It might be wonderful for him, but I’ll bet his wife isn’t whistling.
George: I’d like to straighten her out, but she’s so happy the way she is.
Carol: I tried to have a talk with that doctor, but he was in a hurry to get back to his office. He said he had a little boy in there a year and a half old who couldn’t hold on to his food. So I said, “Why don’t you give him a live lobster? If he can’t hold on to his food, give him food that can hold on to him.”
George: I’ll bet that doctor wasn’t whistling when he left.
Carol: Then this woman sitting next to me told me she sprained her back playing tennis. She told me that she hadn’t held a racket in her hand for two years. So I said, “My goodness, where have you been holding it?”
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