Tim Conway tells a story

Tim Conway, it's been reported, has dementia, That diagnosis would be a blow to anyone, but it's especially awful for people prized for their intelligence and wit. Tim had both of those, especially when it came to improvisation. When he did the improvisation-laden TV series "On the Spot" in 2003, working with people like Michael Hitchcock who were adept in the field, there was still a clear sense that Tim was the grand master, and once he got going, watch out. The stories of Tim cracking up the folks he worked with are legend. He became the perfect guest star, juicing up shows for decades, Look at the clip from the old "Hollywood Palace" TV show, above, where Tim pretty much reduces David Janssen to laughing tears. Or the way this monologue cracks up Johnny Carson:

Those are hardly rare moments; on "The Carol Burnett Show," there was no shortage of footage of Tim taking flight, and taking apart Harvey Korman's attempts at keeping a straight face. But it wasn't just that Tim was silly (although he could be) or wildly improvisational. It was that he knew how to build a funny bit, piling absurdities one on top of the other, methodically dragging you down his own rabbit hole. Compare him to another great comic scene-stealer from Ohio, Fred Willard; Fred, as great as he is, seemed more random, more willing to bounce around in pursuit of the gag, where Tim would build a straight, but zany, path to hilarity.

I talked to Tim several times over the years, and he was always pleasant, comfortable being interviewed and, still, a little dangerous because you never quite knew when one of his stories might begin. The best moment came in 1997, when Tom Feran and I were writing our Ghoulardi book. Tim and Ernie "Ghoulardi" Anderson were longtime friends and comedy collaborators going back to their days in Cleveland, performing together on TV and releasing a couple of comedy albums.

When Tim began reminiscing about his work with Ernie, we came to the question of how he and Ernie happened to leave their jobs at Channel 3 and ended up in a happier home at Channel 8 (where Ghoulardi was born). Ernie claimed Channel 3 heard the two were talking to Channel 8 and fired them -- but Tim had a more complicated tale. Of course.

His involved their pitching a show tied to Jack Paar's then-late-night program, which ran an hour and 45 minutes. "We would come on for the next 15 minutes and do highlights of the (Paar) show. And we would do it with hand puppets."

Hello, rabbit hole. "You're kidding me," I said. "Swear to God," Tim replied.

There followed, Tim insisted, Ernie and Tim taping hair on their hands, Senor Wences style, because they could not afford real puppets. And realizing during pitch that, as they were behind the stage and had their four hands in the air for the puppets, they could not turn their script pages. "I started sucking up pages with my mouth and blowing them out."

Then the pain of holding their arms up set in. By the end, Tim said, their hands were "just hanging on the stage, and just flapping up and down with hair on them."

And then Tim had the finale: him and Ernie, sitting in a bar, "trying to figure out where we went wrong."

Fortunately for audiences, Tim was right far more than he was wrong (and he was wrong mainly in picking TV series, with a string of flops, as he admits above to Carson). But he had a steady approach to a simple idea: "You had to come up with something amusing and possibly make people laugh," he said. Laugh we did.