Carol Burnett Recalls "Sweet" Interaction With Elvis After “Terrible” Performance On 'The Ed Sullivan Show'

Oh, to have been a fly on that wall...

It’s hard to believe that Carol Burnett ever bombed anything over the course of her illustrious 70-year career, but according to a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, that’s exactly what happened in the late 1950s—on the same day she met Elvis Presley.

After Colbert mentioned that the stage they were sitting on was the exact one Presley performed on for The Ed Sullivan Show, Burnett revealed that it was also where she was introduced to the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

“Well I was on when Elvis was on, when he was in the army,” she recalled. “They did a whole big thing when he was in the army on the stage.”

“And they put me on first!” Burnett added with a roll of her eyes. “Nobody wanted to see me. I mean it was Elvis, ‘Where the hell is Elvis? We want to see Elvis!'”

“I bombed. Oh my god. It was terrible, it was awful," she concluded.

Colbert then asked Burnett if she said “hi” to Presley, to which she replied, “Yes, I met him, he was very sweet and I got his autograph for my kid sister.”

Their backstage run-in isn’t the only thing they share. Burnett went on to discuss how Presley served as an inspiration for her song “I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles,” named for the former U.S. Secretary of State, who she said was “dull” and “never smiled.”

“I was doing a special material song that a friend of mine wrote called ‘I Made A Fool Of Myself Over John Foster Dulles,’” she explained. “Everybody was going crazy over Elvis so he wrote this song about this young girl going crazy over John Foster Dulles.”

Burnett appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show seven times throughout the variety show’s 23-year run.

You can catch the television legend alongside Kristen Wiig in Palm Royale, available now on Apple TV+.

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