Now I’m just getting scared. Harvey Korman, whom you’ll remember from The Carol Burnett Show as well as the comically devious Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, is dead. The news was released right around three hours ago, so you know you’re getting it hot and fresh.

The word out of UCLA Medical Center is that Korman died after “suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago.” He had apparently gone through several major operations–aneurysms can do that sort of thing; they’re downright scary in their destructive force–and it all just finally caught up with him. Small wonder considering the man was eighty-one when he died, but it’s a testament not only to his comic genius but also to his sheer strength of will that he could keep going through that.

His career was long and storied–you can find out more about it here–but what we naturally most remember him for was his role in the classic Mel Brooks western. And frankly, Mel misses him too. Check out what he told the Associated Press:

“A world without Harvey Korman — it’s a more serious world. It was very dangerous for me to work with him because if our eyes met we’d crash to floor in comic ecstasy. It was comedy heaven to make Harvey Korman laugh.”

So we’ve lost one of the greats today, and the world is a far more serious place. Let’s put some laughs back into it and pay tribute with a round of Blazing Saddles trivia on Kwanzoo.

Popularity: 4% [?]