Tim Conway Crashing ‘Match Game’ Is Proof Life Was Better in the ‘70s

With Tim Conway’s passing, we’ve lost another comedy legend, a true talent perfectly suited to television. Conway’s contribution to television extends way, way beyond his regular roles on McHale’s Navy and his legend-making stint on The Carol Burnett Show. While Conway was rarely a regular or even recurring presence on any show over the past 40 years, he brought the goods every single time he popped up on screen, be it on 30 Rock, Mad About You, Ellen, Newhart, or many many awards shows. Conway was funny, so funny that just looking at him would immediately make you smile if not bust a gut. Because of that, Conway was really a comedic chaos agent, the kinda performer who could pop up literally anywhere and do or say anything. I mean, this is a guy who played a leather daddy truck driver on the infamous Paul Lynde Halloween Special and also voiced Barnacle Boy on SpongeBob SquarePants. To me, though, Conway was never more chaotic, never more emblematic of the anything-goes nature of the ’70s TV he so easily ruled, than when he and a gang of intruders from The Carol Burnett Show crashed the already out of control daytime game show Match Game.

This meeting of worlds came during an episode of Match Game from January 1978, a totally unscripted occurrence that knocked the tipsy game show over. Burnett and her co-horts–Conway, Vicki Lawrence, and Jim Nabors wearing a shirt that is so gay it makes Charles Nelson Reilly look like Jimmy Carter–emerge from the black void beyond the studio cameras and immediately steal focus from host Gene Rayburn. Pandemonium breaks out, as Match Game’s resident lothario Richard Dawson dips Burnett and plants a kiss on her. Rayburn mimics Dawson, except he grabs Conway instead. This being Match Game, a show notorious for having an open bar and inviting the panelists to get tanked by the end of the tape day, the game continues on. Producers scramble to get Conway and pals pencils and paper so they can play along for the next round. They do, and Conway, who remains deadpan throughout, involves saying “constipated” on daytime TV in 1978. God bless Tim Conway.

I know the ’70s were terrible, just like today and literally every other decade in history. But if you remove the oil crisis and the fallout from the Vietnam war and the rise of serial killers, there’s a version of the ’70s embodied in the clip above that I just want to live in. It just feels like not only could anything happen on TV (when was the list time you saw the cast of a show crash another show?), but it feels like the world was smaller, like all of these people knew each other and had a connection. It felt like you were invited to a secret party with all the coolest kids on TV–and I can’t stress it enough, this happened before lunch on a Tuesday. That sense of reckless joy, the uncertainty that anything could happen when you tune into a show like Match Game (and the ’70s were filled with shows like Match Game), that’s what makes the decade so appealing.

Tim Conway was a big, big part of that. And wherever Conway went, be it a guest spot on a Must See TV sitcom or a sit down chat on a late night talk show, that unpredictable ’70s energy followed him into the 21st century.

Stream Match Game on Prime Video