How The Beatles Ruined Comedian Mitzi McCall’s Big Break | Video

Sketch comedy duo McCall and Brill thought they were about to have their big break, getting booked on the star-making platform of their time: “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The only problem: it turned out that they were one of the acts performing in between sets from the Beatles making their American debut.

Mitzi McCall, who died this week , shared the tale of woe alongside her partner and husband Charlie Brill on a classic episode of NPR’s iconic show “This American Life.”

“If you got a shot on ‘Ed Sulivan,’ you had a shot at stardom,” Brill said.

They figured out what they wanted to perform, rehearsing their sketches repeatedly and performing them at a Santa Monica club to what Brill called “a lovely, lovely reaction. And we told everybody. In fact, I think I sky-wrote it over Hollywood. We’re on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ Yoo-hoo!”

The pair were most excited to be performing on the same show as famed impressionist — and Riddler on the 1960s “Batman” TV show — Frank Gorshin. When their manager called, McCall explained, “He said, ‘And guess what? You’re going to be with The Beatles.’ And we said, ‘Who?'”

During the episode’s dress rehearsal, to preserve the punchlines of their jokes, making sure that they’d be fresh during the show itself for everyone including the crew, they just inserted “blah, blah, blah” in the place of their punchlines. Then they got called into Ed Sullivan’s office.

“He said, ‘What you did in dress rehearsal– first of all, I don’t get the blah, blah, blahs,'” Brill related.

Oops.

They tried to explain, but Sullivan said their act was “too sophisticated” anyway because the crowd that night was going to be mostly teen girls. Sullivan had the pair show him their entire nightclub act, then tasked them with putting characters from one sketch in another — essentially giving them an hour to rewrite their entire set.

As they frantically prepared, John Lennon came in their tiny dressing room to get a Coke from the soda machine, then hung out and sketched each of them on napkins.

“All we thought about was, ‘I wish this kid would go so we could work on our act. Get out of here,'” McCall said.

When the Beatles took the stage to open the show, the screams were so loud that McCall and Brill couldn’t really get much of an idea from backstage of what the band’s music was actually like.

They were too nervous to realize what this moment was actually about.

“We hadn’t gone on yet,” McCall said. “I wanted to know that we were going to be fabulous.”

By the time Brill and McCall took the stage as the last non-Beatles act of the night, it turned out that teen girls hyped for the return of the Beatles to the stage weren’t a welcoming audience for sketch comedy. The crowd failed to deliver many laughs.

“We know immediately,” McCall said. “They didn’t have this expression then but, we sucked.”

Despite the nightmarish moment that led to them wincing when they heard the Beatles and not watching their own performance back for decades, they built careers that included nightclub and Vegas shows during the ’60s and ’70s, appearing on TV panel shows and building acting careers.

Watch a portion of McCall and Brill’s “Ed Sullivan” performance here:

You can read more about Mitzi McCall’s career in her obituary here . Listen to the full “This American Life” segment at this link .

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