Throughout the 11-season run of “The Carol Burnett Show,” viewers noticed Carol Burnett would give her left earlobe a small tug, usually when saying goodnight to viewers as she sang her signature sign-off song, “I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together.” Performing the gesture in every episode, it came to become something of a trademark for her.
Pulling on her ear wasn’t random, but a secret signal she’d concocted years earlier as a way of communicating with her beloved grandmother. “It started when my grandmother wanted me to say hello to her when I was on television,” Burnett recalled in an interview with People. After explaining to her grandmother she wouldn’t be able to do that, she said, “We cooked this up, to pull my ear, which meant, ‘Hi Nanny, I love you, and I’m fine.’ It just became a thing.” In fact, Burnett’s ear-pulling far outlived her grandmother; when Burnett received an honorary award at the 2019 Golden Globes, she snuck in a quick tug on her ear.
Over the years, all that ear-pulling had an impact on Burnett’s earlobe. “Years ago, a reporter from Life magazine measured my left ear, and it was one millimeter longer than my right ear,” Burnett wrote in her memoir, “In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox,” via an excerpt shared by MeTV.
