Thelma Harper
Encyclopedia
Thelma Harper is a fictional character
, who originally appeared on the ongoing Mama's Family
on The Carol Burnett Show
. She was portrayed by Vicki Lawrence
. In her autobiography, Vicki called, "the only role which I got to go to makeup to get ugly!" Thelma was Lawrence's most famous role.
As between The Family sketches
, the NBC
version of Mama's Family, and the syndicated version, Thelma Harper went through many altering traits. On The Family sketches, she was simply known as Mama and was always grumpy and trying to start arguments, as the sketches were full of bickering between her, her daughter Eunice Higgins, and her son-in-law Ed Higgins
. She was also quite passive aggressive, dependent, and behaved more elderly on The Family. The NBC version saw the most easygoing version of Mama, as she was cool, calm, and collected, and known for her wisecracking remarks. By the time the syndicated version came out, Mama became loud, crude, with a smart mouth. Unlike the Family sketches, in the syndicated version, Mama didn't argue nearly as much with her family, but had a lot of control over them instead. Also, more than any other version, the syndicated version saw the most energetic, independent, and least senile version of Mama. For instance, Mama was involved in the Church Ladies League, dirty dancing, and various other activities in the syndicated version of the show. Mama could also be cheerful in the syndicated version, unlike The Family sketches.
In The Family
sketches, Thelma and her late husband Carl Harper have five children: Ellen
, Eunice
, Phillip, Larry, and Jack. In the "Eunice" TV special, they have three children: Ellen, Eunice, and Phillip. In Mama's Family
, Thelma also has three children, but the character of Phillip is replaced by Vinton. Thelma's husband Carl is usually portrayed in voice only (in the special, Eunice, he was voiced by the late Dick Clair
), and is heard primarily from the main floor bathroom. Thelma is in her late 60s during "Mama's Family". Vicki Lawrence was in her 30s during this time and would not turn 60 until 2009.
Thelma's squabbles and offhand disregard for daughter Eunice and Eunice's husband, Ed
, and son, Bubba
, was the ongoing theme of The Family sketches.
In Mama's Family, Thelma lived originally with her sister, newspaper writer Fran Crowley
. In the first episode, Vinton and his two children, Vinton "Buzz" Harper, Jr. and Sonja Harper
, move in with Thelma after being evicted from their house. Vinton has just gone through a divorce from a woman named Mitzi, who fled for Las Vegas
to become a showgirl. Vinton soon marries Naomi Harper
, Thelma's next door neighbor, whom Thelma despises. Thelma becomes so enraptured and relieved to find out Naomi, Vint and the kids are going to move to Arizona to run a trailer park, that she consents to having them marry in her living room. Following the wedding, they all return to Thelma's house to stay because Naomi's partner in the trailer park venture has absconded with every cent of Vint and Naomi's life's savings and had never actually had a trailer park.
Thelma's relationships with her grandchildren are different that those with her children. She gets along rather well with Buzz, since he isn't always worrying her into the grave, the way his older sister does and Thelma's own children had done when they were younger. In fact, Buzz seems to have a unique bond with his grandmother.
Thelma is best friends with her neighbor across the street, Iola Boylan
who is crazy about Vinton and agrees with Thelma that Naomi wasn't the right kind of wife for him. In fact, Iola thinks she would be Vint's perfect mate instead. Thelma and Iola often spend a great deal of time together, and Iola is often over for dinner when she isn't helping her eccentric and infirmed parents. Although they are best friends, Iola and Thelma do have their share of disagreements as well. Most of them are instigated by outside forces, but usually, they patch their differences and become friends again.
After Buzz and Sonja move out of the house for parts unknown, and Fran dies, Thelma is joined by her other grandson, Bubba. Her relationship with him is vastly different than the one she had with Buzz. Bubba is certainly his mother's son, and while not as contentious and selfish as Eunice was, he is just as headstrong and stubborn, though he matured as the series progressed. He makes no fan of his Uncle Vint and his Aunt Naomi when he is given Fran's old bedroom, relegating them to the basement yet again. However, given what Bubba has gone through, his father and his eternally selfish mother leaving him in Raytown while gallivanting off to Florida without even one word of good-bye, they were not about to begrudge him a bedroom.
Thelma has a very strong aversion to her grandchildren drinking to excess. In one particular instance, when Bubba comes home drunk after several beers, she really lowers the boom on him. At first, nobody in her family understands why she is really punishing him hard; considering how often she drinks beer, until Iola explains about a really terrible situation with Bubba's mother, Eunice. During a Mother-Daughter banquet, Eunice showed up quite intoxicated. Then, during a song, Eunice and Thelma started having a violent argument on stage, during which Mama revealed to everyone present the circumstances under which Eunice was conceived. (Mama: "If your daddy hadn't gotten me as drunk as you are now, you never would have been!") Which would perhaps explain just why Eunice and her mother don't get along to this day. Needless to say, Bubba swears off beer from now on.
Ironically, Thelma's embattled relationship with Eunice was not unlike the somewhat contentious relationship she had with her own mother. In her mind, Thelma's mother had no liking for anything Thelma did. In an episode where she deals with her own austere mother who haunts her for entertaining the idea of selling her brooch, Thelma calls her the same epithet that Eunice sometimes uses on her: "Old lady". At the end of the episode, Thelma's mother's haunting ends when Thelma sells the brooch, and then screams at her mother's apparition, "Get the hell out of my life!!!"
Thelma has held various jobs in Raytown. She works with Meals on Wheels; had a short stint as Mayor of Raytown; worked at a travel agency (for less than a day); worked at local grocery store, "Food Circus", to Naomi's disgust; went to night school; worked at a fast food restaurant. She wore many hats.
One of Thelma's life long dreams is to go to Hawaii. She gets her wish when she appears on Jeopardy!
. While Thelma loses the main part of the competition, she does win a Hawaiian vacation as a consolation prize. The next two-part episode features Thelma, Iola, Vint, Naomi and Bubba's adventures in Hawaii.
As a former president of the CLL (Church Ladies League), Thelma has to deal with the ladies of the church, including the gossipy pastor's wife, Alberta Meechum
, who brazenly tries to break up Thelma and Iola's friendship by suggesting that Iola run for president of the CLL. (Ms. Meechum did this because Thelma had helped Alberta's husband spank their grandson, Little Eugene, for causing trouble for the Harpers and for kicking her husband in his sore leg. In her mind, Little Eugene was an angel, and helping to hurt him was a huge "no-no".) Neither Thelma or Iola wins and Thelma's eventual successor is a woman named Lolly Perdue, (Doris Hess; Marge Redmond
) who wins because she was the only person big enough to separate the squabbling Thelma and Iola. Some time later, Lolly is the target of an impeachment attempt by Thelma and Iola, but they end up backing down when they discover
Lolly is illiterate. Thelma also has to contend with Reverend Lloyd Meechum
, the man who married Vint and Naomi. She also babysat their grandson, a little demon named Eugene, with disastrous results.
Thelma was known for her somewhat uneasy relations with her neighbors, going back to when Naomi lived next door. Most of her neighbors wouldn't mind seeing her and her entire dysfunctional family
move away and never come back. A large part of this animosity came about during an aborted attempt to knock down the neighborhood and replace it with a landfill. To Thelma's shock, the house she had lived in since she was married had once been a house of ill-repute where the town's founder, James A. Ray, died. Thus, it was made a Raytown historical landmark, to mayor Alvin Tutweiler
's chagrin, and her neighbors ire. They wanted a lot of money to leave that neighborhood and lose Thelma as a neighbor, but it was not to be. Even Iola was irate.
Lawrence has resurrected the character of Thelma (still in her late 60s) several times on the game show Hollywood Squares
, on stage in her two-woman show, on her talk show in the early 1990s, and on the 2008 TV Land Awards.
Thelma wrote a book in 2008 entitled "Mama for President"
Thelma appeared on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
on October 2, 2009 playing for charity. She ended up winning $8,000 USD, getting 9 out of 10 questions correct and opted not to answer the 11th question (the bonus question), as missing the bonus question results in a loss of all the player's winnings.
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
, who originally appeared on the ongoing Mama's Family
Mama's Family
Mama's Family is an American television sitcom that premiered on NBC on January 22, 1983. It was cancelled in May 1984, but NBC would continue to air reruns until September 1985. In September 1986, Mama's Family returned in first-run syndication, where it aired for an additional four seasons,...
on The Carol Burnett Show
The Carol Burnett Show
The Carol Burnett Show is a variety / sketch comedy television show starring Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence, Lyle Waggoner, and Tim Conway. It originally ran on CBS from September 11, 1967, to March 29, 1978, for 278 episodes and originated from CBS Television City's Studio 33...
. She was portrayed by Vicki Lawrence
Vicki Lawrence
Vicki Lawrence is an American actress, comedienne, and Billboard Hot 100 #1 singer, who was frequently a game show panelist in the 1970s and 1980s...
. In her autobiography, Vicki called, "the only role which I got to go to makeup to get ugly!" Thelma was Lawrence's most famous role.
As between The Family sketches
The Family (sketch)
The Family is a series of skits that aired on The Carol Burnett Show. It was so successful that it became a recurring skit on The Carol Burnett Show and later spun off into the comedy series Mama's Family, a show which first aired on NBC, and then in syndication...
, the NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
version of Mama's Family, and the syndicated version, Thelma Harper went through many altering traits. On The Family sketches, she was simply known as Mama and was always grumpy and trying to start arguments, as the sketches were full of bickering between her, her daughter Eunice Higgins, and her son-in-law Ed Higgins
Ed Higgins
Ed Higgins is a character in "The Family" sketches on The Carol Burnett Show and, to a lesser extent, on the sitcom spinoff Mama's Family. In both cases, he was played by Harvey Korman....
. She was also quite passive aggressive, dependent, and behaved more elderly on The Family. The NBC version saw the most easygoing version of Mama, as she was cool, calm, and collected, and known for her wisecracking remarks. By the time the syndicated version came out, Mama became loud, crude, with a smart mouth. Unlike the Family sketches, in the syndicated version, Mama didn't argue nearly as much with her family, but had a lot of control over them instead. Also, more than any other version, the syndicated version saw the most energetic, independent, and least senile version of Mama. For instance, Mama was involved in the Church Ladies League, dirty dancing, and various other activities in the syndicated version of the show. Mama could also be cheerful in the syndicated version, unlike The Family sketches.
In The Family
The Family (sketch)
The Family is a series of skits that aired on The Carol Burnett Show. It was so successful that it became a recurring skit on The Carol Burnett Show and later spun off into the comedy series Mama's Family, a show which first aired on NBC, and then in syndication...
sketches, Thelma and her late husband Carl Harper have five children: Ellen
Ellen Harper
Ellen Jackson is a fictional character who made sporadic appearances in the sketch comedy, The Family, and its spin-off sitcom, Mama's Family. She was played by Betty White.-Biography:...
, Eunice
Eunice Harper Higgins
Eunice Higgins is a fictional character from the comedy sketch, The Family . Eunice was also featured in a film named after her in 1982, on CBS...
, Phillip, Larry, and Jack. In the "Eunice" TV special, they have three children: Ellen, Eunice, and Phillip. In Mama's Family
Mama's Family
Mama's Family is an American television sitcom that premiered on NBC on January 22, 1983. It was cancelled in May 1984, but NBC would continue to air reruns until September 1985. In September 1986, Mama's Family returned in first-run syndication, where it aired for an additional four seasons,...
, Thelma also has three children, but the character of Phillip is replaced by Vinton. Thelma's husband Carl is usually portrayed in voice only (in the special, Eunice, he was voiced by the late Dick Clair
Dick Clair
Dick Clair was an American television producer, actor and television and film writer, best known for the television sitcoms It's a Living, The Facts of Life, and Mama's Family.-Early life:...
), and is heard primarily from the main floor bathroom. Thelma is in her late 60s during "Mama's Family". Vicki Lawrence was in her 30s during this time and would not turn 60 until 2009.
Thelma's squabbles and offhand disregard for daughter Eunice and Eunice's husband, Ed
Ed Higgins
Ed Higgins is a character in "The Family" sketches on The Carol Burnett Show and, to a lesser extent, on the sitcom spinoff Mama's Family. In both cases, he was played by Harvey Korman....
, and son, Bubba
Bubba Higgins
Bubba Higgins is a fictional character in the television situation comedy, Mama's Family. He was played by Allan Kayser.-Character overview:...
, was the ongoing theme of The Family sketches.
In Mama's Family, Thelma lived originally with her sister, newspaper writer Fran Crowley
Fran Crowley
Frances Marie Crowley, commonly known as "Fran Crowley", is a fictional character on the television series, Mama's Family. She was portrayed by Rue McClanahan during the show's first two seasons.-Character history:...
. In the first episode, Vinton and his two children, Vinton "Buzz" Harper, Jr. and Sonja Harper
Sonja Harper
Sonja Harper is a fictional character in the American television sitcom, Mama's Family. She was played by Karin Argoud.Sonja was the teenage daughter of Vinton Harper and his first wife, Mitzi. In typical teenage fashion, she often appeared bored...
, move in with Thelma after being evicted from their house. Vinton has just gone through a divorce from a woman named Mitzi, who fled for Las Vegas
Las Vegas metropolitan area
The Las Vegas Valley is the heart of the Las Vegas-Paradise, NV MSA also known as the Las Vegas–Paradise–Henderson MSA which includes all of Clark County, Nevada, and is a metropolitan area in the southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada. The Valley is defined by the Las Vegas Valley landform, a ...
to become a showgirl. Vinton soon marries Naomi Harper
Naomi Harper
Naomi Harper is a fictional character from the sitcom Mama's Family. She was played by actress-director Dorothy Lyman.-Character overview:...
, Thelma's next door neighbor, whom Thelma despises. Thelma becomes so enraptured and relieved to find out Naomi, Vint and the kids are going to move to Arizona to run a trailer park, that she consents to having them marry in her living room. Following the wedding, they all return to Thelma's house to stay because Naomi's partner in the trailer park venture has absconded with every cent of Vint and Naomi's life's savings and had never actually had a trailer park.
Thelma's relationships with her grandchildren are different that those with her children. She gets along rather well with Buzz, since he isn't always worrying her into the grave, the way his older sister does and Thelma's own children had done when they were younger. In fact, Buzz seems to have a unique bond with his grandmother.
Thelma is best friends with her neighbor across the street, Iola Boylan
Iola Boylan
Iola Lucille Boylan is a character on the television series Mama's Family. She was played by Beverly Archer.-Television character biography:...
who is crazy about Vinton and agrees with Thelma that Naomi wasn't the right kind of wife for him. In fact, Iola thinks she would be Vint's perfect mate instead. Thelma and Iola often spend a great deal of time together, and Iola is often over for dinner when she isn't helping her eccentric and infirmed parents. Although they are best friends, Iola and Thelma do have their share of disagreements as well. Most of them are instigated by outside forces, but usually, they patch their differences and become friends again.
After Buzz and Sonja move out of the house for parts unknown, and Fran dies, Thelma is joined by her other grandson, Bubba. Her relationship with him is vastly different than the one she had with Buzz. Bubba is certainly his mother's son, and while not as contentious and selfish as Eunice was, he is just as headstrong and stubborn, though he matured as the series progressed. He makes no fan of his Uncle Vint and his Aunt Naomi when he is given Fran's old bedroom, relegating them to the basement yet again. However, given what Bubba has gone through, his father and his eternally selfish mother leaving him in Raytown while gallivanting off to Florida without even one word of good-bye, they were not about to begrudge him a bedroom.
Thelma has a very strong aversion to her grandchildren drinking to excess. In one particular instance, when Bubba comes home drunk after several beers, she really lowers the boom on him. At first, nobody in her family understands why she is really punishing him hard; considering how often she drinks beer, until Iola explains about a really terrible situation with Bubba's mother, Eunice. During a Mother-Daughter banquet, Eunice showed up quite intoxicated. Then, during a song, Eunice and Thelma started having a violent argument on stage, during which Mama revealed to everyone present the circumstances under which Eunice was conceived. (Mama: "If your daddy hadn't gotten me as drunk as you are now, you never would have been!") Which would perhaps explain just why Eunice and her mother don't get along to this day. Needless to say, Bubba swears off beer from now on.
Ironically, Thelma's embattled relationship with Eunice was not unlike the somewhat contentious relationship she had with her own mother. In her mind, Thelma's mother had no liking for anything Thelma did. In an episode where she deals with her own austere mother who haunts her for entertaining the idea of selling her brooch, Thelma calls her the same epithet that Eunice sometimes uses on her: "Old lady". At the end of the episode, Thelma's mother's haunting ends when Thelma sells the brooch, and then screams at her mother's apparition, "Get the hell out of my life!!!"
Thelma has held various jobs in Raytown. She works with Meals on Wheels; had a short stint as Mayor of Raytown; worked at a travel agency (for less than a day); worked at local grocery store, "Food Circus", to Naomi's disgust; went to night school; worked at a fast food restaurant. She wore many hats.
One of Thelma's life long dreams is to go to Hawaii. She gets her wish when she appears on Jeopardy!
Jeopardy!
Griffin's first conception of the game used a board comprising ten categories with ten clues each, but after finding that this board could not be shown on camera easily, he reduced it to two rounds of thirty clues each, with five clues in each of six categories...
. While Thelma loses the main part of the competition, she does win a Hawaiian vacation as a consolation prize. The next two-part episode features Thelma, Iola, Vint, Naomi and Bubba's adventures in Hawaii.
As a former president of the CLL (Church Ladies League), Thelma has to deal with the ladies of the church, including the gossipy pastor's wife, Alberta Meechum
Alberta Meechum
Alberta Meechum is a fictional character on the television sitcom, Mama's Family. She is played by the late Anne Haney.-The preacher's gossipy wife:...
, who brazenly tries to break up Thelma and Iola's friendship by suggesting that Iola run for president of the CLL. (Ms. Meechum did this because Thelma had helped Alberta's husband spank their grandson, Little Eugene, for causing trouble for the Harpers and for kicking her husband in his sore leg. In her mind, Little Eugene was an angel, and helping to hurt him was a huge "no-no".) Neither Thelma or Iola wins and Thelma's eventual successor is a woman named Lolly Perdue, (Doris Hess; Marge Redmond
Marge Redmond
Marge Redmond is an American actress.-Background/Family:Margery Redmond was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1924. She was the first wife of the late actor Jack Weston, with whom she developed her acting craft at the Cleveland Play House after they married in 1950...
) who wins because she was the only person big enough to separate the squabbling Thelma and Iola. Some time later, Lolly is the target of an impeachment attempt by Thelma and Iola, but they end up backing down when they discover
Lolly is illiterate. Thelma also has to contend with Reverend Lloyd Meechum
Lloyd Meechum
Rev. Lloyd Meechum is a fictional character on the television sitcom, Mama's Family. He was played by Earl Boen.-Henpecked Reverend:Lloyd Meechum is the reverend for the church that Thelma Harper and her family attend. He is married to the often overbearing Alberta Meechum and has a grandson...
, the man who married Vint and Naomi. She also babysat their grandson, a little demon named Eugene, with disastrous results.
Thelma was known for her somewhat uneasy relations with her neighbors, going back to when Naomi lived next door. Most of her neighbors wouldn't mind seeing her and her entire dysfunctional family
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often abuse on the part of individual members occur continually and regularly, leading other members to accommodate such actions. Children sometimes grow up in such families with the understanding that such an arrangement is...
move away and never come back. A large part of this animosity came about during an aborted attempt to knock down the neighborhood and replace it with a landfill. To Thelma's shock, the house she had lived in since she was married had once been a house of ill-repute where the town's founder, James A. Ray, died. Thus, it was made a Raytown historical landmark, to mayor Alvin Tutweiler
Alvin Tutweiler
Alvin Tutweiler is a fictional character in the television series Mama's Family. He was played by Alan Oppenheimer.-Raytown's Pompous Mayor:Tutweiler was the mayor of the fictitious community of Raytown, where Thelma Harper lived for many years...
's chagrin, and her neighbors ire. They wanted a lot of money to leave that neighborhood and lose Thelma as a neighbor, but it was not to be. Even Iola was irate.
Lawrence has resurrected the character of Thelma (still in her late 60s) several times on the game show Hollywood Squares
Hollywood Squares
Hollywood Squares is an American panel game show in which two contestants play tic-tac-toe to win cash and prizes. The "board" for the game is a 3 × 3 vertical stack of open-faced cubes, each occupied by a celebrity seated at a desk and facing the contestants...
, on stage in her two-woman show, on her talk show in the early 1990s, and on the 2008 TV Land Awards.
Thelma wrote a book in 2008 entitled "Mama for President"
Thelma appeared on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? (U.S. syndicated game show)
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? is a daily syndicated version of the former primetime American quiz game show of the same name that aired on Fox. It ran from September 21, 2009 to March 24, 2011 and was produced by Mark Burnett, and, like the primetime version, was hosted by Jeff Foxworthy...
on October 2, 2009 playing for charity. She ended up winning $8,000 USD, getting 9 out of 10 questions correct and opted not to answer the 11th question (the bonus question), as missing the bonus question results in a loss of all the player's winnings.