Back in the mid-1970s, the Jackson 5 were one of the biggest acts in the country. They were five brothers out of Gary, Indiana, and the youngest one standing out front was a teenager named Michael Jackson. By then they had already topped the charts and filled theaters, and they were a favorite pick for the big variety shows that families watched together on a weeknight.
One of those shows belonged to Carol Burnett. If you were around then, you remember her. She was the queen of Saturday night comedy, a warm and fearless performer whose program “The Carol Burnett Show” ran on CBS for eleven years and kept the whole country laughing.
So the brothers came on as her guests. The setup was simple and a little silly. Carol played a strict music teacher, and the Jackson 5 were her students stuck in her classroom. Cameras rolling, live studio audience, everybody in on the joke.
Then something happened that nobody had rehearsed.
In the middle of the taping, the whole stage began to move. It wasn’t a special effect and it wasn’t in the script. A real earthquake had rolled through, and the studio started shaking with the cast standing right there in the middle of the scene.
Most people would have stopped cold. Carol didn’t.
She didn’t run, and she didn’t drop the act. She stayed in character as the strict teacher, kept her cool, and turned the shaking into a joke on the spot. The brothers took their cue from her, the scene kept rolling, and the audience went right along with it.
The folks in charge at CBS loved it so much they left the whole thing in. As one account of the clip puts it, “Carol was so calm under pressure and joked about it, that CBS execs left the footage in the show.” A moment that could have landed on the cutting room floor became one of the funniest surprises of the night.
Years later Carol sat down with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” and told the whole story herself, with the original footage playing right beside her. You get to see young Michael and his brothers up on that stage, the floor moving under them, and Carol holding the room together without missing a beat.
This is Carol telling it in her own words, with the real footage from that day rolling as she talks.
Carol Burnett tells the earthquake story and shows the original Jackson 5 clip
Watch her face the second it starts. That calm is a lifetime of live television talking, and it’s the reason the moment lived on at all.
It’s a sweet thing to see now. A legend of comedy and a houseful of young brothers, caught together in one strange minute none of them saw coming, and all of them handled with a laugh.