In one of the most popular sketches from The Carol Burnett Show, Tim Conway plays a recently graduated dentist who accidentally injects himself with Novocain his first day on the job, and Harvey Korman plays his patient.
As Harvey comes into the dentist office with a toothache, the assistant informs him that he will be seeing a new dentist who just graduated from dental school. “As a matter of fact, you’re his very first patient,” she says. “So, he may be a little nervous.”
“He won’t be the only one,” replies the patient.
The dentist, played by Tim Conway, is clearly nervous to see his first patient waiting in his office for a dental procedure.
“Look doctor. Please listen to me. I have a terrible toothache. I am in terrible pain,” says the patient. “I want you to do something to stop the pain. Either fill the tooth or pull it.”
“See in dental school, in filling and pulling, I only got C’s. I was just kind of an average grade,” shares the dentist. “I got A’s in cleaning though. You want me to clean it for you?”
When Harvey finds out that a cleaning won’t stop the pain, he settles for the dentist’s C grades in filling and pulling and tells him to operate on his tooth.
In a hilarious exchange, the dentist then goes on to say that he cheated on his final at school. He keeps trying to convince the patient that he is not fit to do the job and it is so funny to watch!
When the dentist finally decides to work on the patient’s tooth, he first has to look up how to do the procedure in a manual book. Then things start to go south after that! The dentist accidentally grabs the needle full of Novocain and numbs his whole hand!
Then, as he is trying to maneuver his hand to inject the Novocain into the patient’s mouth, he accidentally injects it into his thigh, numbing his whole leg! The whole scene is hysterical!
By the end of the skit, the two men can’t even keep it together and they start laughing. What a great performance on The Carol Bu