Los Angeles- Harvey Korman, an Emmy-winning comedic actor best known for playing the self-described “luminous second banana” for a decade on television’s “The Carol Burnett Show” and for starring in such Mel Brooks films as “Blazing Saddles,” has died. He was 81.

Korman, who had undergone several major operations, died Thursday at UCLA Medical Center of complications from an abdominal aortic aneurysm that ruptured four months ago, his daughter, Kate Korman, told The Times.

With a knack for physical humor and oddball accents, Korman was a master sketch comic who did his best-known work on Burnett’s variety show beginning in 1967 in an ensemble that included Tim Conway.

“It’s a 45-year friendship,” Conway said. “It was a great ride; we worked together probably 30 years, plus the Burnett show, which was about as good as it gets.”

Brooks called Korman “a major, major talent, and he could have very easily have done Shakespearean drama. That’s how gifted and talented Harvey was. . . . I loved working with him.”

Conway said Korman had “a complete understanding of comedy and comedy timing.”

On the Burnett show, which steadfastly stayed in television’s top 10 during its run, Korman showcased his versatility — playing a robust Yiddish matron in one skit, then reappearing as a comic Rhett Butler while sending up “Gone With the Wind” with the show’s star.

He scored as the big-bosomed Mother Marcus and hapless Ed, who was a member of the incredibly dysfunctional “Mama’s Family,” one of the more popular skits that became a series in the 1980s.

“Give me something bizarre to play, or put me in a dress and I’m fine,” Korman jokingly said in a 2005 Chicago Sun-Times interview.

Korman and Conway developed an uncanny rapport that made them arguably one of television’s most lethal comic teams; Conway’s on-camera ad-libs often made Korman crack up; producers wisely kept them in the show.

For about eight years, until late last December, the pair toured the country in a stage show that, more than anything, was a homage to their years with Burnett. They performed about 120 shows a year.

“I don’t know whether either one of us was the straight man,” Conway said. “The most important thing in comedy when you’re working together is for one guy to know when to shut up. And we both knew when to shut up; quiet show, actually.”

One of their favorite routines from the Burnett show was the dentist sketch, “where I kind of anesthetize my entire body with Novocain” while trying to fill Korman’s teeth, Conway told The Times on Thursday.

“They play it at all the dental schools, as kind of an introduction on how not to do it,” Conway said.

In an interview several years ago with the Palm Beach Post, Conway said of the versatile cast that included Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner, “The five of us were the New York Yankees of our time.”

With more than 1,000 sketches behind him, Korman left the Burnett show after 10 years. He was 50.

“It was now or never, and if ever I planned to expand my career beyond sketch work, I’d better do it now,” he said at the time, according to a 1990 Toronto Star story.

ABC had promised him his own comedy series, but “I kept making pilots . . . until everybody said, ‘Get outta here, for God’s sake. Nothing’s working,’ ” Korman told United Press International in 1993.

From 1983 to 1985, he appeared in “Mama’s Family,” the NBC sitcom that featured a number of Burnett alumni, including Lawrence and Burnett, who made a number of guest appearances.

Korman made more than 30 films, including four comedies directed by Brooks, who first discovered him when his wife, the late Anne Bancroft, singled Korman out on “The Carol Burnett Show.”