Harvey Korman was a gangling, 6ft 4in American comedy actor with expressive features and a formidable repertoire of voices who hit his peak on the long-running Carol Burnett Show on television and in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles in the cinema.

Having honed his comic talents on TV shows featuring Danny Kaye, Jack Benny and Lucille Ball, Korman teamed up with the comedienne Carol Burnett in 1967 and was part of the show for the next decade, during which his work won him four Emmy awards and a Golden Globe.

The show comprised sketches with continuing characters, movie parodies and musical items and ended with a big production number. One of the sketches, The Family, in which Korman played the abusive son-in-law, was spun off into a series of its own, Mama's Family, though it had only a modest run. Another of his characters was a portly Yiddish grandmother, drawn from life.

Korman got his chance on the western spoof Blazing Saddles through Mel Brooks's wife, Anne Bancroft, who had seen him on the Burnett show. Korman played a crooked lawyer called Hedley Lamarr, the cue for a running joke about not calling him Hedy. His high spot in the film was getting his tongue round a long list of criminals and gun-slingers who needed to be rounded up.

Harvey Hershel Korman was born into a family of Russian-Jewish origin in Chicago in 1927, the son of a salesman. He started acting in school plays and worked in radio before serving in the United States Navy during the Second World War. He got his first taste of the professional stage at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and studied acting in New York.

He did commercials and took walk-on parts on Broadway but for several years his career failed to take off and he was forced to take other jobs, such as working as a cashier in restaurants. He returned to Chicago and did summer stock but he was into his thirties before trying Hollywood and making what proved to be the decisive move, into television.

His first break was in The Danny Kaye Show (1963-67), supporting the star in comic sketches with a wide range of characterisations. It set the pattern for the rest of his career. Although he eventually had his own show, it was a short-lived flop and he was more effective as the "second banana" than the top man.

In the Sixties, too, he became known for his voice-over work, notably on Tom and Jerry and on The Flintstones, as the snooty helmeted spaceman, The Great Gazoo. He did much other television, including three episodes of The Munsters, before joining the resident team, along with Garry Moore, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Conway and Lyle Waggoner, on The Carol Burnett Show.

One of his first cinema appearances was an uncredited role as a press agent in the musical Gypsy (1962) and he played supporting roles in a number of films before being cast by Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles. He went on to become a Brooks regular, but was used far less effectively, in the Hitchcock parody, High Anxiety (1977), The History of the World: Part I (1983) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

During the 1980s Korman played Professor Auguste Balls in two of the Pink Panther films and when a live-action version of The Flintstones reached the cinema in 1994 Korman was the voice of Dictabird. In a rare and unhappy appearance as a straight man he played Bud Abbot to Buddy Hackett's Lou Costello in a TV film, Bud and Lou (1978), but it failed to bring alive the famous double act.

In The Longshot (1986) he was teamed with Tim Conway, with whom he had enjoyed many a comic joust on The Carol Burnett Show, and they went on to tour the country in a stage show, both still active in their seventies.

He is survived by his second wife, Deborah, and their two children, and by the two children of his first marriage.

Harvey Korman, comedy actor, was born on February 15, 1927. He died after complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, on May 29, 2008, aged 81